her own small widgeon cries

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

From The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992

plenilune:

Some of her wistfulness must have shown on her face, despite her efforts, because Mal turned to her swiftly. “Is something wrong?”

“No! Nothing!” she insisted, perhaps a little too quickly. Mal’s eyebrows lifted faintly, disbelief palpable, and she found herself relenting. “Only,” and she looked away, determinedly casual, “you know, Dad and I go to a festival or two every year, and I’ve had to beg off, on account of —” She spread her hands and shrugged.

“Ah,” said Mal, and was silent for long enough that Lottie thought the subject had been peacefully dropped. Then the car pulled over neatly onto a secluded edge of road and stopped. Mal glanced at her, his expression its old kind of incomprehensible. “Out of the car, then,” he said lightly.

“…What?” Despite herself, her fingers curled around the latch.

“Out of the car, star o’ morning. We’ve driving quite long enough for one day, yes? And there’s a festival only down the road, think of that.”

She felt very still, trying to reach for a response, but her too-sensible mouth said automatically, “We haven’t got tickets.”

Mal gave her an exasperated look, pushed open his door, and unfolded himself from the car, crossing quickly round to open the door for her. “Are you coming?” He held out a hand. She stared into his face for several heartbeats, but his expression — carefully flat, inviting — did not change. She took his offered hand, snatched her satchel off the seat, and slid out.

“But we haven’t got tickets or anything,” she protested again as he led her down the road.

He grinned, lightning swift. “Leave that to me, sweet.”

“Mal!”

“Come now, Lottie.” He reached out with a flicker of one hand to tear a handful of leaves from a tree as they passed. “You’re risking your neck to save their world. Why should they begrudge you a ticket or two?”

“Our world,” she said softly, and he shot her a swift, startled sideways glance. He had forgotten again. His face closed off and became very distant.

She curled her fingers more tightly around his. “It’s all right,” she told him, though she thought it was a wonder she could speak around the tightness in her throat.

“Our world,” he said carefully, his voice unsteady and uncertain around the words.

She leaned her head against his shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said again, and felt him tremble at her touch.

plenilune:

His hand often sought hers these days. She was hesitant to deem it anything like a romantic gesture (don’t go there, my girl, she told herself, and tried to pretend, for both their sakes, that she had never leaned close to kiss him in a hallway), but he seemed to crave touch, contact, as much as possible, even the simplest twining together of fingers, or sitting shoulder to shoulder over the campfire of a night. Perhaps it grounded him a little, she thought, and she understood the feeling, so she clasped his hand tightly whenever it reached for hers, trying to reassure him that it was all right.

Sometimes, though, like now, he stroked the base of her thumb with his own, back and forth like the tide, and she could not tell if this ache in her chest was for him or for herself.

He was very weary, she thought, studying the lines of his face and the tension around his closed eyes; and, as though to confirm her suspicions, he gave a long sigh, a little ragged, and leaned against her, head and shoulder and thigh.

She went very still and hesitant. —If I move, she thought, and could barely breathe for fear of spooking him, for imagining the look on his face. She could not remember how one was meant to respond, however; her limbs ached with the stiffness of her uncertainty.

And Mal felt it, she knew, because he opened his eyes and began to pull away. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking swiftly at her and away again, and she closed her hand more firmly around his to stay him.

“Hey,” she said. Her voice sounded crackly, like radio static. “No. It’s okay. Listen, you know me. I’ll tell you if it’s not.”

His mouth curved infinitesimally, but his eyes still looked lost, and his hand in hers still felt terribly unsure. Anger welled up in and through her,  not at him, but — oh, at something, for making him look this way, frightened at his own corporeality, and she held his hand until he relaxed again. He looked so tired — she could not tell that she would have recognised him, the not-a-man who had come to her window and told her calmly and crisply that she was going to die. His hair fell artlessly over his forehead now, and his eyes — his eyes were different.

After a minute he leaned against her again, very carefully. “Is this all right?” he asked. She could feel his voice in her skin. “I am afraid you must tell me, sweet, for I do not know the rules.”

“Yeah,” she said, relaxing towards him in turn, trying to imbue her touch with that wordless sense of comfort that demanded nothing in return. Her voice did not quite tremble.

“I do not know the rules,” he said again, lifting their clasped hands to study them, “and I find that I am very loath to break them. It would — trouble me a great deal to upset you.”

She turned to look at him, why brimming in her eyes and unsayable against her mouth.

He looked away. There was a wry little smile twisting at his face. “Because, Lottie Talgarth,” he said lightly, his eyes very, very far away, “it would seem that you are all I have.”

