Why did you leave me?

Why did you leave me?
We had grown tired together. Don’t you remember?
We’d grown tired together, were going through the motions.

Why did you leave me?
I don’t know, really. There was comfort in that tiredness.
There was love.

Why did you leave me?
You began to correct my embellishments in public.
You wouldn’t let me tell my stories.

Why did you leave me?
She is… I don’t wish to be
any more cruel than I’ve been

You son-of-a-bitch.
Why did you leave me?
I was already gone.
I just brought my body with me.

Why did you leave me?
You found out and I found I couldn’t give her up.
I was as shocked as you were.

Why didn’t you lie to me?
I was already lying to you. It was hard work.
All of it suddenly felt like hard work.

Why did you leave me?
I wanted to try monogamy again.
I wanted the freedom to be monogamous.

You fucker. You fucking son-of-a-bitch.

Why did you leave me?
I wanted you both. I thought I could be faithful
to each of you. You shouldn’t have made me choose.

Don’t you know what betrayal is?
I never thought of it as betrayal. More like one pleasure
of mine you should never have known.

You really are quite an awful man.
Why did you leave me?
It was time to leave.
The hour of leaving had come.

Why did you leave me?
It would take too long to explain. Please
don’t ask me to explain.

Will you not explain it to me?
No, I will not explain it to you. I’ll say anything
rather than explain it to you. Even things that sound true.

The odds

The odds of existence
of being precisely who you are
are slim

In fact, the odds are almost zero
but here you are
here you exist

so remember the next time
the odds are against you
that you’ve already beaten
the slimmest odds in the universe
before.

from

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations  —
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do — determined to save
the only life you could save.

 

from

more

Happy birthday, old fool

Dear T.,

1.
Dear self: today you turn thirty-one. Do you feel that? Do you feel your bones adjusting to the weight around your body, to the soul you carry? And have you found out what it meant, to want to be here?

2.
Another year older. I’m not very sure we’re wiser for it, but we definitely have made some choices, haven’t we. Yes we did. Perhaps that’s the thing—to continue making decisions that spur your life inch by inch towards some direction. It doesn’t even have to mean forward or backward, because didn’t we say we’ll try to live spherically, in many directions? Didn’t we say: moving without leaving, and didn’t we do exactly that this past year?

3.
Where are we going, self? Where will our feet take us, where will our mind lead us, where will our body agree to go? What are we willing to embrace this year? And do you feel that, the apprehension that murmurs in your chest like a fluttering bird, the uncertainty that makes you weak in the knees? And will you go anyway?

4.
Have you forgiven yourself for it, the fuck-ups, the constant undoing and redoing? Have you accepted that you will always lose something, and when that happens, the question to ask is: and what have I gained?

5.
Last year you said: Be good, forgive, exist. The year before that: I think maybe it’s time to be found. The year before that: You’re not alone. The year before that: It takes courage to live.

Do you hear it, all the echoes of your past selves trying to tell you that you are loved? The unknown yawns before us, and yes, maybe we’ll fuck it up. And maybe we won’t.

6.
Happy birthday, old fool.

 

after EncounterCzeslaw Milosz

 

Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. […]
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

From “Wild Geese”;
Dream Work (1986)

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

 

— Mary Oliver

穿过大半个中国去睡你

其实,睡你和被你睡是差不多的,无非是
两具肉体碰撞的力,无非是这力催开的花朵
无非是这花朵虚拟出的春天让我们误以为生命被重新打开
大半个中国,什么都在发生:火山在喷,河流在枯
一些不被关心的政治犯和流民
一路在枪口的麋鹿和丹顶鹤
我是穿过枪林弹雨去睡你
我是把无数的黑夜摁进一个黎明去睡你
我是无数个我奔跑成一个我去睡你
当然我也会被一些蝴蝶带入歧途
把一些赞美当成春天
把一个和横店类似的村庄当成故乡
而它们
都是我去睡你必不可少的理由
— 余秀华 (Yu Xiuhua)

Married to amazement

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

When death comes, Mary Oliver