The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

OCTOBER

by W.S. Merwin

I remember how I would say, “I will gather

These pieces together,

Any minute now I will make

A knife out of a cloud.”

Even then the days

Went leaving their wounds behind them,

But, “Monument,” I kept saying to the grave,

“I am still your legend.”

There was another time

When our hands met and the clocks struck

And we lived on the point of a needle, like angels.

I have seen the spider’s triumph

In the palm of my hand. Above

My grave, that thoroughfare,

There are words now that can bring

My eyes to my feet, tamed.

Beyond the trees wearing names that are not their own

The paths are growing like smoke.

The promises have gone,

Gone, gone, and they were here just now.

There is the sky where they laid their fish.

Soon it will be evening.

– W. S. Merwin, “October” from The Moving Target (1963), also found in The Second Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1993) and Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

Songs
by Gottfried Benn
Issue no. 199 (Winter 2011)

I

O that we might be our ancestors’ ancestors.
A clump of slime in a warm bog.
Life and death, fertilizing and parturition
Would all be functions of our silent juices.

An algal leaf or a sand dune,
Shaped by the wind and basal and heavyset.
Even a dragonfly’s head or a gull’s wing
Would be too evolved and suffer too much. 


II

Contemptible are the lovers, the mockers,
All despair, yearning, and hope.
We are such painfully plague-ridden gods,
And yet we think of God a lot.

The soft bay. The dark forest dreams.
The stars, snowball blossom big and heavy.
Panthers lope silently among the trees.
Everything is strand. Forever calls the sea—     

Starmutation

Stepping, swinging, listening to a subtler way
soft and somber like white flowers in September
coming together and all at once
sweet autumn clematis, boneset seeds
shifting stems in salient breeze

Three solemn strangers cross the stream
to speak the same split-tongue as my father
the s’s stop here, the snake dies at his name
changes skin, moves to another dusty stage

A new light on an orange ladder
I dreamt of riding a blue whale
and then again, all at once
a sudden, sharp exhale 

Links I Love

Peaky Blinders!!! This clip and this clip and this one just do something to me. Perhaps it is Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) absolutely skewering the competition with his dark-twisted-but-redeemable-anti-hero thing and the cold heat of his stare, or that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds theme song.

These prints. I want all of them! For my apartment. Allllll of them. Also this article about Japanese fairy-tales.

This meditation on accessing your stillness by the phenomenal, artistically profound and lovely Sarah Blondin. Other favorites on there are by (HERO!) Tara Brach. Download insight timer! Do it! It's free!

The fact that Melissa McCarthy considers herself Billie Eilish’s personal “hype man.” “I think every super cool 17-year-old musician needs a 48-year-old midwestern mother of two as kinda like her hype man.” Also her newest video. Consider me buried.

Chance’s Hot Shower but every word is a picture and Taylor Swift covering Phil Collins.

 

Dearest Father God,

In humility, I come to you, to ask you to help me accept myself as I am. I often criticize myself so badly, compare myself to others, that I often feel like I hate myself. I also don't like what I see in the mirror. These bad thoughts about myself make me feel small, resentful and unworthy of your love which makes me unable to love you and others as I should.

Please help me love myself as I am, to see myself as you see me. Please help me to accept my body with all its beauty and perfection just the way you made it. Give me the knowledge and the wisdom to know how to protect and keep it safe and healthy. Help me to never compromise my integrity, to be authentic, truthful and honest in everything, that I never again need to reject myself or sabotage my own happiness.

From now on, let every action, every word, every reaction, every thought, and every emotion of mine, be based on love. Help me, my dearest Father, to trust you fully. Let the power of your love break all the lies I was programmed to believe, all the lies that tell me I am not good enough, strong enough, that I cannot make it. Let the power of your love be present in my whole being that I see myself and everyone through the eyes of your love. Help me that I no longer need to live my life according to other people’s expectations, but by your will.

Dearest Father, help me to know that you are always with me, so that I don't have any fear to make the choices I must make or take actions I must take. Help me to never again be afraid of facing the responsibilities in my life or afraid of facing any problems, to remember that we will resolve them together as they arise. And when I don't do things right, help me to be patient with myself, to have the courage and humility to make the necessary changes and to ask for your forgiveness.

Starting today, dearest Father, help me to live my life being myself and not pretending to be someone else. Help me to love and accept everyone else the way you created them. Please give me wisdom enough, love enough and courage enough to seek your way, your truth and follow it in all I do. Help me to remember that when I reject others, I reject myself and when I reject myself, I reject You. Clean my mind of any emotional poison it has known through abusive words, actions of others and of myself. Please help me to be happy to share my time with my loved ones and to forgive them for any injustice and hurt I feel in my mind. Give me to love my family and friends unconditionally, to find better, loving ways to communicate with everyone, that there is no winner or loser.

Today is a new beginning. Help me to start my life over, help me to love you above all, to love others and treat them with dignity, to be happy to be alive and to no longer live in fear of love. Help me to become great in Kindness, Love, Faith, Forgiveness, Gratitude, Generosity, and Compassion so that I can be at peace with all of your creations forever and ever. Amen.”

Rooting for you,
Immaculee

Say ‘pomegranate’ in French

the anger is there, it’s always there

like a glint on the slide of a knife blade

thinner than a fire pin running through a grenade

(have you ever noticed, by the way, a grenade shape?

curved in like a fig leaf, wired with veins of a maze)

you know, you could hold them both in your palm

I once asked someone, “can you imagine? Holding a heart?”

he said without blinking, “as long as it’s still beating.”

What if a heart had seeds? could bear fruit,

die and be reborn in its own acorn and own accord?

the fruit of the seed is the fruit

the fruit of the grenade is the blood

the fruit of the heart is the same