The first year was like icing.
Then the cake started to show through.
Which was fine, too, except you forget the direction you’re taking.
Suddenly you are interested in some new thing
And can’t tell how you got here. Then there is confusion
Even out of happiness, like a smoke—
The words get heavy, some topple over, you break others.
And outlines disappear once again.

Heck, it’s anybody’s story,
A sentimental journey—“gonna take a sentimental journey,”
And we do, but you wake up under the table of a dream:
You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you.
We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed.
We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
We can always be found with our associates.
Haven’t you always wanted to curl up like a dog and go to sleep like a dog?

In the rash of partings and dyings (the new twist),
There’s also room for breaking out of living.
Whatever happens will be quite ingenious.
No acre but will resume being disputed now,
And paintings are one thing we never seem to run out of.

- John Ashbery

•

You can hear him telling the dog that one broken heart

deserves a heart that has been differently broken.

I had that dream in New York City. Times Square

looks like America throwing up on itself. 

I want to hold its hair back.

•

- Betty Wang

•

Where did you go to, when you went away?
It is as if you step by step were going
Someplace elsewhere into some other range
Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,
Knowing nothing of the language of that place
To which you went with naked foot at night
Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,
Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking.
I have been so dislanguaged by what happened
I cannot speak the words that somewhere you
Maybe were speaking to others where you went.
Maybe they talk together where they are
Restlessly wandering, along the shore,
Waiting for a way to cross the river.

-David Ferry

•

At the end of August, when all
The letters of the alphabet are waiting,
You drop a teabag in a cup.
The same few letters making many different words,
The same words meaning different things.

Often you’ve rearranged them on the surface of the fridge.
Without the surface
They’re repulsed by one another.

Here are the letters. 
The tea is in your cup.

At the end of August, the mind
Is neither the pokeweed piercing the grass 
Nor the grass itself. 
As Tony Cook says in The Biology of Terrestrial Mollusks

The right thing to do is nothing, the place
A place of concealment,
And the time as often as possible.

by James Longenbach, 2012

•

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, 
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

by John Ashbery, 1984

•

wrap their babies in the American flag,
feed them mashed hotdogs and apple pie,
name them Bill and Daisy,
buy them blonde dolls that blink blue
eyes or a football and tiny cleats
before the baby can even walk,
speak to them in thick English,

hallo, babee, hallo,

whisper in Spanish or Polish
when the babies sleep, whisper
in a dark parent bed, that dark
parent fear, “Will they like
our boy, our girl, our fine American
boy, our fine American girl?” 

— Pat Mora 

(Source: sinidentidades)

•

(Source: scarlet-skies-dark-thoughts)

•

(Source: lifeylifelife)

•

(Source: antevorta)

•

I gave myself excuses.
This is for my pain—
and this, and this.
Terrible things.
Pain. My pain. 
All so I might 
twice a month 
get on a train
to witness yours.

— John Freeman

(Source: mashock)

•

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago
They called me the hyacinth girl.” 
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

-T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

•

(Source: whatmountains, via beverly-heels)

•