12th May, 2.30am
Moon-talk. I wake to a ferment of ideas. Is this what Laura means when she talks about the excesses of her premenstrual state? She tells me that women can have heightened states of awareness and wild proliferations of ideas, hormonally, just before menstruation. In my premenstrual migraine I usually feel clumsy and inept and want to shut the world out. But tonight it is full moon, I am bleeding, my belly aches with menstrual cramps and I feel like squatting and baying at the moon. I surrender to the flow of ideas--patterns rather than words. It is a wild connectedness where images merge and fire off each other and my mind explodes. What is this other kind of thinking that happens in the night?

--From Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals

...Some things

you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

--From Philip Levine, 'The Simple Truth'

Shall I compare thee to a winter’s night?
By river’s edge, with inky rolling waves.
Although the ocean’s wind has fearful bite,
In quite no other dark do stars behave.
The autumn flowers wilt at violent rate
And trees in spindly stature bring no shade,
But the most valued of the bulbs do wait,
For winter is when Nature’s start is made.
There is a depth in loss, beauty concealed
That none may understand but those who seek
Such comforts in renewal: a truth revealed
To those in quiet thought who do not speak.
So long as seasons turn to snow and storm,
So long these words aflame may keep you warm.

If I love
I will love beyond today--
beyond the sensuous tingling of the body--
beyond the imprisoned slavery of the mind--
I will love freely
as love was meant to be--
like the white wings of a gull
on a journey to the sun--
like the wonder of tomorrow
and the wonder of a thousand tomorrows
with the faith of a thousand yesterdays
which have freed me
to love this way--

--Nan Witcomb

The One Certainty.

Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,

All things are vanity. The eye and ear

Cannot be filled with what they see and hear.

Like early dew, or like the sudden breath

Of wind, or like the grass that withereth,

Is man, tossed to and fro by hope and fear:

So little joy hath he, so little cheer,

Till all things end in the long dust of death.

To-day is still the same as yesterday,

To-morrow also even as one of them;

And there is nothing new under the sun:

Until the ancient race of Time be run,

The old thorns shall grow out of the old stem,

And morning shall be cold and twilight grey.

--Christina Rossetti

let me count the ways.
I want neither Lethe, nor wolf-bane,
and there are no buds in May.
honesty is lonely if dullness is homely, and
wine is sweeter under the winter sky's carpet of stars.
people will come and speak with us,
strangers, sometimes, meek and mild,
and we will dream of the river dragging silt through time.

and yet.
there is something in it.
beyond the page, something in the cells of our skin,
the narratives of the human,
the poet, the lover, the friend.
the parts we play to keep death entertained and
too busy to lead us astray into the.
what else.
what else is there to do but try.
try with all the might of those who will die.

we danced with the heat of a thousand suns rising