Edgar Degas
Trying to get the shower invitations done, and it is not going well. Offering up someone else who does it much better than I . . .
Selections from “A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook”
Storks, study, and solitude in a fading life.
~ Anna Kamienska
I now exist on the principle of shortsightedness, which demands enhanced attention to the moment. Late wisdom, but close to the wisdom of childhood. A lovely summer day. Color, taste, scent. A squirrel. Cherries. Good tiredness. Cauliflower for supper. Clean house. And always darkness, darkness that spreads around all of it. Everything submerged in awful darkness.
*****
The inscription rings with a poetry much older than its date.
*****
I escape into sleep. Sleep is what I’ll miss most when I die.
*****
I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.
*****
The sun came out today. But I still ache all over. It made me think of Waclaw Gralewski’s theory: every tumble, bruise, broken leg or arm is the price for disrupting some hidden order. Instant punishment.
*****
I have no talent. I’m not talking about the literary marketplace: I mean how I see myself. I write poems for myself, like these notebooks, to think things through, that’s all.
*****
The soul has two distinct layers. One is the “I”—capricious, fickle, uncertain, it hops from joy to despair. The other, the “soul,” is steady, sure, unwavering, watchful, ready, aware.
*****
I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.
*****
In the human world everything is mixed. No pure states. Even death is life in some sense. Archaeology—eschatology?
*****
I walk around disguised as an overweight old lady.
*****
Deafness has seized even my dreams. They’re voiceless, like silent movies. Or when the machine breaks in the theater and the audience suddenly starts stomping.
*****
We recognize things, as in poetry, through resemblances. Through metaphors. This way we gather them into wider systems so that they don’t dangle alone.
*****
Never. Never. Never. I could fill a whole notebook with that word.
*****
I returned
to confirm
there can be no return.
*****
To hide from old age. To crawl into a crack in the floor.
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Sorrow—that’s the noblest thing linking us to animals. The sorrow of existence.
*****
When I woke up this morning, I didn’t have a face. Just a mask of pain. I wanted to be more than a mother, I wanted to be a friend. But the director calls us to order. You don’t get to pick the role.
*****
During the sleepless hours of the night a thought came to me that seemed important. I got up in the dark and wrote it down. In the morning I read: “I went looking for loneliness. But it found me.”
*****
Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.
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Niobe. Niobe—that’s me. That’s every abandoned mother.
*****
This morning I suddenly catch myself: I’m not there, I’m so lost in thought, I don’t know what’s going on around me. Can you think yourself to death?
*****
Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 