無我の境地: LOUISE GLÜCK TINHATTERYの極み

[rhodochrosite]

i can and will make everything about tennis (with apologies to ms gluck)... gonna start with rikkai and maybe add on my highranker faves later... i'm hardmoding this for literally no reason by only pulling quotes from averno

YUKIMURA SEIICHI: landscape

Winter emptied the trees, filled them again with snow.

Because I couldn’t feel, snow fell, the lake froze over.

Because I was afraid, I didn’t move;

my breath was white, a description of silence.

//

It is like losing a year of your life.

To what would you lose a year of your life?

 

Afterward, you go back to the old place —

all that remains is char: blackness and emptiness.
 

You think: how could I live here?

 

But it was different then,

even last summer. The earth behaved
 

as though nothing could go wrong with it.
 

One match was all it took.

But at the right time — it had to be the right time.
 

The field was parched, dry —

the deadness in place already

so to speak.

SANADA GENICHIROU: thrush

Someone like me doesn’t escape. I think you sleep awhile,

then you descend into the terror of the next life

except
 

the soul is in some different form,

more or less conscious than it was before,

more or less covetous. 

 

After many lives, maybe something changes.

I think in the end what you want

you’ll be able to see– 

 
 

YANAGI RENJI: blue rotunda

I want

my heart back

I want to feel everything again —
//

I want she said

a theory that explains

everything
//

I want it

to be my fault

she said

so I can fix it —
 

KIRIHARA AKAYA: october

Summer after summer has ended,

balm after violence:

it does me no good

to be good to me now;

violence has changed me.
//

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:

the ideal burns in you like a fever.

Or not like a fever, like a second heart.
//

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;

it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.
 

How privileged you are, to be passionately

clinging to what you love;

the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

 

NIOU MASAHARU: prism

15.

Deceit. Lies. Embellishments we call

hypotheses–

 

There were too many roads, to many versions.

There were too many roads, not one path–
 

And at the end?

16.

List the implications of “crossroads.” 

 

Answer: a story that will have a moral.
 

Give a counter-example: 

 

17.

The self ended and the world began.

They were of equal size,

commensurate,

one mirrored the other.
//

We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,

who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,

the stranger.

YAGYUU HIROSHI: fugue

2.

Then my soul appeared.

Who are you, I said.

And my soul said,

I am your soul, the winsome stranger.

//

14.

And it said, you must trust me.

//

Then my soul appeared. It said

just as no one can see me, no one

can see the blood.

//

Then it said

I can save you. Meaning

this is a test.

 

MARUI BUNTA: crater lake

Like a foot soldier wanting

to serve a great warrior, the soul

wanted to side with the body.
 

It turned against the dark,

against the forms of death

it recognized.
 

Where does the voice come from

that says suppose the war

is evil, that says
 

suppose the body did this to us,

made us afraid of love–

JACKAL KUWAHARA: averno

He remembers the day the field burned,

not, he thinks, by accident.

Something deep within him said: I can live with this,

I can fight it after awhile.

 

The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased,

when he understood that the earth

didn’t know how to mourn, that it would change instead.

And then go on existing without him.