Mary Shelley’s handwritten poem “Absence”, on the death of her husband. The poem reads:
Ah! he is gone — and I alone;
How dark and dreary seems the time!
‘Tis Thus, when the glad sun is flown,
Night rushes o’er the Indian clime.
Is there no star to cheer this night
No soothing twilight for the breast?
Yes, Memory sheds her fairy light,
Pleasing as sunset’s golden west.
And hope of dawn — Oh! brighter far
Than clouds that in the orient burn;
More welcome than the morning star
Is the dear thought — he will return!
(Source: bookshavepores)
"Flaubert wrote in a letter to Louise Colet that he could never see a cradle without thinking of a grave."
— Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
"Her life – that was the only chance she had – the short season between two silences."
— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (via vwvw)
"When the pain blazed in his chest,
I want to believe he saw
only light as he melted into it.
You know where your father’s
life is now? my friend asked
and gave me without a pause
these words, It’s in you."
— Margaret Gibson, from “Elegy For My Father”
"
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
"— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"Death is a country of which nothing is known; no one has returned to describe it."
— Edouard Levé, Suicide (translated by Jan Steyn)
"As my father’s breathing fails,
the transparency of the windowpane
reminds me that outside there is the world.
I contemplate the brightly lit city,
the cars going by,
the teenager who meets
his girlfriend on a corner,
the passing bicyclist,
the athlete running across the park meadow.
Pondering the fragility of time
I contemplate the world,
the window again,
the reunited family,
and I am thinking that my father no longer speaks
or sees or hears,
that his dead senses
are beginning to perceive the theater of the world
through us,
that the only memory of his life
is what lies in the fragments of our memory:
an immense puzzle with missing pieces.
what must he be thinking about as he leaves himself behind?
My mother’s skin?
Newsreels from the Second World War?
First communion and the commandments?
The tumors spreading through his body?
My father, stammering,
says he has a stone in his throat,
it won’t fall,
he’s going to fall with it,
To where? In what place?"
— Manuel Ulacia, from “The Stone at the Bottom” (translated by Reginald Gibbons)
"We are against forgetting the dead. We are against recovery and healing. To ‘heal’ is to entomb, forever, the sickness. To that end we are bringing the dead back, not to haunt, but to remind us that we are always in the presence of their absence."
— Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers
"I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking
you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking."
— Natasha Trethewey, from “Myth”
“They were ‘dawn poems in blood,’ those lines stormed onto paper while the children slept; several of them were written through fevers, and the heat seared onto the pages, those old memorandum sheets marked Smith College, or the back of a manuscript marked The Calm. That had been a radio play, drafted by Ted Hughes in their flat in London early the previous year; now Sylvia Plath was in the Devon farmhouse they’d bought soon afterward, and Hughes was back in London, banished, their marriage over. It was late 1962, and in the space of eight weeks, it brought Plath forty of what would become her Ariel poems. They were, she wrote to the poet Ruth Fainlight, ‘free stuff I had locked in me for years,’ and now they were out. And they were astonishing. Only pain could have released them, only fury and outrage and jealousy and panic of the sort into which Plath’s daily universe had plunged. ‘I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart,’ she told Fainright, ‘but that is not so, the muse has come to live here, now Ted is gone.’”
Read more of Belinda McKeon on Sylvia Plath and her last letters before her suicide fifty years ago.
"And when we are alone
I tell you what lies
in each direction: This way
is death, and this way, after
a longer walk, is death,
and that way is death but you
won’t see it
until it is right
in front of you."
— Rita Mae Reese, from “Dear Reader”
"I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
I found it in the wash, the orange
shell I picked up on the beach
that last time. One of my girls—
the one named after you—
must have found it in my room
and wanted it. Clean calcareous
curve, a palm open to nothing,
reeking of sunshine
and your death. For years
I didn’t know what to do with it.
You would have liked
this story: how a child
slips grief into a careless pocket.
Breaks it to pieces. Lets it go."
— Harriet Brown, “Shell”
"Mother, I have been devastated all my life."
— Leigh Stein, from “Marooned”
"Kafka said, A book
must be an axe
for the frozen sea
inside us, which sounds
great, but what good
is an axe against
a frozen sea?
Perhaps this is why
he said, while dying,
Destroy everything."
— Matt Rasmussen, from “Elegy in X Parts” (via proustitute)
