"I let down my defenses this morning"

Effort at Speech Between Two People

:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now?

   I will tell you all.          I will conceal nothing.

   When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit

   who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair    :

   a pink rabbit    :    it was my birthday, and a candle

   burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

:  Oh, grow to know me.        I am not happy.        I will be open:

   Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,

   like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.

   There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

:  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now?

   When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,

   fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin,

   and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.

   I want now to be close to you.        I would

   link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

:  I am not happy.          I will be open.

   I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.

   There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate

   On what a tragedy his life was, really.

:  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now?

   When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,

   and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   :

   if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,

   if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.

   I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me.

:  I will be open.          I think he never loved me:

   He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam

   that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:

   he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me.

:  What are you now?          If we could touch one another,

   if these our separate entities could come to grips,

   clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday

   I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,

   and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.

   Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.


-- Muriel Rukeyser

Archetypes

Often before our fingers touched in sleep or half-sleep and enlaced,
often I’ve been comforted through a dream by that gently sensitive pressure,
but this morning, when I woke your hand lay across mine in an awkward,
unfamiliar position so that it seemed strangely external to me, removed,
an object whose precise weight, volume and form I’d never remarked:
its taut, resistant skin, dense muscle-pads, the subtle, complex structure,
with delicately elegant chords of bone aligned like columns in a temple.

Your fingers began to move then, in brief, irregular tensions and releasings;
it felt like your hand was trying to hold some feathery, fleeting creature,
then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to your hands and knees,
and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair tangled down over your face,
until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you abruptly let yourself fall
and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest, your head turned away,
forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised you to that defiant crouch.

I waited, hoping you’d wake, turn, embrace me, but you stayed in yourself,
and I felt again how separate we all are from one another, how even our passions,
which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions,
that for our more abiding, ancient terrors we each have to find our own valor.
You breathed more softly now, though; I took heart, touched against you,
and, as thought nothing had happened, you opened your eyes, smiled at me,
and murmured–how almost startling to hear you in your real voice–“Sleep, love.”

- C.K. Williams

Envoi

"The truth is the thing I invented so I could live."
                                                    - Nicole Krauss

I write to you not knowing where you are

 or what form you might take. I know things

I never told anyone. They claimed parts of me;

mostly contents in the nether regions

of my brain, and a happiness that passed

before I knew it was. I marked them

from the corner where I saw the man holding

a woman’s waist as if she were glass; to the morning

they kissed and I was filled with knowledge

I failed to articulate; a toast to forgetting

what I’ve been waiting for; to love, in all forms,

within and outside the body; the need

to endure what I thought resembled it.

I made things I never told anyone.

For whom, is not important. I wanted

to savor the thought of knowing

someone could've heard. Perhaps

I made something worthy of time,

like I’ve always imagined.

Animal

Could you so arrantly of earth, so cool,
With course harsh hair and rapid agile pace,
So built to beat boys in a swimming race
Or drive with sheer terns to a salty pool,
So lean, so animally beautiful--
Your breasts look sideways like a heifer's face,
And you stand sometimes with a surly grace
And mutinous blur eye-fires like a bull--
Could you from this most envied poise descend,
Moved by some force in me I know not of,
To mix with me and be to me a woman,
Diana down from heaven could not lend
More ecstasy, or fill my faltering human
Heart's hunger with a more celestial love.

--Max Eastman

"And at once, I knew, I was not magnificent"

What ticks me off

Venting out because that's what occasional blogs are for, right?

It frustrates me when I try with all my strength and mindfulness to explain a very important point that represents the crux of my concerns. I find it irritating when a person simply shuts me off while claiming they did not understand anything I said. (If it's my failure to communicate that confuses or overwhelms people, why do others use this limitation to avoid important arguments? Why can't people for a second just stop and really listen. An urgent call comes in all unintelligible forms and yet its "incommunicability" doesn't cancel the fact that something is very wrong.) Worst of all, it angers me when these people dismiss my concerns for another petty "overreading" that's narrow/irrelevant/uncalled for. 

I beg to differ.

I think a person shuts off at the precise moment they stop seeing their own flaws. They turn a blind eye to their own errors, seeing flaws only in others, without correcting their own. The double-standards begin with the bias we have for ourselves. People commit "harmless errors" all too often that the errors become nothing more than "harmless habits." People even justify their actions by arguing that "other people have validated it and are doing it too." (I guess that's the price our society pays for perpetuating a stunted democracy in the age of severely deteriorating attention spans.) It annoys me how they can be so stubborn. They stop listening the moment someone calls them out on their misgivings. 

The most frustrating part?

They don't even acknowledge they were wrong (even in some shady aspect of the word). Hell, they would rather ride in their innocent delusion thinking nothing is wrong. If this form of denial is keeping them sane, I'd rather be swathed in madness! One day the walls of their delusion will crumble due to this unacknowledged internal defect they never bothered to address. 

I find it difficult to reconcile my emotions towards these kinds of people. We're all walking contradictions, I know, but that doesn't give any of us the excuse to 1) stop being good individuals 2) stop learning 3) stop listening. Your age and experience is not an excuse either.