Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 40

CarrollBlog 2.25

Lines for Winter

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know, which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are."

-Mark Strand

CarrollBlog 2.23

It is cloudy this morning so I imagine you sitting indoors somewhere in weather like this, staring out at the grayness. It is chilly too, so you're wearing a thin coat or thick sweater. Plum colored or gravel gray. Your fingernails are dark red but your lips are pale. Are you meeting someone? Or are you alone the whole day? Are you talking animatedly to a friend or silent, your hands still? Hands are not important to me although I know they are crucial to some people when describing their dream mate. On the chair next to you is a small purse. Or maybe none at all-- you don't like clutter. When you leave the apartment, often it is just with your keys in one pocket and some cash in the other. There's a cellphone too but you don't like to use it and usually forget it at home. I'm talking about the woman sitting half in shadows in the corner of an afternoon restaurant, one hand in her hair while she speaks into the phone in a language you've never heard before-- Norwegian or Turkish. A waiter comes over. Smiling, she gives him her full radiant attention, even if it's just to order a glass of wine. He walks away happy. She said something he liked, something unimportant but witty or kind that made things nicer for a few moments. I knew a woman who said she fell in love almost every day with men she passed on the street, men sitting in buses reading newspapers, in bars talking with their friends about sports. She said falling in love was the easiest thing in the world. I never could figure out whether she was right or dead wrong.

CarrollBlog 2.17

Old loves. They enter your thoughts unexpectedly, like a flash of summer lightning at night. They blast open a part of the sky pure phosphorescent white a moment, and then are gone. A memory is lit, or a few-- a meal together, an hour when nothing could be better than right now. The look in their eye that day you sat together by the river. Maybe if the memory is particularly strong, a shiver slides along your heart like an ice cube down your back. But then unless you are haunted or were ruined by this person, life goes back to a moment ago. You straighten up, take a long breath, and move forward. Maybe part of you looks once over your shoulder to see if, impossibly, they are there behind you again. But they never are.

CarrollBlog 2.13

GOOD GIRL

by Kim Addonizio

Look at you, sitting there being good.

After two years you're still dying for a cigarette.

And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?

Don't you want to run to the corner right now

for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice

and a nice lemon slice, wouldn't the backyard

that you're so sick of staring out into

look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends

day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint,

the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs —

don't you want to mess it all up, to roll around

like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren't you a dog anyway,

always groveling for love and begging to be petted?

You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides

of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,

you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.

Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes

and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first

beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven't they

been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn't it time

you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets

to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?

Sure it's time. You've rolled over long enough.

Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this

there's one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.

So get going. Listen: they're howling for you now:

up and down the block your neighbors' dogs

burst into frenzied barking and won't shut up.

CarrollBlog 2.11

"What Do Women Want?"

by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.

I want it flimsy and cheap,

I want it too tight, I want to wear it

until someone tears it off me.

I want it sleeveless and backless,

this dress, so no one has to guess

what's underneath. I want to walk down

the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store

with all those keys glittering in the window,

past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old

donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers

slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,

hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.

I want to walk like I'm the only

woman on earth and I can have my pick.

I want that red dress bad.

I want it to confirm

your worst fears about me,

to show you how little I care about you

or anything except what

I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment

from its hanger like I'm choosing a body

to carry me into this world, through

the birth-cries and the love-cries too,

and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,

it'll be the goddamned

dress they bury me in.

CarrollBlog 2.10

Every Case

by Wisława Szymborska

It could have happened.

It must have happened.

It happened earlier. Later.

Closer by. Further away.

It happened not to you.

You survived because you were the first.

You survived because you were the last.

Because you were alone. Because you were with others.

Because to the left. Because to the right.

Because it rained. Because there was shade.

Because the day was sunny.

Fortunately a forest was there.

Fortunately no trees were there.

Fortunately a rail, a hook, a bar, a brake,

an embrasure, a curve, a millimeter, a second.

Fortunately a razor was floating on water.

As a consequence, because, and yet, in spite.

What it would have been if a hand, a leg,

within an ace of, by a hair's breadth

saved from a combination of circumstances.

So you are here? Straight from an abrogated moment?

The net had just one mesh and you went through that mesh?

I am all surprise and all silence.

Listen,

how quickly your heart beats to me.

CarrollBlog 2.4

CUTTING LOOSE

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,

you sing. For no reason, you accept

the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go

where you want to.

Arbitrary, sound comes, a reminder

that a steady center is holding

all else. If you listen, that sound will tell where it is, and you can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters

always bar the path—but that's when you get going best, glad to be lost, learning how real it is

here on the earth, again and again.

~William Stafford

CarrollBlog 1.26

"My Worst Habit"

by Rumi

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter

I become a torture to those I'm with.

If you're not here, nothing grows.

I lack clarity. My words

tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.

How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,

dig a way out through the bottom

to the ocean. There is a secret medicine

given only to those who hurt so hard

they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,

no matter whether that friend is moving away from you

or coming back to you.

CarrollBlog 1.12

Life scars us. It is inevitable.We learn to live with those scars, or they kill us long before we actually die. Small scars, large, scars as long and deep as the ocean—they define us; they become a part of our life map. A friend of mine recently lost a child and asked what she should do now that it was gone. I said it seems to me that the best thing to do now is to live for both of you. Show your lost child what life is all about and carry them on your soul like someone giving a child a piggyback ride. Show her everything you can that *you* love about life and maybe even more, if that's possible. They still live inside you, so let them see life through your eyes. The more involved in life you are, the more they will see. The more you retreat from life, you will be depriving them of a beautiful view. Maybe that means some big things must be changed in your life. Things that scare you, things you don't WANT to change. But you must if you are to move forward and allow your spirit child to enjoy the wonders of your life. now lived for two.

CarrollBlog 1.6

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

Jeffrey Eugenides