Enough just to know that it was there.

larissa marie swindle.
Originally uploaded by less like math

Because I don't have much to say that will be of any interest, because I am permanently exhausted in every sense, because my weekend was long in the bad way, because I have been reading through old emails and livejournal posts and rediscovering things i liked a lot of years ago, because i fell asleep by ten o'clock last night and still want more sleep, because i have to think about how to do that right thing and i don't want to think about that, and because reading is fun(damental), i have a couple things to share with you today. They're old things but they're good things. If you think of my gmail account as a keepsake box, which i do, then these things are some of the things i know I'll keep forever.

Imagining Defeat
David Berman

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.


*That was the first David Berman poem I ever read. It still kills me every time I read it. Along about the middle, the exact point would be the phrase "but always as a tree way up ahead", i get a knot of something in my stomach. It gets bigger and bigger and then I'm glad when the poem is over....and then I read it again.

And then there is this -


The Sixth Burough
Jonathan Safran Foer

excerpt
"It's getting almost impossible to hear you," said the young girl from her bedroom in Manhattan, as she squinted through a pair of her father's binoculars, trying to find her friend's window.

"I'll holler if I have to," said her friend from his bedroom in the Sixth Borough, aiming last birthday's telescope at her apartment.

The string between them grew incredibly long, so long it had to be extended with many other strings tied together: the wind of his yo-yo, the pull from her talking doll, the twine that had fastened his father's diary, the waxy string that had kept her grandmother's pearls around her neck and off the floor, the thread that had separated his great-uncle's childhood quilt from a pile of rags. Contained within everything they shared with one another were the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, and the quilt. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string.

The boy asked the girl to say "I love you" into her can, giving her no further explanation.

And she didn't ask for any, or say, "That's silly" or "We're too young for love" or even suggest that she was saying "I love you" because he asked her to. Her words traveled the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, the quilt, the clothesline, the birthday present, the harp, the tea bag, the table lamp, the tennis racket, the hem of the skirt he one day should have pulled from her body . The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love from him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he could never open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know that it was there.

*If you want to read the whole thing you can find it Right Here. This is the first thing I remember reading by Jonathan Safran Foer. Summer emailed it to me at a time when I was really sad and it was the most comforting thing to read. Actually, looking back I think I had probably already read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but since it's my history I prefer to believe that I read The Sixth Burough first.

And so that we have balance, another poem -

Refusing the Necessary
Stephen Dobyns

becoming the river, we are the river.
unable to accept it, we are drowning.
your long hair floats on the surface-
sentences in a book i havent read.
you ask for help. i can do nothing for you.
the river passes between high banks,
thee- and fog-bound. it passes over the tops
of intricate buildings. we can see the people,
but not their faces. they are shouting.
we can't make out their words. fragments
of words float around us. we resemble
those fragments. the language is foreign.
we have waited too long for our decisions.
we have waited too long for the last boats.
we are afraid to surface or seek the bottom.
insubstantial, we are not enough to cling to.
foghorns continue their warnings:
the house is burning, the king is sick.
without daylight, we have forgotten the sun,
accepted a darker place. between the surface
and bottom, we may hang forever.

*I don't really have much to say about this one. I mean, what could you really even say.


So, there are a lot of things for you to read today. And if that's still not enough, there's always McSweeney's Lists. They never get old. Because, ya know, there are always new ones.