Tuesday, March 24, 2009

So.

Sorry for the lapse in posting. The reason for the silence is that this past weekend Shelley and I ended our engagement and our relationship. So needless to say it's been a rough time. I had a post up here (for about ten minutes) explaining more of the situation, but it felt all too personal, a bit like having an open wound bleeding all over the interwebs. So I took it down. If anything, along with the hurt, this provides a huge dose of prespective: on how lucky we were to be together for as long as we were (almost three years, the majority of it with us living in different places), how much I care and will always care about Shelley, and ultimately how amazing our friends are and have always been. For anyone who's tried to call me in the past few days and has been sent to voicemail: keep trying, I'll get there eventually, I promise. It's just too close right now.


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Two poems taken yesterday, one by Poetry East and one by Tar River Poetry. Both magazines I respect a lot and wish I could get more excited for, but again, eventually....


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"Herman lay beneath the desk with the cracks running through his chest and his heart tight in the fist of someone invisible and huge: God? Answers seemed to float through the space around him. It was about love. It was about getting handed at conception a gift that sets you apart from everyone and you spend your whole life drifting through the margins of time, not understanding hours like everyone else seems to: glancing at wristwatches, checking timetables--you hardly know what it is people are trying to accomplish when they go through their days: morning, noon, evening, night. Wake up and sleep and wake up. This was about family, how blood supersedes death; it was about trying your hardest, it was about snow."

-from Anthony Doerr's About Grace
(Penguin, 2004)


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And a helpful poem, from Claudia Emerson's Pulitzer Prize winner "Late Wife" (LSU Press, 2005):

Corrective

For a long time there would be the small
resurfacings of things you had forgotten
to throw away, or ceased to see at all.
These returned her, not to you, but to me
the way I had seen a spider unknot itself
on a warm late afternoon to move
again in slow relief--however brief
the hour, embolic, corrective--before fall resumed.


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I think I'm going to shave my beard.

2 comments:

JayTee said...

Late Wife healed me too :)

I appreciate the inspiration here on your blog. Congrats on the poem acceptances!

Luke Johnson said...

As horrible and dark as something like this can be, it really does remind me how important poetry is in my life, as tourniquet and outlet.

Thanks for the congrats. Both are places I've been rejected before, so it's nice to make progress there.