Friends

What woman would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow — for all about the looking glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth.

His hour came with the shells,
with the notched iron splinters,
in the smoke and flame,
in the shaking and terror of the battlefield.

Word came to him in the bullet shower
that he should be a hero briskly,
and he was that while he lasted,
but it wasn't much time he got.

He kept his guns to the tanks,
bucking with tearing crashing screech,
until he himself got, about the stomach,
that biff that put him to the ground,
mouth down in sand and gravel,
without a chirp from his ugly high-pitched voice.

No cross or medal was put to his
chest or to his name or to his family;
there were not many of his troop alive,
and if there were their word would not be strong.
And at any rate, if a battle post stands,
many are knocked down because of him,
not expecting fame, not wanting a medal
or any froth from the mouth of the field of slaughter.

I saw a great warrior of England,
a poor manikin on whom no eye would rest;
no Alasdair of Glen Garry;
and he took a little weeping to my eyes.


( Thainig uair-sin lis na sligean )

Exoskeleton
Samn Stockwell

Being inebriated is not the same
as being an invertebrate,
although the maintenance of rigid lines
may obscure taxonomic categories.

I resemble a beetle
sloshing around inside
while my hard legs
neatly grapple chair and air.

I am strong but my days are slippery.
Gnawing at my jaw
is the never-vanished nostalgia
for a time when I didn't exist.

From DMQ Review.

 Pssst...Hi everyone! :o
You should take a look at my info and be my penpal! 
;D

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" Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad - such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remember that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was.There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."


Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.

Out of my mouth is coming, at some
distance from me, a thin gnawing sound
which you could confuse with prayer except that
praying is not constrained.

Or is it, Lord?
Maybe it's more like being strangled
than I once thought. Maybe it's
a gasp for air, prayer.
Did those men at Pentecost
want flames to shoot out of their heads?
Did they ask to be tossed
on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry,
eyeballs bulging?

As mine are, as mine are.
There is only one prayer; it is not
the knees in the clean nightgown
on the hooked rug.
I want this, I want that.
Oh far beyond.
Call it Please. Call it Mercy.
Call it Not yet, not yet,
as Heaven threatens to explode
inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

--Margaret Atwood, "Half-Hanged Mary"

What is your Mother/Son dance song?  This is one of the many tasks I gave my FH to do 8 months ago and now I realize that he just has no clue what song to dance to with his mother.  I appreciate any suggestions!

Does anyone know who wrote this?:

( under the cut )

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring stright ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

"Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is then a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing-room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty. The lovers crouch under the plane tree. The policeman stands sentinel at the corner. A man passes. There is then a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. The waves breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness;  I am also a girl, here in this room."

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Your hair contains an entire dream full of sails and masts. 

 

When I gnaw on your rebellious sea hair, it is as if I am eating memories, happiness espoused to water.

 

At the start of your tawny tentacles, follicles give way to the soft matter of your brain.  Your hair is the arm of your brain. 

 

I saw two foxes on my way through your hair yesterday. Something was in the air; the animals were stir-crazy.  Hundreds of geese were circling the pond. 

by Natalie Diaz

  

'Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.' 
-Wislawa Szymborska 


In the Kashmir Mountains,  
my brother shot many men,  
blew skulls from brown skins,  
dyed white desert sand crimson. 
'Were there flowers there?' I asked.  

This is what he told me: 
In a village, many men  
wrapped a woman in a sheet. 
She didn't struggle.  
Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.  
They laid her in the road 
and stoned her.  

The first man was her father.  
He threw two stones in a row.  
Her brother had filled his pockets  
with stones on the way there.  

The crowd was a hive  
of disturbed bees. The volley  
of stones against her body  
drowned out her moans. 

Blood burst through the sheet  
like a patch of violets,  
a hundred roses in bloom. 

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

- High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

I've been planning our wedding for the last two years, and it's so hard to believe that today marks our 6 months out point. I'm so excited. I made a one year post, and here is my updated 6 months post!!

( 6 Months out...OMG!! )

"She pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy she sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? We men say more, swear more, but indeed our shows are more than will; for still we prove much in our vows but little in our love."

I was looking for event planning services on Yelp -- not realizing how (potentially) useful it could be for wedding planning in general.

List of Awesome Event Venues in Boston, MA

[Greater] Boston [area] Bride & Wedding Survival Guide

I already have a venue but figured I'd pass this along. I didn't consider searching Yelp for venues or anything earlier, and now I kind of wish I had.

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

"Skinny-Dipping After Work at the Drive-In"
Debra Nystrom

No moon; the pickup's headlights stare
across the river from the bluff above, where
fields of sunflower heads turn away,
waiting for dawn. It's cold, yelps Amy,
and Brian calls where are you
but she screams no, get away, so
he and Tommy laugh, dive under for
her legs again. In March I skated over
this same place, past Farm Island, leaving
my track lines in the snow hard to imagine
now, and even then the water must
have moved like this beneath me, erasing
bodies' outlines, as if everything touched
everything all the time.