Because with alarming accuracy
she’d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of — this tic, that
tendency, like the way that I’ve mastered intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt —
I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.
A Draft of a Marriage Contract (Vera Pavlova)
…if necessary, the books shall be divided as follows:
you get the odd, I get the even pages;
“the books” are understood to mean the ones we used to read aloud
together, when we would interrupt our reading for a kiss,
and would get back to the book after half an hour…
*
Inseparable: the parrot and its mirror,
Narcissus and his stream.
Here, I have made duplicate keys
to Eden, had the white dress altered.
Inseparable: Robinson Crusoe and Friday,
the dots in the umlaut,
me and you, my Sunday.
*
Teeth dull, veins collapsed,
heels worn down.
We are young as long as
our parents are young.
Dry is the riverbed where milk and honey,
white and amber, had run.
In the hospital, comb your mother’s hair,
clip the yellow nails.
*
Picking a sleepy kid
off the potty at night:
the kid’s limbs
a foal’s,
a Christ’s,
long and scrawny
in the dim light.
A Pieta.
Today I bought
the first pumpkin
of my season.
The sun was
hitting the water
in tiny explosions;
the grass was as pure
as a revival meeting.
I thought of your smile
on my long walk home
with the leaves
dropping aimlessly
and the sound
of roller skates.
When the door opened
you burst upon me
like a diamond.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
- t.s. eliot, The Love Song of J. Edgar Prufrock.
(via jorrrrdyn)
If There Is Something To Desire: One Hundred Poems (Pavlova)
Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.
It’s time to give up the search for the invisible.
On the best of days there’s little more
than the fainest intimations. The millennium,
my dear, is sure to disappoint us.
I think I’ll keep on describing things
to ensure that they really happened.
