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Past Lives (2023)
dir. Celine Song
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Telescope
by Louise Glück
There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.
You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.
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("Anti-Love Poem" -- Grace Paley)
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Chelsea Dingman; Letter from the Gulf Coast
I could be someone who twists
the truth. I knew what I was asking
when I said Stay here with me. The walls
waved in your image, a storm
on the horizon, growing. Hurricanes
all have their own names & we earned ours, secret
triumphs locked away in other apartments, other
cities. It wasn't having a house to tend that kept us
together. We weren't supposed to stay anywhere
long. We paint different walls the same
stark white, but they dim & darken
to a dingy beige as we stand waiting
to see what skyline comes next.
Who doesn't wake & want
to be somewhere different? Different
birds at the door. I still want your hands
on my hips. On my collarbones, arcing
toward you. A space we're meant to
dust & darken. To wake in a different city, longing
for home. Where home is the curve of our hands
on the doorknobs. Where we know ourselves
by thunder & the smell of thick
rains. By the way rain tastes as it's meant to
taste. Our mouths, upturned. Open.
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In what I think is a dream,
I look at some manifestation of the past
& say, I know you’re not real. Someone has to.
And as most dream-things do, the past
shape-shifts, reconstitutes itself with new
eyes & a new haircut—the past
made over—& then I forget its name.
I forget what I’m doing with the past.
What is that joke about the river?
It’s not really a joke, no more than past
is really past—the one about water never
being the same water. As it flows past,
the river’s current—now that’s a joke—
is always flowing now, now, now. Past
seven, when I wake from what I think
is a dream—a dream where I tell the past
the truth about itself—it is the present
as it always is. There is no past.
Maggie Smith, “Joke”, Goldenrod
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Poet James Schuyler to painter John Button (Spring 1956)
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Natalie Wee; After the Atlanta Spa Shootings, We Sat in a Field
sprawled over grass
made an endless planet
by nightfall. Our faces
lifted to the season’s end
were a cloister of moons.
I asked for a legend
about what glows
so we could fill our bellies
with something death
hasn’t yet touched.
To be moved
by what’s untouchable
means we are conduits for more
than flesh, fallibility.
To ready ourselves
for gentleness, then,
is to make a landscape
of desire, translate farewell
into the sum of all distances
measured by light.
Nothing’s as visceral
as the hard-won kiss
where we press our lips
to ghosts & inhale
until we are vessels for life
still unlived.
Genealogy creates room.
I only have my shadow
to bear—& even that is theory
in another throat.
We are both endangered
species, you & I,
but the weight
of your heart’s chambers
upon my breast
was a dream
no prayer could give us.
If there’s anything
that still surprises me
it’s the fact joy too has weight.
That at the end of all hurts
there lies another to climb out of
while wearing your own face.
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EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)
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The phrase ‘you saw nothing in Hiroshima’ can be read on a number of interconnected levels, all of which are central to an understanding of the film. Firstly, as a tourist, the woman, like the majority of the viewers of the film, witnesses the site (and sight) of the city long after the atomic bombing has taken place. She does not ‘see’ Hiroshima as an event, only its aftermath. Secondly, she has not seen ‘Hiroshima’ because the event has been mediated through photographs, films and archiving. Filmic reconstructions that are so realistic ‘that the tourists cry,’ are dangerous, the film implies, because they give the tourists the impression that they have witnessed something of what actually happened when all that they have seen is the representation that stands in place of the real. Thirdly, the word ‘nothing’ is a negation. The footage of Hiroshima does not allow the atomic bomb survivors to enter the frame for more than a few seconds; they turn away from the gaze of the camera resisting characterisation. The very presence of the incomplete images points to the absence of all that cannot be incorporated of the atomic bomb experience, to all that exceeds the representational frame. This opening scene can be understood as a template for the film as a whole. The lovers’ disagreement over the possibility of knowing and understanding Hiroshima extends to the film’s broader concern as to whether a traumatic past can be represented or communicated to another.
— Sarah French, From History to Memory: Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour (2008)
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Before, you were asking about ‘our daughter’. It’s crazy. But… it really got me thinking… what if… you had come with me all those years ago.
You want to know what would have happened? ‘What if?’ We’d wake up everyday… in a tiny apartment… over a failing laundromat.
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022) dir. Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
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José Olivarez; Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains
i love you dad, i say to the cat.
i love you dad, i say to the sky.
i love you dad, i say to the mirror.
it rains, & my mom's plants
open their mouths. my dad stays
on the couch. maybe the couch opened
its mouth & started eating my dad.
i love you dad, i say to the couch,
its tongue working my dad like a puppet.
i hear the rain fall & think the city is drinking.
or making itself clean. i am here
with my dad & the TV & the TV drones
on & on, so i'm not sure i hear it--
my dad grunting and nodding,
not the mushy stuff i was expecting,
neither of us cry, no hug or kiss.
a grunt & a nod. i love* you dad,
i say to my dad. we sit together
and watch TV. outside it rains. my dad
turns the volume up. the city is drunk.
the city is singing badly in the shower.
i killed a plant once because i gave
it too much water. lord, i worry
that love is violence. my dad is silent
& our relationship is not new or clean.
i killed a plant once because i didn't give
it enough water. my dad & i watch TV
on a rainy day. we rinse our mouths
with this water.
*America loves me most when i strum a Spanish song. mi boca guitarrón. when i say me estoy muriendo, they say that's my jam.
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“After Language” by Chaia Heller, from My Lover Is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems edited by Lesléa Newman (1996).
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Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
by Adrienne Rich
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon’s eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
now diagram the sentence
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Ocean Vuong; Tell Me Something Good
You are standing in the minefield again.
Someone who is dead now
told you it is where you will learn
to dance. Snow on your lips like a salted
cut, you leap between your deaths, black as god’s
periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds
in the wind. You are something made. Then made
to survive, which means you are somebody’s
son. Which means if you open your eyes, you’ll be back
in that house, beneath a blanket printed with yellow sailboats.
Your mother’s boyfriend, his bald head ringed with red
hair, like a planet on fire, kneeling
by your bed again. Air of whiskey & crushed
Oreos. Snow falling through the window: ash returned
from a failed fable. His spilled-ink hand
on your chest. & you keep dancing inside the minefield—
motionless. The curtains fluttering. Honeyed light
beneath the door. His breath. His wet blue face: earth
spinning in no one’s orbit. & you want someone to say Hey…Hey
I think your dancing is gorgeous. A little waltz to die for,
darling. You want someone to say all this
is long ago. That one night, very soon, you’ll pack a bag
with your favorite paperback & your mother’s .45,
that the surest shelter was always the thoughts
above your head. That it’s fair—it has to be—
how our hands hurt us, then give us
the world. How you can love the world
until there’s nothing left to love
but yourself. Then you can stop.
Then you can walk away—back into the fog
-walled minefield, where the vein in your neck adores you
to zero. You can walk away. You can be nothing
& still breathing. Believe me.
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hello! could you post the full diane wakoski poem, my little heart pops out like springs?
here you go! it’s from her book smudging (1972)
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OPPOSITE SIDES OF WANTING TO BE GOOD
Japanese Breakfast, Slide Tackle // Mary Oliver, Wild Geese // Patti Smith, Woolgathering // Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood // Saul Bellow, Herzog // Mitski, I Will // Florence Welch, Useless Magic // Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star // Mary Oliver, Dogfish // John Steinbeck, East of Eden.
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