For You Today

For You Today

Jessica Greenbaum

Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper,

but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily

herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come: thwash,

the next day another, an example of everything that gets done

in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow

that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case,

the strange October weather warming them. There were the

conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was

pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my

ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged

to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive

at the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring out

against each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of

another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.

Fun fact: I ate grasshoppers this weekend.

Virginia Woolf in Mexico

“Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.” 

- Virginia Woolf from “Montaigne”.

Anecdote of the day: I've been desperate for good coffee every morning, and I found a place a couple days ago that's pretty good... I made a fool out of myself on Tuesday when I didn't understand the word for cinnamon, and then gave them the wrong change. Today, I went to the same place, confident that I would do it right this time - which I did, but as soon as they gave me my coffee, I spilled it all over everything. So to the people at La Charamusca Cafe, I will always be a clumsy, stupid American. There's no escaping it.

somewhere i have never traveled

Tonight, I'll be flying to Queretaro, Mexico, where I'll be living for the next two months. Yesterday, I moved to a new apartment in downtown Bellingham.
Currently, my life is......
Full.
Full of "blunders and absurdities", joy, stress, poetry, beauty, insanity, adventure, and love.
So I leave you with this poem:

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands