Julie G > Recent Status Updates

My heart was using something thicker than blood and it was clogging up my brain like dying.

Soaking in warm water seemed to wash something away; not guilt because I never felt guilty, but the sort of old contacts with things and people. You skinned them off and left them in the water. When you stepped out you were being born again.

Dying of Thirst

leaves lose their weakened grip
and slip
yellow to the ground.

Pushing up against guard rails and old cedar fence rows,
sunflowers stand in tribute along the blacktop,
inconsolable mourners along an endless memorial route.
Tires hum in harmony.
Friend, pause and look this way.

a wall of bad dreams
separates me from the dead

the streets are empty and the shadows
predict
bitter hearts are out searching for old thorns

the song
I will never sing
has fallen asleep on my lips
the song I will never sing

Try being grateful when you're expected to be grateful; it mops you up.

in my aging soul
a small silver pulse echoes

I hold the No he gave me
in the palm of my hand
like a nearly white
lemon made of wax

Let us remember that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend. It can be so, sometimes!

if the alphabet died
everything would die
words are wings

were you once arrows
now fallen from the blue?

what terrible warriors shot you?
did they come from the stars?

your music contains the souls of birds
your perfect passion comes
from the eyes of God

trees!

will the warriors ever know?
your rough roots have found
my heart in the earth

(trees, 1919)

"We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome."

"Talking helps people see eye to eye."

on this dark blue path
you fill all my universe
you fit all my heart

the stars blind our eyes
and our eyelids blink open
again and again

He caught the glint of clear grey eyes; and then he shivered, for it came suddenly to him that it was the face of one without hope who goes in search of death.

the hour rings out in this jungle
the silence is filled with bubbles

a golden pendulum back and forth
swings my face through the air

the hour chimes throughout the jungle
in the pockets of people

people walking back and forth
like groups of insects

I listened instead to my heart sounding
like my grandmother's gilded clock

Love was like the bite of a horsefly that no one could see but everyone pursued.

From "For years I lived"

Imagine
the absurdity of taking a chisel
to water, or trying
to sculpt it with your hands.
This is what a life is: water.
The work is letting it fill
the spaces it runs to; letting it
flow around or through the rest. . .

A life does
what water does: It goes.

Who to hand these things to--these thoughts that accumulate each day like stones in my pockets. Whose palm to drop them into.

From "Study"

I'm beginning to suspect this life
is a study for another one,

research for a larger project
still taking shape.

Extravagant and contrary in all things, he thought, her loyalty, her griefs,.

The energy worker tells me
I'm not inside my body.
"Then where am I?"
She gestures to the left of me:
"You're here."

I've been crayoned outside
the lines, I think. Or picture
a body casting a shadow:
that's the me of me,
the shadow my body
throws down beside me.

"I was beside myself,"
we say when stunned,
when shock electrifies
until our hair's on end,
our eyes wide & unseeing,
& we're hovering. . .

From "Pastoral"

Dry leaves are beginning
to startle the pavement.
One scuffs along,
curled like a hand
cramped around something
for so long, it can't open.

From "A Suit or a Suitcase"

You ask what I'll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.

But you want one specific thing,
so here--I'll miss my body. I'll miss

its companionship, how it's traveled
with me, never leaving me--

Old Man Daniel was sucking his old clay pipe and talking, talking. Nobody seemed to listen; the old man didn't seem to care. He was trying to talk his grief and anxiety out of himself.

Shadow came down on the City.

Though she understood Ross's mood she did not know how to manage it. He was beyond her.