Love…

LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.

– Emily Dickinson

Count Up the Almonds

by Paul Celan

Count up the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you waking,
count me in too:

I sought your eye when you looked out and no one saw you,
I spun that secret thread
where the dew you mused on
slid down to pitchers
tended by a word that reached no one’s heart.

On Death, Without Exaggeration

Wislawa Szymborska (translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

It can’t take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

Elegy for a Suicide

By John Poch

She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact:

there’s only so much you can do with friction

and an intentional hand before the hand burns.

The sound that scissors make in a child’s hand

while crunching construction paper aches when

she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style,

that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk.

Elegy on Toy Piano

By Dean Young

You don’t need a pony
to connect you to the unseeable
or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all important ways
one is on one’s own.

For nothing now can ever come to any good

The semester is wrapping up at warp speed. I passed my comps exams with flying colors (answering a question about the trajectory of American commemorative culture, and one about the history of art history, from Kantian aesthetics to the idea of visual culture studies.) I graded all my students’ papers and returned them, and I presented in my Monstrous and Grotesque class on Wednesday. I still have an infinite amount of work to do, but there is just a little bit more breathing room now. That breathing room must have been palpable, for my very best friend in the entire world waited till I had the time, and then told me she was ready to go.