Start Something

It’s a dangerous mission. You/could die out there. You/could go on forever.
                                     - Tess Gallagher, from “Instructions to the Double”.

The Phenomenology of Anger

1. The freedom of the wholly mad
to smear & play with her madness
write with her fingers dipped in it
the length of a room

which is not, of course, the freedom
you have, walking on Broadway
to stop & turn back or go on
10 blocks; 20 blocks 

but feels enviable maybe
to the compromised

                                An excerpt, by Adrienne Rich 

Things I Do Not Understand And Definitely Am Not Going To Talk About

thingsidontunderstandand:

• Twitter is, essentially, like standing on street corners, shouting one-liners, and waiting for high fives.
• While trying not to cry.

The Woman In the Moon by Denis Johnson

for Glenna K. 1922-1979

Who wouldn’t have been afraid
of your face? - watching me
from another world through your cheap
frame on the dresser, while your daughter
wept and I made hysterical
love to her, trying
to banish your ghost that wandered
with its smashed head through this life
I never invited you to.
Who wouldn’t have wanted to drive you out of her,
seeing how your memory, grown
sharp as flint in grief, carved
her face a little more every
day into yours?
I thought you were watching me out of her eyes,

I thought every night I heard the telephone
clatter to the floor again,
and your daughter
scream so she couldn’t stop.
And for months afterward
you came to me like
nobody - secondhand,
through a daughter’s hindsight,
her unblinking, horrified love,
as night
after night the room filled
with the dark and the air
burned with your murdered presence,
until I couldn’t possibly make love to the dark gold
woman, vessel of your self, the torn
strings of your motherhood dripping
from her like an ocean
where she drowned but couldn’t die.
Who would drag us before some tribe of elders
to be scorned,
or have anything but pity
on us, that we turned to other lovers
and lost each other?
Glenna,

forgive me: tonight, in a moment
of learning that is clear
and absolute as ice, and hurts
as much to be inside of,
I see how much like him
I’ve become, the man
who beat you until you died with something
they never found -
walking in an anger of love
and hatred through these streets
just as the geraniums

of light around the baseball
diamonds are coming on -
oh, god, inside me I carry a black
night you climb through like
the moon in which the Asians
see a woman:
higher

and smaller, Glenna, farther
and farther away,
and nothing
will ever bring you back.
And nothing will ever get rid of you.