M. Longley, Terezin

No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.

Misery and Splendor

Robert Hass, Misery and Splendor

Summoned by conscious recollection, she
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,
the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
embracing. He holds her as tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.
Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.
They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it. They are tender
with each other, afraid
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.
They feel themselves at the center of a powerful
and baffled will. They feel
they are an almost animal,
washed up on the shore of a world---
or huddled against the gate of a garden---
to which they can't admit they can never be admitted.

Now I have a craving for Italian food

A. R. Ammons, Recovery

All afternoon
the tree shadows, accelerating,
lengthened
till
sunset
shot them black into infinity:
next morning
darkness
returned from the other
infinity and the
shadows caught ground
and through the morning, slowing,
hardened into noon.

Romantic Love Poems

In The Asylum Dance, his work of singular liminal poetry, John Burnside lifts then quickly drops an element he all-but-calls the “weekender’s idea,” the outsider’s inaccurate map of the quayside or the skewed romance of tourist postcards that raises disdain, disgust & pity (equal measures) in locals looking on. The weekender’s idea, for Burnside, you happily project away from yourself, the local, onto the passing unsuspecting. It’s use is as much a tool of judgement (by locals of weekenders) than as one of actually adjudging perception; it’s as much a perceived perception. The weekender’s idea, in large, depends upon a cached cynicism of the actual real felt insiders’ existence of the place that the other is only able to glimpse from his (lack of) perspective and ultimately denies. That denial bringing the rise (nursed grudges, hurt, grumbles into late evening malts, glances, evil). This is Burnside at his most lovingly poetic, marshalling the stalled perceptions of the outsider (“S E R E N I T Y” emblazoned foot-high on his boat) against his authentic town-dwellers; as such a doggedly poetic image it hardly presents as a concept that’s useful as part of an “efficient interpretative strategy”.

II

When a relationship ends there comes a point when you're able to see through to the person behind the scrim of care and concession you erected. Love snuck over you and away and now you can hear her boring, you can feel your bones' creaky anxiety in her company, or choke on how simultaneously smug and aggressively humble she can be, and recoil in hurt as she drinks herself drunk then looks all dopey, hunched, horrific, the opposite of beauty, fiddling with her "guilty" cigarette, as if her lips are scared of it, the most inelegant of smokers. A mind turns in agony from thoughts it shouldn't think. Stories once hidden behind "our" back now creep out from behind hers, friends' unknown viciousness ribbons out from somewhere behind the dark. And each time you see her rehearsed robotism, her cold Kohl eyes, her cold SHARK eyes, you scream in a vocabulary of arson "I love you still but FUCK you, you FUCKING fuck!"

III

Paris was the most cramped hell when I visited last year. Lost in its locked streets, almost without language and hostage to a steadily whittling wallet, the most everyday of tasks became an ordeal akin to completely renegotiating the terms of my existence. The Metro, restaraunts, ‘do you have this in my size?’, basic human interactions - all permanents of routine at home in Scotland where the understood etiquettes of dialect, intonation, fashion &c. provide sure tickets to short-hand speed-read acceptance - all so many nightmares in that suffocating Paris. I began to deteriorate. Once-informed inner monologue, with all its tics of prejudice and aesthetic, its leanings and overbearing doubts, its ‘seen’ and ‘had’, ‘been’ and ‘went’ - all of it, it all became outer dialogue, everything negotiable and negotiating. The hard fast lines of my identity (the heuristic by which we all live lives) were blurring and fraying.