Very often these days when walking about, many of the photos I take seem to come about because in thinking about the framing, I am also thinking of a poem that goes with it. In this case, I saw the cart and immediately thought of a Pablo Neruda poem from his beautiful The Book of Questions. Paraphrasing it a little here,
“How did the abandoned vegetable cart
win its freedom?”
I can still hear the clink
of the milk bottles he brought home
10:00 in the morning after he made
his deliveries for Bordens.
Thirty-five years, they never
gave him off a Jewish holiday.
The goy he asked to do his shift
on Yom Kippur refused and
the next day he dropped dead.
They called it a Jewish curse.
Then they stepped all over each other
to work for him.
What could I do after his stroke?
I put him in a nursing home.
He knows me, but can’t talk anymore.
Fifty years we lived together
he would never weep in front of me.
Now all the time his eyes are tearing,
but there is no more Morris to cry.
Lovemaking wasn’t so easy between us
in the early years. We both felt guilty.
We thought we weren’t supposed to enjoy
it and I was always worried
about becoming pregnant.
Later on we worried the children would hear.
But after they grew up and moved out
and I couldn’t bear anymore
we began to have fun.
It wasn’t always before going to sleep either.
Sometimes during breakfast
he would say, Let’s go
and roll his eyes up to the bedroom.
Luba, he would say, I’ll help you
take out the hairpins.
Spilled Milk, Willa Schneberg
The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?
Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.
Imaginary Number, Vijay Seshadri
Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is a daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses
and there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart
involuntary.
At sudden times.
For sudden reasons.
from Wildly Constant, Anne Carson
[…]
When I went on vacation with my dad
it was awkward. Were we two men sharing a bed. Were we father
and daughter. We fought
as we always have, like brothers.
At dusk we took a walk into town.
You know what we call this he said?
Wolf-light. Just after sundown the sky a deep bruise
the air anticipates.
from Wolf-Light, Ari Banias
A misfortune can swell
for a long, long time in the mind.
While goodness shrinks
down to a hard shell.
I reach for the hammer,
but it doesn’t crack.
Evolutionarily, it makes sense.
These fishbone days, this fatty grief.
Hardwired, Jenny Xie
Cover me over
In dusk and dust and dreams.
Cover me over
And leave me alone.
Cover me over,
You tireless, great.
Hear me and cover me,
Bringers of dusk and dust and dreams.
Bringers, Carl Sandburg
I wake myself imagining the shape
of the day and where I will find
myself within it. Language is not often
in that shape,
but sentences survive somehow
through the islands of dark matter,
the negative space often more important
than the positive.
Imagine finding you look at the world
completely different upon waking one day.
You do not know if this is permanent.
Anything can change, after all,
for how else would you find yourself
in this predicament or this opportunity,
depending on the frame? A single thought
can make loneliness seem frighteningly new.
We destroy the paths of rivers to make room for the sea.
Meditation For the Silence of Morning, Adam Clay
Do not forget old friends
you knew long before I met you
the times I know nothing about
being someone
who lives by himself
and only visits you on a raid
Leonard Cohen
The train swayed past cropped fields,
Barking collies, abandoned gas works, cows,
Brown bungalows with little gardens
And potting sheds, kids kicking a soccer ball
Down a deserted street. Behind me two teenage girls
Dressed in identical vests and white blouses talked.
“I hate people who are good,” one of them said.
“They want you to be good, too.”
“I know,” the other one said.
“My Aunt Mary is like that. She makes me retch.”
I got up and walked down the wobbling aisle toward
The space between cars. Two guys were sharing a pint
In that conspiratorial way guys like to do.
I stretched my short legs and smelled their whiskey.
Night coming over the western hills, the lights of
The villages along ridges. I wanted to walk into
A house and be welcomed like some long-lost uncle.
I wanted to see everyone rise excitedly.
I wanted to smell the cooking, the wash, the closets,
The cats, the peculiar odors of various skins.
The girls were still talking but in lower and tenser voices.
Two more stops and we’d all be getting off.
I was taking the ferry across a sea I’d never crossed.
The windows inside the coach were beaded with the vapor.
Of human warmth. I ran my fingers along the jeweled moment
Before it died in the taunting arms of speech.
Travel, Baron Wormser