today's inspiration

found this gem stashed on my mac.

atticus and scout finch (a.k.a. cutest father/daughter in literature).

the first love poem i've ever received

"sam" by enrico bruno

emily always knows

I felt a funeral in my brain,         And mourners, to and fro, Kept treading, treading, till it seemed         That sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated,         A service like a drum Kept beating, beating, till I thought         My mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box,         And creak across my soul With those same boots of lead,         Then space began to toll As all the heavens were a bell,         And Being but an ear, And I and silence some strange race,         Wrecked, solitary, here. And then a plank in reason, broke,         And I dropped down and down-- And hit a world at every plunge,         And finished knowing--then-- -Emily Dickinson

oh. my. goodness.

"And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die, and walked four long miles..." (162)
-On the Road, Jack Kerouac

i can't believe i'm just reading this book for the first time; it's so mindblowingly incredible. the feminist in me will admit to there being some patriarchal ideas in it, but i'll accept that that's how things were then. anyway, the language is way too good to even get stuck on those things.

enlightening

i've been getting into helen vendler, an amazing poetry critic, who has a new book on emily dickinson out. i've yet to read the book but it's on my list of things to read.

this is a link to a great to interview on her by some guy named bruce cole. good stuff.

click here.

wow

so one of my friends shared his favorite poem with me the other day, and it's so incredible that i have to share it with you, too:

The Truth the Dead Know
by Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June.  I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape.  I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch.  In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely.  No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead?  They lie without shoes
in the stone boats.  They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.