this has been stuck in my head since two thousand four.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Rules of Sleep

In the sludge drawer of animals in arms,
Where the legs entwine to keep the body warm
Against the winter night, some cold seeps through-
It is the future: say, a square of stars
In the windowpane, suggesting the abstract
And large, or a sudden shift in position
That lets one body know the other's free to move
An inch away, and then a thousand miles,
And, after that, even intimacy
Is only another form of separation.


-Howard Moss from his book Rules of Sleep

letters and then letters

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead."
-Oscar Wilde

"A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life."
-Woolf

"I always imagined Paradise will be a kind of library."
-Jorge Luis Borges

"All I care about is distances traversed, miles an hour, the geography of despair and coffee and nonsense and beauty, of punk rock and luggage and grime and sugar and young love."
-Al Burian

"One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."
-Nietzsche

"Every weekend is a vacation."
-sign on Colonial

"Asimov was a claustrophile; he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In the first volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading."