you dream that it's just a dream until the phone in your pocket starts to scream

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"There's this idea that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. And what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."
--Junot Díaz


"She knew then that Sade had not personally known the dead man. Her grief was almost theoretical. It didn't mean any less, but it was a different sort of grief from Miranda's. It was the sort of grief you didn't have to suppress because letting it out made it smaller instead of bigger. The sort of grief you could say something about because you instinctively understood that it could not continue, rigid inside your breathing apparatus like a metal stem."
--Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching


"The University Library is a mouth shut tight, each tooth a book, each book growing over, under and behind the other. The writing desks are placed in front of the bookshelves, some of them between bookshelves so that whoever is sitting at the desk gets a feeling of something dusty, intangible and unspeakably powerful, something like God, watching them through tiny gaps in the shelves."
--Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching


"Circe's Power"
I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
look like pigs.

I'm sick of your world
that lets the outside disguise the inside.

Your men weren't bad men;
undisciplined life
did that to them. As pigs,

under the care of
me and my ladies, they
sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell,
showing you my goodness
as well as my power. I saw

we could be happy here,
as men and women are
when their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
your men with my help braving
the crying and pounding sea. You think

a few tears upset me? My friend,
every sorceress is
a pragmatist at heart; nobody

sees essence who can't
face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.
--Louise Glück


"The Wild Iris"
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
--Louise Glück


"Trillium"
When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.

I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see.
And as I watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
Then it wasn't possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.

Are there souls that need
death's presence, as I require protection?
I think if I speak long enough
I will answer that question, I will see
whatever they see, a ladder
reaching through the firs, whatever
calls them to exchange their lives--

Think what I understand already.
I woke up ignorant in a forest;
only a moment ago, I didn't know my voice
if one were given me
would be so full of grief, my sentences
like cries strung together.
I didn't even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me.
--Louise Glück


"Lamium"
This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.
--Louise Glück


"Spring Snow"
Look at the night sky:
I have two selves, two kinds of power.

I am here with you, at the window,
watching you react. Yesterday
the moon rose over moist earth in the lower garden.
Now the earth glitters like the moon,
like dead matter crusted with light.

You can close your eyes now.
I have heard your cries, and cries before yours,
and the demand behind them.
I have shown you what you want:
not belief, but capitulation
to authority, which depends on violence.
--Louise Glück


"Matins"
Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful
are always lied to since the weak are always
driven by panic. I cannot love
what I can't conceive, and you disclose
virtually nothing: are you like the hawthorn tree,
always the same thing in the same place,
or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up
a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,
and the next year, purple in the rose garden? You must see
it is useless to us, this silence that promotes belief
you must be all things, the foxglove and the hawthorn tree,
the vulnerable rose and tough daisy--we are left to think
you couldn't possibly exist. Is this
what you mean us to think, does this explain
the silence of the morning,
the crickets not yet rubbing their wings, the cats
not fighting in the yard?
--Louise Glück


"The Mask"
The mask is what you use; it isn't a fake, it's a mask. Your senses love you; they evolved to be your mask--or you made them, didn't you?

I keep talking to my future self: she tells me how to be her. I'm already her, that mask.

The bacterium puts on its mask, a painstaking silver drop. The quail flies up, I see his red crest which is almost invisible in dawn and desert dun, don't alliterate or you'll go to hell.

In my culture I need to repeat sounds, so I can step across the instant gap to future, future her. I can't even known what I'll write, she tells me things.

Light through rabbit's ear orange-pink on other side of gully. The rabbit's mask's alien, but I can humanize him--he can be powerful and dangerous. The dark chaotic wind--not wind--can flash from his eye holes, and his teeth holes can be scary.

Why are you scared? Afraid you're going to die? Are you still afraid of that? she asks. It's not that she's smug. Even though she knows what's going to happen to me. But she's not dead yet either.

The mask is covered with writing that people think they understand, now they understand it; you never understood it. Before. Now you can.

The mask is leering at you, with its dark mouth and eyes: you can't understand what you're making up right now, so get on with making it up.
--Alice Notley


"Language of Mercy"
They seem unapproachable in the crowded room--Tara and her father
at night: she'd have to be young and with him. And I'd have to owe
them tentativeness. But who set up this system of debts
sticking to you baby a lawyer's daydream--My culture won't have
a legal system. I'm still not sorry for everything I've done.

He's protecting his merciful child but she is mercy and needs no
protection. I don't need to be sorry, I need to be merciful.

Your hair is all in clumps; your future self forgives you
you mime paroxysms of grief in the vision: I don't want to feel
I don't want to feel any more today and prefer the symbolic world.
I have been living poems for so long I'm only a figure and I'm glad.

You opened this particular poem and you're inside, you can't
get out. Shall we talk about the origin of fear again?

Walk toward the gathering one more time, with its yellow
mound of disorder--a cloth perhaps--at one side of the area.
He thinks he has to protect her, but Mercy needs no protection,
and has no time for fear. Part of me chooses to be her.

Someone is singing to me; I suppose it's a prayer or invocation
Birds gather in the mesquite tree, confessing to existence.
--Alice Notley


"Skull"
I took a skull and transformed it. It looks like a
different one. I know it used to have ruby brains inside.
And dreams that I interpreted badly. And wretched onyx-hooked
and emerald-gush feelings. And the rattle of reasoning...conk, conk.
Take it out, and here's this skull, and you still think it talks like you,

famished my tongue casts about for a confirmative taste.

Then I know I'm the beautiful monster I've made. Naked bares
my fantasy teeth--so we can feel better. My errors could not
be forgiven by others; but now we're the color of lions and peacocks, we, I,
have painted tears, and real-bead brains. I mean literal birds
in my mouth. I'm what they call an overmodeled skull.

I have shiny seashells for eyes; I have lizard guts for hair.
I think the best thoughts I can imagine. I also receive them,
from nowhere, at all. I have a lot of voices, I spew them
they look like overmodeled snake nerves, sequins on fiber slime.
Actually she pastes them to me, so she can talk. She began
existing by doing this, fabricated cowrie-shell eons of light years ago.
--Alice Notley