You’re the patron saint of elsewhere,

jet-lagged and drinking apple juice,

eying, from the sixth-floor window,

a kidney-shaped swimming pool

the very shade of Hockney blue.

I know the left-hand view of life,

I think, and it’s as if I have, of late,

forgotten something in the night –

I wake alone and freezing,

still keeping to my side.

Each evening tidal night rolls in

and the atmosphere is granted

a depth of field by satellites,

the hammock moon, aircraft

sinking into Heathrow.

Above the light pollution,

among the drift of stars tonight

there might be other traffic –

migrations of heron and crane,

their spectral skeins convergent

symbols, arrows, weather systems,

white flotillas bearing steadily

towards their summer feeding.

A million flapping sheets!

Who knows how they know?

The aids to navigation might be

memory and landmarks,

or the brightest constellations.

Perhaps some iron in the blood

detects magnetic north.

I wish one carried you some token,

some Post-it note or ticket,

some particular to document

this instant of self-pity –

His Orphic Loneliness, with Dog.

Advances? None miraculous,

though the deadness of the house

will mean your coming home

may seem an anti-climax

somehow, and a trespass.

– Nick Laird

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

– W.S. Merwin

memoryslandscape:

“She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?”

— John Banville, from The Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

After the orchestra had been playing for some time, and had passed the andante, the scherzo, the poco adagio, and the first flautist had put his head on the stand because he would not be needed until tomorrow, there came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played. And still it must exist and be passed over, an interval at the discretion of the conductor. But tonight, the conductor decides, it must be played—he has a hunger to make his name. The flautist wakes with a start. Something has happened to his ears, something he has never felt before. His sleep is over. Where am I now, he thinks. And then he repeated it, like an old man lying on the floor instead of in his bed. Where am I now?

— Louise Glück

It’s like being sick all the time, I think, coming home from

      work,

sick in that low-grade continuous way that makes you forget

what it’s like to be well. we have never in our lives known

what it is to be well. what if I were coming home, I think,

from doing work that I loved and that was for us all, what

if I looked at the houses and the air and the streets, knowing

they were in accord, not set against us, what if we knew the

      powers

of this country moved to provide for us and for all people —

how would that be — how would we feel and think

and what would we create?

– Karen Brodine

Rain who nails the earth,
whose infinite legs
nail the earth, whose silver faces
touch my faces, I marry you.  & open
all the windows of my house to hear
your million feral whispers
of si si

                                                                    sí

                                                        sí
                                                                            sí

- Aracelis Girmay

This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held

the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath

and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed

– Dionne Brand

I take nothing for the migraine, knowing that nothing will help me and being anyhow cultist of pain. Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it. The air is cool and green even in the afternoons. Sometimes the pain is a solid block behind the wall of my forehead, sometimes disk within my skull tilting and humming with the movements of the earth, sometimes a wave that unrolls and thuds endlessly against the backs of my eyelids. I lie hour after hour concentrating on the sounds inside my head. In trance of absorption I hear the pulse in my temples, the explosion and eclipse of cells, the grate of bone, the sifting of skin into dust. I listen to the molecular world inside me with the same attention I bring to the prehistoric world outside. I walk in the riverbed and hear the cascade of thousands of grains of sand, or smell the iron exhalation of rocks in the sun. I bring my understanding to the concerns of insects the particles of food that must be carried over mountaintops and stored in holes, the eggs that must be arranged in hexagons, the rival tribes that must be annihilated. The habits of birds, too, are stable. It is therefore with reluctance that I confront the gropings of human desire. Clenched beneath a pillow in a dim room, focussed on the kernel of pain, I am lost in the being of my being. This is what I was meant to be: a poetess of interiority, an explorer of the inwardness of stones, the emotions of ants, the consciousness of the thinking parts of the brain. It seems to be the only career, if we except death, for which life in the desert has fitted me.

– JM Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country