“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.”
Sylvia Plath ~ The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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It’s Sunday Morning in Early November
by Philip Schultz
and there are a lot of leaves already.
I could rake and get a head start.
The boy’s summer toys need to be put
in the basement. I could clean it out
or fix the broken storm window.
When Eli gets home from Sunday school,
I could take him fishing. I don’t fish
but I could learn to. I could show him
how much fun it is. We don’t do as much
as we used to do. And my wife, there’s
so much I haven’t told her lately,
about how quickly my soul is aging,
how it feels like a basement I keep filling
with everything I’m tired of surviving.
I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can’t stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding…
Meanwhile, it’s such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.
“Again, it was spring, and the sky was so blue it could take your breath away. It was blue and she could see it, the color of his eyes, the color of veins beneath the skin, and of hope and of shirts pinned to a laundry line. [She] could make out nearly every shade and hue that had been missing all year.”
— Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
“Where do the words go When we have said them?”
— Margaret Atwood, from “The Small Cabin” (via joannastarks)
After Work
Coming up from the subway
into the cool Manhattan evening,
I feel rough hands on my heart —
women in the market yelling
over rows of tomatoes and peppers,
old men sitting on a stoop playing cards,
cabbies cursing each other with fists
while the music of church bells
sails over the street,
and the father, angry and tired,
after working all day,
embracing his little girl,
kissing her,
mi vida, mi corazón,
brushing the hair out of her eyes
so she can see.
Richard Jones
“My mind is filled with dreams of romantic meetings.”
— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West written c. February 1935