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NYTimes: Life Without Sex

Portrait of a Lady

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze -- or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-- As if that answered
anything. -- Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore --
Which shore? --
the sand clings to my lips --
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
-- the petals from some hidden
appletree -- Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.

- William Carlos Williams

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My Beloved

In the fine print of her face
Her eyes are two loopholes.
No, let me start again.
Her eyes are flies in milk,
Her eyes are baby Draculas.

To hell with her eyes.
Let me tell you about her mouth.
Her mouth’s the red cottage
Where the wolf ate Grandma.

Ah, forget about her mouth,
Let me talk about her breasts.
I get a peek at them now and then
And even that’s more than enough
To make me lose my head,
So I better tell you about her legs.

When she crosses them on the sofa
It’s like a jailer unwrapping a parcel
And in that parcel is a Christmas cake
And in that cake a sweet little file
That gasps her name as it files my chains.

- Charles Simic

This is how I feel about life most of the time. 

"Want some whiskey in your water, some sugar in your tea?"

- Three Dog Night

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop

[My sister emailed me this poem today out of nowhere.]

Stephen Shore

Purple Bathing Suit

I like watching you garden
with your back to me in your purple bathing suit:
your back is my favorite part of you,
the part furthest away from your mouth.

You might give some thought to that mouth.
Also to the way you weed, breaking
the grass off at ground level
when you should pull it by the roots.

How many times do I have to tell you
how the grass spreads, your little
pile notwithstanding, in a dark mass which
by smoothing over the surface you have finally
fully obscured. Watching you

stare into space in the tidy
rows of the vegetable garden, ostensibly
working hard while actually
doing the worst job possible, I think

you are a small irritating purple thing
and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth
because you are all that's wrong with my life
and I need you and I claim you.

- Louise Glück

"We weren't lovers like that, and besides it would still be alright."

 Ode on Indolence

‘They toil not, neither do they spin.’

 

One morn before me were three figures seen,

    With bowèd necks, and joinèd hands, side-faced;

And one behind the other stepp’d serene,

    In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;

        They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn,

    When shifted round to see the other side;

They came again; as when the urn once more

        Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;

    And they were strange to me, as may betide

With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye not?

    How came ye muffled in so hush a mask?

Was it a silent deep-disguisèd plot

    To steal away, and leave without a task

        My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;

    The blissful cloud of summer-indolence

Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;

        Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower:

    O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense

Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?

A third time pass’d they by, and, passing, turn’d

    Each one the face a moment whiles to me;

Then faded, and to follow them I burn’d

    And ached for wings, because I knew the three;

        The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;

    The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,

And ever watchful with fatiguèd eye;

        The last, whom I love more, the more of blame

    Is heap’d upon her, maiden most unmeek,—

I knew to be my demon Poesy.

They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:

    O folly! What is Love? and where is it?

And for that poor Ambition! it springs

    From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;

        For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—

    At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steep’d in honey’d indolence;

        O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy,

    That I may never know how change the moons,

Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

And once more came they by:—alas! wherefore?

    My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams;

My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er

    With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:

        The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,

    Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;

The open casement press’d a new-leaved vine,

    Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay;

        O Shadows! ’twas a time to bid farewell!

Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.

So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise

    My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;

For I would not be dieted with praise,

    A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!

        Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more

    In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;

Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,

    And for the day faint visions there is store;

Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,

    Into the clouds, and never more return!

- John Keats

“In a 1994 Interview, about twenty years after he wrote 'Famous Blue Raincoat,' Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. 'I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.' I find this forgetting quite heartening and quite tragic, in turns.” 

 

- Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Sam Francis

 

 

"Because if Ben P-------- can't appreciate a card of a random chick apparently strangling herself then I don't know who would."

- E. Y. (Dec 20, '08), in a card with Degas' "Dancer" on the front.

Again and again, even though we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

- Rainer Maria Rilke [a mixed translation of Stephen Mitchell & ...]

Brooklyn Anchorage 

and at noon I will fall in love 
and nothing will have meaning 
except for the brownness of 
the sky, and tradition, and water 
and in the water off the railway 
in New Haven all the lights 
go on across the sun, and for 
millennia those who kiss fall into 
hospitals, riding trains, wearing 
black shoes, pursued by those 
they love, the Chinese in the armies 
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash, 
and in my plan to be myself 
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life, 
and I left, from an airport, 
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train 
started moving and yesterday 
it seemed true that suddenly 
inside of the newspaper 
there was a powerline and 
my heart stopped, and everything 
leaned down from the sky to kill me 
and now the cattails sing.

- Lisa Jarnot 

Stone Nudes

Dean Fidelman (2012 & 2013)

I'm Waiting Here

Nothing But Single Friends

"Phalluses are not always offensive."

- AnnaLise

Meditation at Lagunitas

 

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

- Robert Hass

Wildest Moments

Born on a Train

"Everyone on the internet, they're not having as great a time as you think they are."

"I think that's because people are just cropping out the sadness."

- Portlandia

Deidre Schoo for The New York Times, cover photo for "The Night Comes Back to Life" in Thursday Styles (this day) about clubbing in Brooklyn.

Meditations in an Emergency         

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

          Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

          Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

          I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

          Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

          However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

          My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

          Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

          St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

          Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

          It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

          “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

       I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

- Frank O'Hara

Breezeblocks

"There is a story that I can't prove, but I was told that a very early age, my parents dressed me all in white from top to toe, so that if God was watching, He would have thought me already an angel and would not pluck me. It's a religious custom or superstition from the old country. I wouldn't die, in other words. I would be a fraudulent angel."

- Maurice Sendak, in an interview with Terry Gross 

"I know how much you love paradigm shifts."

Misunderestimate

"It just looked like you guys were having a lot of fun."

Queen-Anne's-Lace

Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth--nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over--
or nothing. 

- William Carlos Williams 

"Sometimes it takes distance to dissolve distance."

 - Marija

Post-War

"It was dark outside, and spring chill was in the evening air. He breathed deeply and felt his body tingle in the coolness. Beyond the jagged outline of the apartment houses the town lights glowed upon a thin mist that hung in the air. At the corner a street light pushed feebly against the darkness that closed around it; from the darkness beyond it the sound of laughter broke abruptly into silence, lingered and died. The smell of smoke from trash burning in back yards was held by the mist; and as he walked slowly through the evening, breathing the fragrance and tasting upon his tongue the sharp night-time air, it seemed to him that the moment he walked in was enough and the might not need a great deal more."

- John Williams, Stoner

"Wanna see movies of my dreams"

- Built to Spill, Car

"He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into nothingness they did not alter."

- John Williams, Stoner

"You got to think about how far advanced slaughterhouses are, especially big ones that want to make every penny count. Like the one I worked at, you bring the pigs in, you stun them, then you stick them. And the blood goes off into a trough. And it goes down and it's vacuum sucked out of there with a vacuum into centrifuges. And they separate the blood from the blood plasma. And they save that. I mean, they save the lungs. They save the pancreas. They save the spleens. They save the hearts. The only thing left by the time it's all said and done is a skull and jaw bones. I mean, you can be an anthropologist all you want. But if you don't work in a processing plant, you don't know shit."

- Ron Meek, This American Life episode "Doppelgangers"

"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion, he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."

- John Williams, Stoner

Roads

"People have sex for crazy reasons."

- Will

"Step up."

- Freud

"I'm not a pit stop.
I am a destination."

- M. P.

I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
     enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
     enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother’s face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Annemarie S. Kidder)

Elaine & Ben