Quotes

[Evil Willow]
Evil Willow is the Quote Queen.

The Garden

En robe de parade.
--Samain

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding,
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

--Ezra Pound
[1916]

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blinfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones.

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

--Seamus Heaney

From Inheritance by Indira Ganesan:

But like ants who keep working no matter what, we try to contol our own lives, tunnel paths to ideals and wants, unaware that an accidental footstep will knock everything assunder. I was old enough to get by on instinct, I thought. But listening to my mother changed my life. I think it was that night I learned not to take anything for granted, that no future was ever secure.
It's about how you survive after things are taken from you. It is about the prospect of losing what you love and the effort it takes to continue. Life is not romantic. Romance is hard to come by. Romance does not always work.

Hearts have no sense; we love what we love.

I have not yet found my true love, and sometimes doubt that I will. I can imagine living in a cabin in the wilderness with two large dogs for companions. I do not long to share my life with someone else anymore. Love has failed so many people I know. The poet writes of this often. She says love is like a golden blossom that sprouts at the footfall of Buddha, sprung from joy and adortion. But the beloved walks away witout a glance. It seems the moment we meet someone, we are preparing to depart from him, just as our every breath brings us closer to death.

Should I never have loved? Should I have saved my heart? Maybe, yet what good would it have done me? I might never have known the rapture of sadness, as the poet says, the heights of despair, the ectasy of agony. You can never escape one for the other. But I am not a philosopher, and I cannot make rules for the way to live my life. I am not that strong. Every time I swear never to fall in love again, my head is turned by the sight of a pretty face. My heart again fills with song, readying for the heartbreak. Often I spend more time in recovery from love lost than in love itself. It is distraction and selfishness, but sometimes it is all I have.