Tag Archives: love

Feb 12 2016
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poem

je suis

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you

the invisible
who-ness
is present, bidden or
not bidden, so

i admit to feeling

(you prefer
lower case i’m guessing?

i do)

your nearness,

much more

than God – is that your father:
enormous, cliff-
like, unknowable shore line
everywhere and nowhere
or did i make him up? – and

you remain unseen yet noticeable
and quiet, as a young
girl, painfully shy

supine?

and here:

are you the swing? are you the hush?
are you the dusk

light, and why is your name such
a problem? i admit to feeling un-
comfortable with it
in public,

aloud

i don’t mind thinking it

je suis is as close as i get

why do you keep
showing up discernibly concealed?

what did you learn as a human? and
what do you continue to learn as a
God-formerly-human-yet-still-human-but-waiting-
for-something-i-don’t-understand-to-happen?

you are
the missing
person who
i look for
everywhere
in a stadium
crowd, far off,
other side of field
eye contact
we locate each
other, impossible
to talk, we wave,
sort of, our
gaze in a
pause
held in that
small holiness

just seeing you is
seeing me

you are the being in
a person without a
body, right? though in a
body, is that it?
that certain near-thing
we know is distinct
and unique
in me
here

like being in your own car, your own pew,
your own bed

how am i
doing so
far

stop me if
i’m going
to
fast

 

poem by chris woodhull / photograph by kumiko ishigaki

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Feb 02 2016
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poem

erasure

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you left —

that is how
it should be

a cantilever
reaching toward
a ghost

 

chris woodhull

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Feb 01 2016
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poem

glance

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glance:

she looks my way
and i look hers

eyes open
as windows

without a word
we think —
who are you?

windows open

eyes turning elsewhere,
mind moving
into privacy

where we
sit and
think about such
things as meeting

strangers, new

friends we
may enjoy —

i sip coffee, she reads

wondering and wondering,

we both
return home.

 

chris woodhull

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Jan 25 2016
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poem

I walked past a house where I lived once

 

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I walked past a house where I lived once:
a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there.
Many years have passed with the quiet hum
of the staircase bulb going on
and off and on again.

The keyholes are like little wounds
where all the blood seeped out. And inside,
people pale as death.

I want to stand once again as I did
holding my first love all night long in the doorway.
When we left at dawn, the house
began to fall apart and since then the city and since then
the whole world.

I want to be filled with longing again
till dark burn marks show on my skin.

I want to be written again
in the Book of Life, to be written every single day
till the writing hand hurts.

Yehuda Amichai

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Jan 25 2016
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Blessing, prayer

For Love in a Time of Conflict / by John O’Donohue

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When the gentleness between you hardens
And you fall out of your belonging with each other,
May the depths you have reached hold you still.

When no true word can be said, or heard,
And you mirror each other in the script of hurt,
When even the silence has become raw and torn,
May you hear again an echo of your first music.

When the weave of affection starts to unravel
And anger begins to sear the ground between you,
Before this weather of grief invites
The black seed of bitterness to find root,
May your souls come to kiss.

Now is the time for one of you to be gracious,
To allow a kindness beyond thought and hurt,
Reach out with sure hands
To take the chalice of your love,
And carry it carefully through this echoless waste
Until this winter pilgrimage leads you
Towards the gateway to spring.

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Jan 22 2016
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poem

who knows where

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who knows where
we will be in a year
but now, here,
on this small ledge

a mountain porch opening
into the night with listening
pines and a cathedral moon
i hold your hand

that made the tea and
for the first time
the thrill of love
returned to me,
without stain —
it could have been a
prayer.

our souls, my soul is a
feathery invisible breathing,
lifting and panicking
with delight —

why here and why now?
who made this,
who made us,
where will we be in a year?

 

chris woodhull

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Mar 05 2015
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aside

Love of Making

#cover U #magazine

Where is joy? I’ve been struggling with this. Studying art as an undergraduate can make you either a robot for craft or concept. And even if you excel at both something feels missing. I think it’s love.

I’ve never attended a critique where the love an artist puts into a piece is discussed or perceived. Instead we drill down into the formal and conceptual aspects of the piece. I think people get uncomfortable with love. And talking about love under the umbrella of art feels ambiguous.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend and they left me with this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”:

“You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself.”

So what I’ve been insisting myself to do is this: encourage my love for making. My love for putting pen to paper. My love for thinking. My love for the process. My intense desire to create a window to the world.

So to all the artists and tender creatures out there; peace be with your heart, soul and weary hands.

Go get your love back!

-paris

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Aug 18 2014
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aside

Outside There

David Hockney

Outside there’s a girl sitting at a small coffee shop table. Across from her sits a boy. An important boy. He’s reading and she’s typing. Flip. Flip. Tap. Flip. Tap. After a few minutes she looks up to make sure he’s still there. He is.

Snap.

“Got it,” I see him mouth. His head leans forward inspecting the picture he just took. He looks up and grins. She smiles, not bothered, accustomed to being the subject in the frame of his camera. Her eyes return to her laptop, fingers tapping the keyboard again.

He keeps gazing at her. He says something. She looks up, eyes wide. She says three words and spins around the table, landing in his lap. His arms catching her waist. Her ankles crossed rocking from side to side. They are in a kind of rapture, via wavelengths, lightning, shocks, softness.

I’m inside looking out on this from my table. It’s such a private moment. I should turn my head but I don’t. I watch instead.

She’s dancing. Really. On the sidewalk in front of him. Her silk floral dress billows around her body. Between the skirt and boots are long legs and pink knobby knees in hiking boots that swallow her feet.

Love is its own flash mob.

– paris / art by david hockney

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Jan 05 2014
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reflection

Calling

makieclothier.com

makieclothier.com

I keep picking up the phone

8-6-5

5-2-4…

It rings, and she picks up.

The muffled sound of struggle, rummaging for a moment (no doubt untangling her curly phone cord from around a plant or other objects in the vicinity.)

Hello? She says hello

I feel her joy

laughing at my jokes.

showing a genuine interest in my life.

loving me.

I tell her stories, she listens and enjoys them whole heartedly.

Then a couple weeks later I accidentally tell her the same story. She doesn’t stop me and say, “You told me that last week, remember?”

No.

She sits and listens again and enjoys again.

Yeah. I love that about her.

Even though she passed, when I call she always answers.

And always will.

-paris

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Jan 03 2014
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reflection

Love

Photo Credit: Mario De Biasi

Photo Credit: Mario De Biasi

 

Love is breathing; it’s alive like a pulse. Move to Stevie Wonder’s, “Love’s in Need of Love Today.” Or Gregory Porter’s, “I Fall in Love too Easily.” It goes where it will. It is emphatic and fleeting. It has body. Love only needs love with me in the middle.

The thing about love is that it resists control. If you use it too much or squeeze it too tightly it vanishes.

Let love be, let it sit in the palm of your hand like some wandering ladybug. Don’t contain it by wrapping your fingers around it. Let it inhale and exhale and maybe even flutter its wings in flight suggesting leave-taking.

Love is sumptuous. It’s belongs to other things besides relationships. Scientists say we have discovered 14% of the species on earth. The same with love I say.

We pass love daily, and don’t know it. That’s the beauty of love; it can be found in every crinkle and crease of life if you’re patient and open and let it capture you.

-christopher & paris

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