“She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.” – Graham Greene, ‘The Living Room” What a difference a smile makes. How it shifts landscapes and ruins the topography of the heart. And how it does and undoes the shoelaces of our reserve, our restraint, and…
Tag: postcards
Postcards from Istanbul /7
“You are a colander, sometimes losing things. Sometimes what keeps you alive is a mystery.” – Aracelis Girmay Another night, another room, in another hotel in a city so many thousands of miles away. In my life so often it occurs to me that the more I love, the further the object of my…
Postcards from Istanbul /5
“Or give me back one shred from our hundreds of days – a forgotten word, or look – that I might lie here counting them, like sheep, waiting out the dark.” – Greg Johnson, Insomnia Dear, sweet one. Gratitude today for the precious few moments I received to see you. Your face that I…
Postcards from Istanbul /4
“When I met you, you were both for me: the sensual and the spiritual. The two can never separate…” – Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann Paris, 31 Oct 1957 Precious, precious one. The day closes on me again. I am left wondering just how little life is and how fleeting our time on earth….
Postcards from Istanbul /2
“To write words I put a symbol in place of an absent sound. To write the words ‘I love you’ requires a further, analogous replacement, one that is much more painful in its implication. Your absence from the syntax of my life is not a fact to be changed by written words.” – Anne Carson…
Postcards from Istanbul /1
“What impels me to write you all the time? Before I can even turn around to look, from the unique destination, unique you understand me, unnameable and invisible, that bears your name and has no other face than your own, before I can even turn around for a question, at every moment the order to…
between desire and disaster 