I am and you are, as larks going, at the same time, away and up, unthought of separately, a blurred black-thing against blue, though we are different, and two. And soon we’ll be lost to a chasm. While moving is an immense gesture, it almost means we can, as astonishingly as things change, be the same. You will understand,
*
As your plane lands here, didn’t the lady once say in the event of aloneness please hold on? Why have you gone? Here is a question I’ve tried: why at the same time as speaking are we moving away? Though the theory of action explains it well, the function of experience must be experimental. And, too, I knew assuredly that
*
Once, while slow and desperate, we behaved almost as a low wind, no shame or control. We were as simple as photographs, rendered images, at the same time as living with our figures and it figures you so besieged me that I decided to live, while also sad, in your sadness. Yes, I’ll wear that black dress
*
When I meet you at the gate, you’ll be walking and I’ll be walking and we’ll both know things cut across time, and how lucky that no time is lost, those small repeated reliefs. Time deserves to be studied, as I study you and me and how we are linked. See we’ve become almost like holy things, while the reverse is also true and every time I see you, while I’m looking,
*
I’m thinking of a long river, something with no end, as a real river somewhere does, at the same time, into a true-blue sky. It is the same way I imagine us ending, like two parts of the same broken line, who go down trying, as the planes are flying, as the dying are dying, as the not dying are dying, as lovers and lover, I‘ve figured it out: you are only mine when you are moved, at the same time, the same way, I’m moved.
Anne Carson's "Half Lives and Long Drives" "I think every piece of work has its own voice, and you have to figure out what that is, sort of work into it...I mean, you can hear in your head how the thought should sound like. Sometimes there are rhythms and melodies even before there are words, and you have to find the words that fit into that rhythm or melody." viaLIT HUB
What Sparks Poetry: Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes on Ama Codjoe's "Superpower" "Each time I read 'Superpower,' I’m astonished by the turns the poem keeps making: from the playful to the horrifying, spanning over a hundred years in a few lines. The poem moves from an imagined fantasy of a superhero, to the folk hero John Henry, to an unnamed enslaved woman, to a (re)imagined memory of the speaker’s mother."
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