tenderblues

[tenderblues]

If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.

David Wojnarowicz, from, “When I Put My Hands on Your Body” a 1990 art piece inspired by the death of his lover Peter Hujar by AIDS.

#david wojnarowicz

[tenderblues]

But you know, dearest T. C., that if I ever really began a "letter" to you it could have no imaginable end—or even beginning—for it would just have to circle forever and ever, like a great wheel, about the one central fact, and you know what that fact is, and there are either millions of ways of telling it or only one way. I love you dearly, and if you wish, I will write that over and over again until this page is filled up, and many more pages, like a bad boy kept in after school, whose teacher (in some perverse way) wishes to make him happy instead of wretched.

Newton Arvin in a letter to Truman Capote, 1946

#love letters #newton arvin

[tenderblues]

And there are words of night words that are moans illegible words that rise to our lips diamond words unwritten words words that can’t be written because here we don’t have any violin strings we don’t have all the world’s blood or the air’s whole embrace and the arms of lovers write high overhead far beyond the blue where they rust and die maternal words just shadow just sobbing just spasms just love just solitude’s dissolution Between us and words those who are walled in, and between us and words our duty to speak

Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, “You are welcome to Elsinore” (tr. Richard Zenith)

#poetry #Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos

[tenderblues]

She that I love is a vision. She sings in a language I do not know. Perhaps an elegy or an ode—a work song, a song of war. It is not mine to say. It is not mine to question, to beg forgiveness, to look away.

Uma Dwivedi, “Aisling at the Ballard Locks”

#uma dwivedi #poetry

[tenderblues]

“The Teller of Tales” by Gabriela Mistral (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

When my arms held the one I had, the stories all ran as a blood-gift in my arms, all through the night. Now, turned to the East, I’m giving them away because I forget them.

Old folks want them to be lies. Children want them to be true. All of them want to hear my own story, which, on my living tongue, is dead.

 I’m seeking someone who remembers it leaf by leaf, thread by thread. I lend her my breath, I give her my legs, so that hearing it may waken it for me.

#poetry #gabriela mistral

[tenderblues]

If you are intolerable, let me be the one to tolerate you.

Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

#taylor jenkins reid #novel

[tenderblues]

Now I'm going down and set 57th Street on fire to keep you warm.

James Schuyler to John Button, spring 1956

#james schuyler #love letters

[tenderblues]

What kind of thing does a man say to a man he’s in love with? Things like, I can’t tell you how adorable you looked in your new suit and that tie          the other night. Then he says, That suit is rather me isn’t it, then I say, yes, and the world lights up like the hot star they say it used to be or may become burnt by the sun.

James Schuyler, “Having My Say-So”

#james schuyler #poetry

[tenderblues]

the fullness of his lower lip, like the excess that shaped the pear,          sulky and determined, boyish and sweet, Greek, before they got refined: but if I’m such a lover why can’t I remember the color of his eyes?

James Schuyler, “Having My Say-So”

#james schuyler #poetry

[tenderblues]

I love being in love with you, it makes even unhappiness seem no bigger than a pin, even at the times when I wish so violently that I could give my heart to science and be rid of it.

James Schuyler to John Button, spring 1956

#love letters #james schuyler

[tenderblues]

We stop on the outskirts of town and think about being reborn. When he places his mouth near my mouth because he’s so obviously thirsty, when he moves to the well where my tongue spouts out because we’re mostly made of water two-thirds of me is certain: este infierno vale la pena.         This hell is worth the risk.

Sjohnna McCray, “I Do”

#sjohnna mccray #poetry

[tenderblues]

Our love fills the air. Our love eats the deadly sounds men make when they see how much magic we have away from them.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, “This Is What Makes Us Worlds”

#joshua jennifer espinoza #poetry

[tenderblues]

I’ll never renounce, never relinquish the first radiance, the first moment you took my hand

Cyrus Cassells, “Beautiful Signor”

#cyrus cassells #poetry

[tenderblues]

I needed one such day and one such night to tell you how much I love you, in which to see soul-deep and be satisfied⏤for after all with all my sensuality and sentimentality, I love sublimated things and today nature, the only great cleanser of life, would have distilled anything. God grant us one such day and one such night before America with her inhibitions closes down on us.

Alain Locke to Langston Hughes, 1924

#love letters #alain locke

[tenderblues]

I call to him one night, at home, asleep.  His breath, I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips had touched.  I felt as though I'd touched a shrine. Not disrespectfully, but in some lapse of concentration. In a mirror shines the distant moon.

Rafael Campo, “The Distant Moon”

#rafael campo #the distant moon

[tenderblues]

Sappho Fragment 47

Once again limb-loosening Love makes me tremble, the bitter-sweet, irresistible creature. -translation D.A. Campbell

Eros limbslackener shakes me again— that sweet, bitter, impossible creature.  -translation Jim Powell

Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees. -translation Anne Carson

#sappho #poetry #comparison

[tenderblues]

Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous. How it frightens and confounds and enrages. How strange, unfamiliar.

Joseph O. Legaspi, “Vows (for a gay wedding)”

#joseph o. legaspi #poetry