And there was nothing, after all, she could say to that.

subtlecluster:

Just saying.

true!

[…] it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all my jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

♥

kiriamaya:

…but one of the most important lessons I’ve learned this year is that my time is now. If I keep waiting for “the right time” to do something, that time will never come. So I have to push forward, push through my doubts and do what I want/need to do.

More on this later, maybe.

this.

plenilune:

When she pushed open the door, Mal was pacing by the window; he looked tight and coiled and dangerously close to snapping. “Hey,” she said softly. “I’ve brought groceries.”

He flinched around, staring at her for a moment as if he couldn’t understand how a thing like groceries entered into the matter. Then he relaxed a little, but did not move away from the window. He only kept looking at her, hesitant, and it unsettled her so badly that she set groceries and keys on the counter and went to him. He balked slightly when she slipped her hands into his, and let out a breath, and his hands loosened, and he curled them around hers, still fraught with that weird new hesitance.

“I don’t know who I am, Lottie,” he said. He was not looking at her now, but at their hands, at his hands, examining them with a scholar’s detachment. “I don’t know — what I am, I don’t know how to be — ”

She found that she was laughing, a desperate, shaky sound. “Guess you’ve got human down perfectly then,” she said. “I think that’s sort of how it works.”

He shook his head, his mouth a thin rigid line. “I hardly needed — food, sleep — before. I did not need — emotions rattling in my head like pigeons.” Despite their linked hands he still stood removed, and she did not know if he seemed more or less human now than when she had first seen him, an elegant shadow on Marwick grounds with a tilted crescent smile. She closed the distance between them and lay her head against his chest, where the mark had been, where a scar still glinted beneath his shirt. He had held her like this before, and she tried, clumsily, to give a little of what he had given then back to him now.

“Is this all right?” she whispered. “Is this all right?”

He let go of her hands, and held her very tightly. The cadence of his breathing never changed, but after a moment he let his head rest against her shoulder.

Time seemed to have bent funny; she couldn’t have guessed how long they stood there, but it felt like a very long time before he pulled away and went to the window again. “I’m going to put the kettle on,” she said as brightly as she could manage. “If you’re going to commit to this human gig, you are going to need tea.”

She thought perhaps that he laughed.

i want this book to exist very badly. <3333333

visions-and-revisions:

plenilune:

Kyra and I were discussing recently how the times we most need help are the times we are least capable of asking for it.

I’m beginning to understand that not only is this my problem, but also that the times I most need help are the times I most actively turn it away, out of some twisted subconscious sense of pride or fear or shame.

So yeah, I made a reference to this in my emo-vomit post last night, but anyway here it is again, because this is…kind of one of the biggest symptoms of depression, at least in my experience. The more you need help, the less capable you are of asking for it; the more you need people around you, the more you’re going to withdraw; the more you need to take some steps and freaking do things, the more paralyzed you are. You know those things you’ve probably seen around the internet that’s like “the care and feeding of your introvert” or whatever? We need one of those for people with illnesses like depression so we can hand them out to people. Because seriously—the times when I’m really doing bad and really need help, I’m essentially incapable of saying so, and whether that’s because I assume I’m not worth anyone’s trouble or because depression’s just convinced me that strongly that it won’t help, I don’t know, but either way its true…which is why I need some way of telling people, look, you’re around me on a fairly regular basis, so here are the things you should watch out for, and here is what you should do.

Actually, it’s probably a lot more like—you live with a diabetic, say, and you start learning the signs of low blood sugar or whatever, and you help the person monitor that, and sometimes you have to say “hey, maybe you should check your blood sugar” or something because sometimes it gets to a point that a lack of awareness about it becomes itself a symptom. (I think. I haven’t actually been around anyone with diabetes much, aside from a boss who told us “if I seem especially cranky, ask me if I’ve checked my blood sugar!” and an uncle who’s lived with the disease since he was six but I can’t remember seeing really noticeable signs of it when I’ve visited.) That would be reasonable, right? Well, it’s the same kind of thing. I’m pretty sure there are fairly clear signs of it when I’m having an especially bad episode, and those are times when I need someone to ask me if I’m okay and not accept my shrug as an answer, to hug me just because, to tell me it’s going to be okay—not that I can do whatever it is that’s triggered this in the first place, because then what happens if I can’t?, but that it’s going to be okay anyway. Except, y’know…I can’t ask for those things. Definitely not when I actively need them. Partly because I just can’t, I don’t know, and partly because asking makes me feel like, one, I’m causing problems for other people, and two, nobody cared enough to notice independently in the first place. Because knowing that somebody cares enough to make a little effort is pretty important, apparently.

emphases mine.