knowledge

What the heart has once known, it shall never forget.

E.B. White

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maggie Smith, "Rain, New Year's Eve"

The rain is a broken piano, playing the same note over and over. My five-year-old said that. Already she knows loving the world means loving the wobbles you can’t shim, the creaks you can’t oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts, MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum. Let me love the cold rain’s plinking. Let me love the world the way I love my young son, not only when he cups my face in his sticky hands, but when, roughhousing, he accidentally splits my lip. Let me love the world like a mother. Let me be tender when it lets me down. Let me listen to the rain’s one note and hear a beginner’s song. Maggie Smith
Read more

Eavon Boland, "An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears"

I knew we had to grieve for the animals a long time ago: weep for them, pity them. I knew it was our strange human duty to write their elegies after we arranged their demise. I was young then and able for the paradox. I am older now and ready for the question: What happened to them all? I mean to those old dumb implements which have no eyes to plead with us like theirs no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean— there was a singing kettle. I want to know why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin base of its extinct design or crouched to hear its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with the birds in their blue sleeves of air torn away with the trees that sheltered them. And there were brass fire dogs which lay out all evening on the grate and in the heat thrown at them by the last of the peat fire but no one noted down their history or put them in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight. There was a wooden clotheshorse, absolutely steady, without sinews, with no mane and no mea...
Read more

Sharon Olds, "The Race"

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was cancelled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you'll see a yellow bus, get off at the second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me . He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then run. I ...
Read more