show your face, your face to me, be you my friend or enemy, and do not fear oblivion

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"I don't understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something by nature we call it progress."
--Ed Begley Jr.


"You know, it's quite a job starting to like somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it."
--Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea


"In the City of Light"
The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored. Once,

At night, I walked through the lit streets
Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel
Up Lexington & at that hour, alone,
I stopped hearing traffic, voices, the racket

Of spring wind lifting a newspaper high
Above the lights. The streets wet,
And shining. No sounds. Once,

When I saw my son be born, I thought
How loud this world must be to him, how final.

That night, out of respect for someone missing,
I stopped listening to it.

Out of respect for someone missing,
I have to say

This isn't the whole story.
The fact is, I was still in love.
My father died, & I was still in love. I know
It's in bad taste to say it quite this way. Tell me,
How would you say it?

The story goes: wanting to be alone & wanting
The easy loneliness of travelers,

I said good-bye in an airport & flew west.
It happened otherwise.
And where I'd held her close to me,
My skin felt raw, & flayed.

Descending, I looked down at the light lacquering fields
Of pale vines, & small towns, each
With a water tower; then the shadows of wings;
Then nothing.

My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. Most

Of my decisions have been wrong.

When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.

Her bright, green eyes at an airport—how they widened
As if in disbelief;
And my father opening the gate: a lit, & silent

City.
--Larry Levis


"In a Hospital"
By the side of an old woman
who is dying in a corridor
no one stands

Staring at the ceiling
for so many days already
she writes in the air with her finger

There are no tears no laments
no wringing of hands
not enough angels on duty

Some deaths are polite and quiet
as if somebody gave up his place
in a crowded tram
--Anna Kamieńska, translated from the Polish by David Curzon and Grazyna Drabik


"Once, long ago, there was a war and everyone involved behaved very badly. The war is not important--war is never important. It is the same, a sort of mummery that everyone knows how to perform but agrees to pretend they can still be surprised by it. War is only ever a joint or a hinge, where the world becomes something else, swings open or swings closed."
--Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World


"God is not a man who looks like men, God is not even a blemmye who looks like blemmyae. God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking. It has no sense of timing. It does not obey nice narratives like: a child is born, he grows, he performs miracles and draws companions, then sacrifices himself to redeem a previous event in an old book. That is not how anything works. God is a sphere, and only rarely does it intersect with us--and when it does, it crashes, it cracks the surface of everything. It does not part the sea at just the right time. God is too big for such precision."
--Catherynne M. Valente


"The historian's job is to decide who gets forgiven and who doesn't. To decide what the story was."
--Catherynne M. Valente