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Been busy today, although at the same time don't feel I've accomplished much. It's sunny but cold - windchills in the teens and 20s. Didn't stop me from wandering about though. Went to church - where the sermon was basically just various love poems - from Pabulo Neruda to Adrienne Rich. She said that we need not figure out the meaning and if we don't like poetry, to just relax and listen to it. I rather like poetry - no problem at all understanding its meaning since I sort of think that way anyhow, but I proceeded to doze all the same. My eyes falling shut. My mind drifting away, the words ships carrying it out to sea. Not really in the mood for love poems, since lately been feeling oddly bereft of love, my mind protects my body and pulls us both out upon the air to the sea sleepy musings until the voice soft as a lullaby ends and the music begins.
Here's Pabul's
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
Translated by Stephen Tapscott
And here's selections from Adrienne Rich's Twenty One Love Poems:
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk… if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior high school playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.
You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down
the upbreathing air.
The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
of the great round rippled by stone implements
the midsummer night light rising form beneath
the horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”
I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge
simply nor any place but the mind
casting back to where her solitude,
shared, could be chosen without loneliness,
not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
After church went apartment hunting again. Location not bad - quite doable. Steep three - four flight walk up with narrow steps and railing? Not doable at all. If I was still 25 maybe, which most of the people viewing it appear to be. So it's out.
Dang. Came back and stood in front of Fitness Collective for fifteen minutes contemplating if I can afford the Cross Training program. I can't. It's $1,235 for 90 days. I kid you not. $500 a month. You get nutritional aid, and personal trainer support. But no...this is so out of my price range. I'm going to try the Y, even if it is a 30 minute walk away. Then bought groceries and treated myself to nice homemade chocolates. Home now. Laundry pick up in about an hour and a half.
Quickly jumped on Facebook and rapidly jumped off again. I really despise Facebook.
Too much information on that thing. I now got to see, finally, the stupid redneck cowboy Dad with the 45 - who shot his daughter's lap-top. Sigh. I feel very lucky to have grown up in a time period in which the internet did not exist. Adolescence was humilating and crappy enough without the internet. Can imagine how horrific it would be with it? Now you get to have people humiliate you and/or your family and friends in front of millions of people worldwide instead of just the handful in your small town. Poor kid - when she's in her 20s or 30s, applying for a job or to college, some joker is going to send that youtube video to either her employer or dean of admissions and she won't get in. Folks? Don't post stuff like this on the internet.
Bad idea. You keep stuff like that private. The rest of us do not need to know.
Anybody else miss the good old days when we didn't? Which were...oh I don't know maybe 10 years ago?
Discussed romantic films with the Momster. She thinks the most romantic film of all time was The Way We Were...tragic but poignant. I never made it through it. Barbara Striesand grates on my nerves. She does in all her films. I don't know why exactly.
Have similar issues with Liza Minelli.
Anyhow...here's a brief list of good ones off the top of my head:
An Officer and a Gentleman
LadyHawk
The Philadelphia Story
Pride and Prejudice (pick your favorite version)
How to Steal a Million
Marnie
The African Queen
Woman of the Year or The Desk Set (pick your favorite Spencer/Hepburn)
Romancing the Stone
Splash
Dirty Dancing
Last of the Mohicans
Beauty and The Beast (pick your version - there's the French film and the Disney Cartoon)
Here's Pabul's
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
Translated by Stephen Tapscott
And here's selections from Adrienne Rich's Twenty One Love Poems:
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk… if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior high school playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.
You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down
the upbreathing air.
The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
of the great round rippled by stone implements
the midsummer night light rising form beneath
the horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”
I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge
simply nor any place but the mind
casting back to where her solitude,
shared, could be chosen without loneliness,
not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
After church went apartment hunting again. Location not bad - quite doable. Steep three - four flight walk up with narrow steps and railing? Not doable at all. If I was still 25 maybe, which most of the people viewing it appear to be. So it's out.
Dang. Came back and stood in front of Fitness Collective for fifteen minutes contemplating if I can afford the Cross Training program. I can't. It's $1,235 for 90 days. I kid you not. $500 a month. You get nutritional aid, and personal trainer support. But no...this is so out of my price range. I'm going to try the Y, even if it is a 30 minute walk away. Then bought groceries and treated myself to nice homemade chocolates. Home now. Laundry pick up in about an hour and a half.
Quickly jumped on Facebook and rapidly jumped off again. I really despise Facebook.
Too much information on that thing. I now got to see, finally, the stupid redneck cowboy Dad with the 45 - who shot his daughter's lap-top. Sigh. I feel very lucky to have grown up in a time period in which the internet did not exist. Adolescence was humilating and crappy enough without the internet. Can imagine how horrific it would be with it? Now you get to have people humiliate you and/or your family and friends in front of millions of people worldwide instead of just the handful in your small town. Poor kid - when she's in her 20s or 30s, applying for a job or to college, some joker is going to send that youtube video to either her employer or dean of admissions and she won't get in. Folks? Don't post stuff like this on the internet.
Bad idea. You keep stuff like that private. The rest of us do not need to know.
Anybody else miss the good old days when we didn't? Which were...oh I don't know maybe 10 years ago?
Discussed romantic films with the Momster. She thinks the most romantic film of all time was The Way We Were...tragic but poignant. I never made it through it. Barbara Striesand grates on my nerves. She does in all her films. I don't know why exactly.
Have similar issues with Liza Minelli.
Anyhow...here's a brief list of good ones off the top of my head:
An Officer and a Gentleman
LadyHawk
The Philadelphia Story
Pride and Prejudice (pick your favorite version)
How to Steal a Million
Marnie
The African Queen
Woman of the Year or The Desk Set (pick your favorite Spencer/Hepburn)
Romancing the Stone
Splash
Dirty Dancing
Last of the Mohicans
Beauty and The Beast (pick your version - there's the French film and the Disney Cartoon)