[from Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems"]

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through
our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies
our telephone calls. She knows - what can she know?
If in my own arrogance I claim to read
her eyes, I find there only my own animal thoughts:
that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort,
that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh
further than the dense brain could have foretold,
that the planetary nights are growing cold for those
on the same journey, who want to touch
one creature-traveler clear to the end;
that without tenderness, we are all in hell.

*
No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books  that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No prison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape - recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape - recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us, against us and within us.
*

Clogs – Last Song (ft. Matt Berninger of The National) [buy!]

Shaw – Mama Wolf (Devendra Banhart Cover)

Gontiti – Turban Shell Polka [buy!]

June Madrona – Through the Dark Wood [buy!]

*

The stunning illustrations of Tessar Lo:

I come home from you through the early light of Spring
flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe-store... I'm lugging my sack
of groceries, I dash for the elevator 
where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed
lets the door almost close on me. - For God sake hold it!
I croak at him - Hysterical, - he breathes my way.
I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,
make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone
singing Here Comes the Sun...I open the mail,
drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,
my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail,
lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
"My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep me constantly awake with the pain...
Do whatever you can to survive."
You know, I think men love wars...
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms. 

Related posts:

1. A little folkier than the original:
2. The Collective Family
3. …on love and mystery and ignorance and knowledge
4. 21 Love Songs: A Tribute to the Magnetic Fields
5. Emmy the Great, the Cute, the Talented, the Melancholic, the Sweet, the Magnificent

Tags: 2009, 2010, clogs, cover, devendra banhart, folk, gontiti, instrumental, Japan, june madrona, national, shaw, usa

This entry was posted on March 11, 2010 at 23:00 and is filed under Art, Books, Covers, Features, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.