the half-life of love is forever

Earlier this year The Hairpin linked to an incredibly absorbing interview with Junot Díaz in the Boston Review - read here, read it! And then get his latest collection of short stories, because they're everything a follow-up to The Brief Wondrous Life (or more pertinently, the raw and beautiful Drown)ought to be. Sometimes it's just such a relief to hear an intelligent, articulate man address issues of race and sexuality in a thoughtful way - consider it an antidote to the general world at large.

further reading

Mad Men loves a good literary allusion. ("Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" - "You should read the rest of that poem, you boob") 

LADY LAZARUS

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap, 
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

 - Sylvia Plath

How I Wanted You to Find Me

Last night when you didn’t turn up I snapped my timing belt and
spent an hour listening to passing cars make the ditch brush hiss,
watching the earthworms coming up onto the blacktop looking for
a better place to dry out and die. The tow truck driver talked
forever. His shift was over in forty minutes, and if he delayed he
wouldn’t have to go out to rescue anybody else. I texted you as he
dropped me and the dog at the Motorway Motel, but you didn’t
respond so I got out of the cab and tried not to make a big deal out
of things. I ran some water from the sink into the ice bucket and
went to sleep on top of the covers. I imagined there were dead
bodies in the boxspring. I imagined there were U.S. Marshalls in
the room next door. I imagined the next morning I would settle
down and live here with a truck driver who was only home on
holidays. This is how I wanted you to find me. This is how I
thought I could make you feel sorry for what you’d done.

- Sarah Carson

not bad for a dirty old man

FOR JANE: WITH ALL THE LOVE I HAD,

WHICH WAS NOT ENOUGH:-

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling beads

in black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

like that

or knew

my name

could never die

in the common verity of dying,

and I pick

up her lovely

dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak

to all the gods,

Jewish gods, Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread,

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

without a chance,

hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

I lean upon this,

I lean on all of this

and I know:

her dress upon my arm:

but

they will not

give her back to me.

Charles Bukowski

Actual Air

Imagining Defeat

She woke me up at dawn,
her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.

I sat up and looked out the window
at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees.

A bus ticket in her hand.

Then she brought something black up to her mouth,
a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.

I reached under the bed for my menthols
and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn't matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,
so far behind his wagon where it also doesn't matter.

except as a memory of rest or water.

Though to believe any of that, I thought,
you have to accept the premise

that she woke me up at all.

- David Berman

this is all we need: couple of smokes, a cup of coffee and good conversation

Sydney Writers' Festival for russh

baby, this one's for you

"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains."

I'm in love with the modern world

Having A Coke With You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

                                                          I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't oick the rider as carefully

as the horse

                 it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I'm telling you about it

    

      Frank O'Hara

There are an awful lot of Marini's Riders out there, but this one's at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and this poem comes into my head every time I see him. You don't get so many echoes of Frank in Sydney.

smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin

This is maybe my favourite bookcase. Second-hand pulps of wildly varying qualities, from the very good to the pretty much unreadable. But oh, the COVERS.