Posts: 438
Threads: 374
Joined: Sep 2014
Winter Long
Love lit a candle
and all the rest of the world went dark.
Shadows laid on the wall all in one way
and the bed seemed like the only place to be.
Together or alone, bed is best,
to recover or rest or send electricity back and forth
between endless gaps;
sad to see the candle burn away
and all the wax soon gone
leaving an empty glass
that makes me think of drinking.
But everything makes me think of drinking.
A warmth that wells up in my chest
replacing the coldness of anxiety,
the hot freezing of a woman's touch,
everything melting and freezing at once,
bleeding in love, frozen in love,
lit, plastered, stoned,
burned out on love and frostbitten without it.
Nothing, nothing can be done about or without it.
Posts: 695
Threads: 139
Joined: Jun 2015
The full honesty of her body feels better than an empty bottle lying beside me.
Posts: 5,057
Threads: 1,075
Joined: Dec 2009
some great lines though i'd like to have seen something more definitive regarding the woman. that said, it has a subtlety that slaps you in the face. the questions it begs for me is this; Is it better to have loved and lost or is it better to get drunk and not know one way or the other?
Posts: 1,139
Threads: 466
Joined: Nov 2013
12-21-2018, 05:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-21-2018, 05:36 PM by RiverNotch.)
for some reason this reminds me of russian poetry. not just the cold dynamic, but the way the speaker treats his love. i'm not very well read, so it might just be the russian poetry *i've* read compared to all the other poetry *i've* read, but russian love poetry has a certain sensibility to it that i can't quite describe, where the love is sort of abstracted into gorgeous imagery, yet somehow the abstraction still makes him or her the very specific him or her that is loved, and at the same time there's a sly sense of the ironic about the whole thing. lovely, lovely work.
ps or it could just be the way all the examples of russian poetry i've read are translated.
Posts: 438
Threads: 374
Joined: Sep 2014
I find bridges in the seasons. I can share the air, and truly feel, as if through a portal, a Russian or Swedish or Danish landscape when my own resembles it, especially covered by snow or night. I live as a participate in a folktale. . . . But to get to the poem: And this is just in general: Because there isn't much to say about the poem itself. Which love, or love in general. I could explode in all the directions from which this poem came, but it's all in there anyway. . . . But there's always tension that forces me to write. I know two women, one I write wild, exploding poems about, about the other I write poems that are warm and concise. Because that's how they make me feel. But they both leave me shattered and scattering and spreading like a forest fire. . . . Luckily, I'm apparently impossible to be around for long periods of time, and not made of longterm relationship material, so there are these long spaces, long periods of poetry-producing tension and explosions.
