Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.
Pablo Neruda
"In the house there was a room which could not be found, a room without a window, the fortress of their love, a room without a window where the mind and blood coalesced in a union without orgasm and rootless like those of fishes. The promiscuity of glances, of phrases, like sparks marrying in space. The collision between their resemblances, shedding the odor of tamarisk and sand, of rotted shells and dying sea-weeds, their love like the ink of squids, a banquet of poisons."
Anaïs Nin
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.
Pablo Neruda
1
Antjie Krogmy words of love grow more tenuous than the
sound of lilac
my language frayed
dazed and softened I feel myself through your stub-
born struggle
you still hold me close like no-one else
you still choose my side like no-one else
against your chest I lie and I confess
you hunt my every gesture
you catch up with me everywhere
you pull me down between bush and grass
on the footpath you turn me around
so that I must look you in the eye
you kick me in the ovaries
you shake me by the skin of my neck
you hold me, prick me in the back, on the straight
and narrow
LOVE IS A HABIT
Love is a habit, like brushing your teeth or cleaning the bath.
And if love is a habit, is grieving one too? What shall I replace
the habit of loving and grieving you with?
(A habit built up slow,
like the accretions on a pearl, grey and baroque and expensive;
or the gloss on a dining table, hours of elbow grease and polish;
or skin sloughing off imperceptibly, renewed from beneath;
or the silent unfurling of a baby, cell by cell.)
(But
growth in the womb is by division, not addition; by one simple cell
splitting and replicating itself a million million times, till suddenly some know:
to shape a nose, and nose hairs, and a channel to the back of the mouth
that is slippery, and a tongue with nodules for tasting,
and teeth that are hard, but living.)
Love is a habit, and grieving one too.
But I want to hold on to the grieving as a way of holding on to you.
That first Sunday without you, the September sky was cold and empty,
despite the jasmine struggling to bloom.
I’d never lived a day without you in the world;
now the city for me was empty.
It hardly seemed possible.
Megan Hall
And if love is a habit, is grieving one too? What shall I replace
the habit of loving and grieving you with?
(A habit built up slow,
like the accretions on a pearl, grey and baroque and expensive;
or the gloss on a dining table, hours of elbow grease and polish;
or skin sloughing off imperceptibly, renewed from beneath;
or the silent unfurling of a baby, cell by cell.)
(But
growth in the womb is by division, not addition; by one simple cell
splitting and replicating itself a million million times, till suddenly some know:
to shape a nose, and nose hairs, and a channel to the back of the mouth
that is slippery, and a tongue with nodules for tasting,
and teeth that are hard, but living.)
Love is a habit, and grieving one too.
But I want to hold on to the grieving as a way of holding on to you.
That first Sunday without you, the September sky was cold and empty,
despite the jasmine struggling to bloom.
I’d never lived a day without you in the world;
now the city for me was empty.
It hardly seemed possible.
Megan Hall
"In the house there was a room which could not be found, a room without a window, the fortress of their love, a room without a window where the mind and blood coalesced in a union without orgasm and rootless like those of fishes. The promiscuity of glances, of phrases, like sparks marrying in space. The collision between their resemblances, shedding the odor of tamarisk and sand, of rotted shells and dying sea-weeds, their love like the ink of squids, a banquet of poisons."
Anaïs Nin
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