when I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew
- william shakespeare, romeo and juliet
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
human resilience.
a cracked egg stitching together the fragile white fractures of its skeleton, mopping up all its insides, wringing them out into a new, makeshift frame (all without hands), and deciding, well,
it's all here (mostly),
most of the yolk is still inside, and still
bright yellow, like the sun.
we carry on.
a cracked egg stitching together the fragile white fractures of its skeleton, mopping up all its insides, wringing them out into a new, makeshift frame (all without hands), and deciding, well,
it's all here (mostly),
most of the yolk is still inside, and still
bright yellow, like the sun.
we carry on.
Monday, May 3, 2010
new and used
yesterday in the used bookstore
(that smells the remarkable way that only used bookstores do, a bit of thrift shop, a bit of cigarette butt, a bit of grandma's outdated floral perfume, a bit of coffee spilled on the egdes and sneezes on the pages, a bit of old bread, a bit of thingsyoufindinyourbasementwhicharethebestthingsbecausetheytellstories)
i read a bit of hemingway by the light flitting in through the blinds, you read
something that i, prefering fantasy, would never read, something about the science of the brain (and you are new but you are refreshingly different),
and some eclectic african music that you find in
eclectic places such as these, with old postcards tacked to the walls and ceiling fans for ventilation and handwritten signs, made
my hips sway ever so subtly left and right on my stool as i read, and you,
in the middle of all this old (around) and all this new (you)(me) came up behind me and said "i love this."
and it could have been the music and
it could have been the book about the brain (a marvelous thing, yes) and
it could have been that breathy combination of air from the slowly spinning fan above us and soft sunlight warming our exposed and busy fingers through the window, that felt just like palm breezes
and i might have been me,
so i said yes,
yes, i love it(all) too.
(the other thing about used books is that they are like grown children or grown animals or grown plants; unlike them, of course, because they cannot move; like them because they have stories, and not just stories in the text of the book, but around it and marked on it, in the notes penciled in the margins, the "To my love"s scrawled in the blank page in the front (designed, it seems, for personal prologues), the dog-earred and rumpled pages and most of all the muffled (but quickly flip the pages, all of them at once, run your thumb through) smells (like reliving an old christmas).
(that smells the remarkable way that only used bookstores do, a bit of thrift shop, a bit of cigarette butt, a bit of grandma's outdated floral perfume, a bit of coffee spilled on the egdes and sneezes on the pages, a bit of old bread, a bit of thingsyoufindinyourbasementwhicharethebestthingsbecausetheytellstories)
i read a bit of hemingway by the light flitting in through the blinds, you read
something that i, prefering fantasy, would never read, something about the science of the brain (and you are new but you are refreshingly different),
and some eclectic african music that you find in
eclectic places such as these, with old postcards tacked to the walls and ceiling fans for ventilation and handwritten signs, made
my hips sway ever so subtly left and right on my stool as i read, and you,
in the middle of all this old (around) and all this new (you)(me) came up behind me and said "i love this."
and it could have been the music and
it could have been the book about the brain (a marvelous thing, yes) and
it could have been that breathy combination of air from the slowly spinning fan above us and soft sunlight warming our exposed and busy fingers through the window, that felt just like palm breezes
and i might have been me,
so i said yes,
yes, i love it(all) too.
(the other thing about used books is that they are like grown children or grown animals or grown plants; unlike them, of course, because they cannot move; like them because they have stories, and not just stories in the text of the book, but around it and marked on it, in the notes penciled in the margins, the "To my love"s scrawled in the blank page in the front (designed, it seems, for personal prologues), the dog-earred and rumpled pages and most of all the muffled (but quickly flip the pages, all of them at once, run your thumb through) smells (like reliving an old christmas).
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