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Head: Heart, why do I hurt so much this morning?
Heart: Because I have been hurting all night. I'm sorry. I may have whispered too many tears to you.
Heart (after a pause): You gave me too much to carry, you know.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[giovedì 28 settembre 2017 ore 10:35:00] [¶]
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...that makes you want to try again, because maybe this will be the fall in which you finish Proust. (And maybe you will like it, at least half as much as you would like to.)
But in the meantime, there is time. And time hopes and time regrets and time makes plans like there's nowhere else you have to be but now.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[domenica 10 settembre 2017 ore 16:26:00] [¶]
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...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[sabato 09 settembre 2017 ore 10:16:10] [¶]
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On Sunday September 3rd, John Ashbery died. On Monday September 4th, the Poetry Foundation didn't pick an Ashbery poem for their Poem of the Day. Instead, they stuck with what must have been the original choice, a poem for “Labor Day,” by Rodney Koeneke. On Tuesday September 5th, Trump rescinded an immigration policy known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day was, at last, a poem by John Ashbery.
In his lifetime, Ashbery published over twenty volumes of poetry. Out of those hundreds of poems, the one the Poetry Foundation picked, for September 5th, ends like this:
And then one day the ship sailed away
There were no more dreamers just sleepers
in heavy attitudes on the dock
moving as if they knew how
among the trinkets and the souvenirs
the random shops of modern furniture
and a gale came and said
it is time to take all of you away
from the tops of the trees to the little houses
on little paths so startled
And when it became time to go
they none of them would leave without the other
for they said we are all one here
and if one of us goes the other will not go
and the wind whispered it to the stars
the people all got up to go
and looked back on love
Then too, these days, with Harvey and Irma. I can't help wondering, if I braid too much on my own.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[mercoledì 06 settembre 2017 ore 10:13:10] [¶]
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