The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott

ELECTION

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.

I voted for my grandfather’s bones
that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles
under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies
South along the shores of two continents.

I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring
of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,
and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the local, the small, the brim
that does not spill over, the abolition of waste,
the luxury of enough.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,
a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted flower
for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse
for every colony of maggots.

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore
that cannot be erased, for it becomes the dust and rain,
and then a tree again.

I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers,
more recess in schools to cultivate play,
more leisure, tax free, more space between days.

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence
and the price of a thrush song.

I voted for ten million stars in your next inhalation.

—Alfred K. LaMotte, interfaith chaplain based in Olympia

Mary Oliver passed today...

WHEN DEATH COMES

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

-Mary Oliver

Burning the Old Year

“Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”

— William Faulkner, Light in August

Aphex Twin - avril 14th and cows(vine by Pierre Moulene) - Coub - GIFs with sound by Nansdy

How to Leave a Motel Room

“The act touches on mortality. It offers a small dose of the autobiographical sadness you feel after the moving van has gone and you take a last look around the place where you used to live. Travelers who must face this experience on a daily basis should brace for it with stoutness of heart and the comfort of ritual. First, shower. Then put on all the clothes you expect to wear that day. (Your coat may be left until right before departure.) Fill your pockets with everything you normally carry, except for the room key. Place that in a prominent spot on top of a few singles or a five, for the cleaning people or the demons of the room.

Pack your briefcase. Pack all other gear, and then your clothes. Take the suitcase out to the car first, leaving the room door ajar. (I flick the little metal-bar thing across the frame to keep it open.) Come back for your other gear. Leave your briefcase with the most important stuff last.

The slamming of car doors in the morning is the unwelcome rooster crow of the motel world, so I make it a point of honor to avoid slamming anything. Ideally, in good weather, I like to load up and leave without closing any car door more than twice. When the car is loaded, it’s time for a final look around the room. Check the closet—and always remember the little hook behind the bathroom door. (I’ve left a lot of pajamas on those hooks.) For the very last, I always get down and look under the bed. I have never once found any forgotten object there, but I always check just the same. On family trips when I was little, my father always used to do that last of all. He has been dead now for 20 years; I like to imprint on my mind the same under-motel-room-bed vista that he saw. At this moment of transience, it gives me a reassuring sense of eternity.”

— Ian Frazier, How to Do Everything, www.outsideonline.com

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

— Cheryl Strayed