A Short History of Words

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”

-The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

“Behold, the many banners
The clamor among the faithful
A maple, its leaves an Alizarin Crimson
Deepened and dulled by Indian Red
You are at a latitude you know well
Or did once
You are unaccountably cold.”

-“Above Gower Street,” August Kleinzahler

“From low, dark clouds
That soak my spirit,
Rain remembers me.”
-“The Elements of Zimmer,” Paul Zimmer

I am feeling a lot of this today.

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed through to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

“The young poet is composing a long poem entitled “Fate.” He had his doubts whether he should not call it “This Fate,” but after consulting carious better-established poets, he finally decided that it was best to call it “Fate,” without any trimmings. It was simpler, more evocative, more mysterious. Also, calling it plain “Fate” would make it more suggestive, more—how to put it?—more indefinite and poetic. In this way it would not be clear whether fate as such was meant, or a particular fate, an undecided fate, a tragic fate, a blue fate, or a violaceous fate. “This Fate” would have tied it down too much and left less scope for imagination to take wing in free, untrammeled flight.”

-The Hive, Camilo Jose Cela

“Landscape with Figurines”

There once were some pines, a canal, a piece of sky.
The pines are the houses now of the very poor,
Huddled together, in a blue, ragged wind.
Children go whistling their dogs, down by the mudflats,
Once the canal. There’s a red all lost in the weeds.
It’s winter, it’s after supper, it’s goodbye.
O goodbye to the houses, the children, the little red ball,
And the pieces of sky that will go on falling for days.”

-Donald Justice

“Mother dozes in her chair,
awakes awhile and reads her book
then dozes off again.
Wind makes a rush at the house
and, like a tide, recedes. The trees are sere.

Afternoons are most difficult.
They seem to have no end,
no end and no one there.
Outside the trees do their witchy dance.
Mother grows smaller in her chair.”

-“Portrait of My Mother in January,” August Kleinzahler