Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massiveinsect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the endof a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurtin your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kindsof women–those you write poems aboutand those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought youa bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addictionlyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I workedwithin the confines of my character, castas the bad boy in your life, the Magellanof your dark side. We don’t have a past so muchas a bunch of electricity and liquor, powernever put to good use. What we had togethermakes it sound like a virus, as if we caughtone another like colds, and desire was merelya symptom that could be treated with soupand lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immuneto your waterfall scent, still haven’t developedantibodies for your smile. I don’t know how longregret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would taketo wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the lightof a candle being blown out travels fasterthan the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffinginto each other’s ears–as if the brain was a trickbirthday candle–didn’t make the silenceany easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were writtenin disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of youso hard one of your legs would pop outof my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d pressyour face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen yearsto reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skiddingoff the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyridingover flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolateto be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphyof each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraphfrom the volumes of what couldn’t be said. Jeffrey Mcdaniel
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
-
Wallace Stevens
To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above.
-
Fernando Pessoa
The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.
-
Jane Kenyon
Truth is a friendthat asks for loyaltyand acceptancethen it enters our heartsdissolving the boundariesfreeing us from lonliness
-
Nirmala
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.
-
Kahlil Gibran
More Quotes By Jeffrey Mcdaniel
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
The Quiet WorldIn an effort to get people to lookinto each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decidedto allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear...
There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.
If you heard your lover scream in the next roomand you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood. You wouldn't rush to the pinkie and say, 'Darling, are you OK? 'No, you'd wrap your arms around his...
The Everlasting Staircase"Jeffrey McDanielWhen the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live, my first thought was: can't she postpone her exitfrom this planet for a week? I've got places to do, people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs, said disappear or reappear more...
