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letters to a young poet…

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is — solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

                                                                                                                   — Rilke

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travellers…

In trains we need not choose our company
For all the logic of departure is
That recognition is suspended; we
Are islanded in unawareness, as
Our minds reach out to where we want to be.

But carried thus impersonally on,
We hardly see that person opposite
Who, if we only knew it, might be one
Who, far more than the other waiting at
Some distant place, knows our true destination.

— Philip Larkin —

http://filthybadllama.tumblr.com/post/67749106750/v-tom-b-x-filthybadllama-2013

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you can’t have it all…

But you can have the fig tree and
its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green.

You can have the touch of a single
eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one
a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat
and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that
says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when
it is August,
you can have it August and
abundantly so.

You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious,
like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the
bean pot over the red kidneys until
you realize foam’s twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center
between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like.

You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly
vestments, never admitting
pettiness, never stooping to bribe
the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something.
You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly.

You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together.

And you can be grateful for makeup,
the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva.

You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt,
the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa.

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,

but there is this.

– Barbara Ras –