Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

 

Alexandra Saper

 

Ocean, don’t be afraid.

The end of the road is so far ahead

it is already behind us.

Don’t worry. Your father is only your father

until one of you forgets. Like how the spine

won’t remember its wings

no matter how many times our knees

kiss the pavement. Ocean,

are you listening? The most beautiful part

of your body is wherever

your mother's shadow falls.

Here's the house with childhood

whittled down to a single red trip wire.

Don't worry. Just call it horizon

& you'll never reach it.

Here's today. Jump. I promise it's not

a lifeboat. Here's the man

whose arms are wide enough to gather

your leaving. & here the moment,

just after the lights go out, when you can still see

the faint torch between his legs.

How you use it again & again

to find your own hands.

You asked for a second chance

& are given a mouth to empty out of.

Don't be afraid, the gunfire

is only the sound of people

trying to live a little longer

& failing. Ocean. Ocean —

get up. The most beautiful part of your body

is where it's headed. & remember,

loneliness is still time spent

with the world. Here's

the room with everyone in it.

Your dead friends passing

through you like wind

through a wind chime. Here's a desk

with the gimp leg & a brick

to make it last. Yes, here's a room

so warm & blood-close,

I swear, you will wake —

& mistake these walls

for skin.

Ocean Vuong 

in, Night Sky With Exit Wounds 

Modern Love

 

Thinkstock

 And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up

For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;

A thing of soft misnomers, so divine

That silly youth doth think to make itself

Divine by loving, and so goes on

Yawning and doting a whole summer long,

Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,

And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;

Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,

And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.

Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,

If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,

It is no reason why such agonies

Should be more common than the growth of weeds.

Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl

The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say

That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.

 John Keats

Prayer for an Invitation

 

 I pray for you, world

to come and find me,

to see me and recognize me

and beckon me out,

to call me

even when I lose

the ability to call on

you who have searched

so long for me.

I pray to understand

the stranger inside me

who will emerge in the end

to take your gift.

I pray for the world

to find me

in its own wise way.

I pray to be wanted

and needed

by those I have

learned to love

and those

I must learn to love.

I pray to be wanted

and needed

by those I cannot

recognize

in my self-imposed

aloneness.

And

I pray to be wanted

and needed

by those

I wish to be wanted by.

But I acknowledge

the power of your beautiful

disguise, and I ask

for the patient heart

of all things

to understand

the uncertain, abiding

and intimate invitation

in my fear of leaving,

in my fear of arriving,

in my fear of taking your hand

to follow

that hidden, difficult

and forever beckoning way.

David Whyte

in, The Bell and the Blackbird 

Sharing the Grail

 

 When we arrive, and sooner

than we think, at that final goodbye

we seem to have anticipated so clearly.

When we arrive at the place

we have understood until now,

only through distance.

When we sit at the bedside

of the loved one as if sitting

by a well where we drink

from the source of all memory;

when we sip together from the grail

of that common memory

and we taste an essence

of love from that memory

that until now we could never fully say,

we are getting ready to be ready

to give the goodbye

we came all along to give.

And if our faith

and the vulnerability

of that faith,

and the wounded

nature of that faith

is felt finally and fully

at the side of that well,

we find ourselves

speaking completely and utterly

the love that we thought had

turned only to memory.

So that after the words

of goodbye are said

everything around us

in the quiet room

and everything spreading

out from the room

becomes like the well itself,

holding the same sacred water,

which is never just still water,

but a hidden flow always arriving,

a never-ending invitation

to drink from the depths,

and perhaps, most of all,

an invitation to somehow rest

in those depths: to rest in that love

that you spoke and they heard,

to wave confusion goodbye,

as you enter

the hallway of presence,

to accompany them

as you always

wanted to accompany them,

and then, to bring everyone

they loved with you,

those you have loved too

and even, those you tried to

and could not,

and then, to make room

inside you, for every single guest.

And above all to be generous now,

as you pass around the grail

of water, saying,

‘This will do.

For now and for eternity.’

David Whyte

in, Still Possible

The sea

 

 The pull is so strong we will not believe

the drawing tide is meant for us,

I mean the gift, the sea,

the place where all the rivers meet.

Easy to forget,

how the great receiving depth

untamed by what we need

needs only what will flow its way.

Easy to feel so far away

and the body so old

it might not even stand the touch.

But what would that be like

feeling the tide rise

out of the numbness inside

toward the place to which we go

washing over our worries of money,

the illusion of being ahead,

the grief of being behind,

our limbs young

rising from such a depth?

What would that be like

even in this century

driving toward work with the others,

moving down the roads

among the thousands swimming upstream,

as if growing toward arrival,

feeling the currents of the great desire,

carrying time toward tomorrow?

Tomorrow seen today, for itself,

the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,

unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface

of a great silence, the movement of a moment

left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,

safe in our unknowing, our very own,

our great tide, our great receiving, our

wordless, fiery, unspoken,

hardly remembered, gift of true longing.

David Whyte

In the Beginning

 

Freepik 

Sometimes simplicity rises

like a blossom of fire

from the white silk of your own skin.

You were there in the beginning

you heard the story, you heard the merciless

and tender words telling you where you had to go.

Exile is never easy and the journey

itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,

when you heard that voice, you had to go.

You couldn't sit by the fire, you couldn't live

so close to the live flame of that compassion

you had to go out in the world and make it your own

so you could come back with

that flame in your voice, saying listen...

this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love...

It is all here, it is all here.

David Whyte