from the archives :: How did I know an angel from denial? / It took me years. / It took me years.
[again from a blog now defunct]
[originally written on july 20th, 2018]
kiss me & kiss me
here & here
(my beloved em dash)
*
feeling such a strange & total sadness
that i no longer use LJ
—how devoted i was to the site, what a dedicated
writer i was on there, maintaining an almost daily practice
for a while
—honestly, i miss that
—& almost posted on there instead of here, where
i also have not posted in ages
—& how strange, to confess to myself on my blog
the sin of my lack of blogging
*
“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe, in a letter to Russel Vernon Hunter, from Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (New York Graphic Society)
*
i wish tumblr were more text-friendly, & also that you could create a totally private blog on there—yep, then i would just migrate entirely to tumblr, every blog, every persona, every jotting
*
i wanted to post a poem by Burkard. been reading & thinking about his poems, him, again.
& i guess i'm thinking of Michael's love for notebooks, the mess & flaw & goodness of them. writing without trying to make a publishable thing. i still need that. i continue to need that. and something outside of social media, too, as much as twitter has become a blog of sorts for me. but yes, outside of that, outside of publicness & retweets & likes & "hearts," all that. a more private space. meditative.
& i guess i was afraid of posting on LJ again bc i'm nervous that it might just go under, go defunct, go away, gone, at any moment, i don't know. should i be saving those posts? or should i practice letting them go? my wild ephemera? my internet scraps?
*
oh i love you to bits & pieces,
angela montenegro says to temperance brennan a.k.a. bones
why am i watching this show
david boreanaz's character is so annoying
& the writing really gets so lazy
& preposterous
but maybe right now i am lazy & preposterous
*
or maybe what i need is more friends, friends i can hang out with in person, talk with in person...maybe what i miss is that, those conversations...and LJ's reminding me of that kind of conversation bc "social media" or blogging back in the day used to be a lot more conversation-oriented, not so much announcing, posturing, curating... well, there was still a lot of that... but really, in some ways, i learned how to talk to people through LJ
*
A Bell Over a River
by Michael Burkard (from A Thief in the Lamp: Uncollected Poems, 1966 - 1990, which is part of Envelope of Night)
How did I know a man from a woman?
One had a father, the other had bells.
Each shared the consciousness of a horse.
How did I know a well from a river?
One had a pulse, the other a light.
Each shared the consciousness of night.
How did I know house from house?
I didn't know. I didn't know I didn't know,
that this condition was a consciousness.
How did I know an angel from denial?
It took me years.
It took me years.
How did I know an angel?
I let the angel know me.
The angel was both
an aspect of reality
and an aspect of mystery.
A bell over a river.
A man asks a woman
if there is such thing as pain,
and the woman's yes,
I was there once,
with other women,
before I knew myself.
*
a poem, a language shaped not to impress, but to tremble alongside/within your trembling, hello
*
all i want is to be walking with you, suddenly & totally, on a windswept somewhere,
the wind cinematic in our coats,
our trench-coats,
that's what i want,
i wish, & i think i could love
summer, then
*
a variation on a line from an LJ entry: read everything. walk everywhere. eat honey nut cheerios.
another variation: read your walking. carry your reading. eat honey nut cheerios.
*
but what wet tangled hairy letters to myself
to: me
from: moi
bonsoir
*
seems fitting to quote the ending of this Mary Ruefle poem ("Spikenard"), too:
I spend more time with my journal
than I spend with myself.
The end.