tidbits

things from Virginian travels!
first, verbatim snippets from last week's late night musings, re-read only now:
[all incomplete. teasers, really.]

she greeted the sun with a forlorn smile,
chin upturned as a sunflower’s might be,
finding the heat and then staying within it,
and it felt like holding onto a hug for too long.
like the sun would let go if it could
like if the sun were not the anchor, but a ship
not the refrigerator, but a magnet
he would meet his maker and then leave her
abandon his roots in the ocean
the kitchen
and say he’ll be back soon
but not mean it.
______________

the blinks they sink like soap in a drink like bubbles that think what they float above is the monster, that what they float above is the answer, that what they float above is the primer before the paint, the "will not" before the "ain’t," the pinks before the faint.
______________

and as you sing along, I sing a different song, a song you won’t know how to sing when I’m gone, won’t know how to take for too long, cause I’m going to the riverbed, going to the river, dead, as Virginia Woolf, the rocks in her pocket and brilliance in her fingers that couldn’t trump the wanderlust in her heart. the wanderlust for another world. and the only other world was one she couldn’t reach in this life, and who knows where the other life is, but it’s not here
__________________

how much for that lover in the window
the one with the shaggy blonde hair
it sounds funny I know
but it really is so, oh,
I’m my own...
I’m my own.

***

and an excerpt from Judith Minty's "Letters to My Daughter." I found a copy at a secondhand store. It's really great.

"This week I received two love letters,
one from a boy still in high school, another
from an older man in his twenties,
a man who whispers about mountains.
Your father doesn't read my mail. He pretends
disinterest in the postmarks, the crimped penmanship,
the shy poems folded inside.
Even when it mattered, he never wrote me. I think he was
embarrassed by misspelled words, stammering lines.
But now he watches me as I watch for the mailman's truck. He notices
how my fingers stain the curtains when I part them,
that I float through snow in my bathrobe to the mailbox.
I hide the letters in dark drawers and pull them out
when I can't remember my name. They smell like wild violets.
Your father? Lately, I find him bent at his desk,
hands knotted over blank papers. I must tell him
those young men are only in love with poetry."