Kazuo Ishiguro

from Never Let Me Go

"It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.” 

*****

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart.” 

*****

“As I’ve said, it wasn’t until a long time afterwards—long after I’d left the Cottages—that I realized just how significant out little encounter in the churchyard had been. I was upset at the time, yes. But I didn’t believe it to be anything so different from other tiffs we’d had. It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven could unravel and separate over a thing like that.
But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we’d understood that back then—who knows?—maybe we’d have kept a tighter hold of one another.” 

Kazuo Ishiguro

“Your wound, your silly little wound! That's your real love, Leo, that wound, the one true love of your life! I know how it will be, even if we tried, even if we managed to build something all over again. The music too, that would be no different. Even if they'd accepted you tonight, even if you became celebrated in this town, you'd destroy it all, you'd destroy everything, pull it all down around you just as you did before. And all because of that wound. Me, the music, we're neither of us anything more to you than mistresses

you seek consolation from. You'll always go back to your one real love. To that wound! And you know what makes me so angry? Leo, are you listening to me? Your wound, it's nothing special, nothing special at all. In this town alone, I know there are many people with far worse. And yet they carry on, every one of them, with far greater courage than you ever did. They go on with their lives. They become something worthwhile. But you, Leo, look at you. Always tending your wound.” 
                                                                                                                                ―The Unconsoled

Tony Harrison

from A Kumquat for John Keats

Now were you twenty five or six years old 
when that fevered brow of yours at last grew cold? 
I've got no books at hand to check the dates. 
My grudging but glad spirit celebrates 
that all I've got to hand's the kumquats, John, 
the fruit I'd love to have your verdict on, 
but dead men don't eat kumquats, or drink wine, 
they shiver in the arms of Proserpine, 
not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne, 
nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn 
as I did, waking, when I saw her twist, 
with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist, 
the moon that feebly lit our last night's walk 
past alligator swampland, off its stalk. 
I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw, 
as if I'd never seen the moon before, 
the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light 
make each citrus on the tree its satellite. 

Tom Picard

 

After a row

A lapwing somersaults spring

flips over winter and back.

After a fast walk up long hills, my limbs

the engine of  thought, where burn

bubbles into beck and clough to gill,

beneath a sandstone cliff  balanced on a bed of shale

and held from hurtling by Scots pine

that brush a scrubby sky with cloud snow scutters,

I found a place to sit

                 by snapping watta smacking rocks

and wondered — how would it be for you?

And so, alone,

                  un-alone even, in my anger,

bring you here.

J. H. Pyrnne

 

Smaller than the Radius of the Planet

There is a patch like ice in the sky this
evening & the wind tacks about, we are
both stopped/fingered by it. I lay out my
unrest like white lines on the slope, so that
something out of broken sleep will land
there. Look up, a vale of sorrow opened by
eyes anywhere above us, the child spread out
in his memory of darkness. And so, then, the
magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its
shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus,
we are still here, I look steadily at nothing.
"The gradient of the decrease may be de-
termined by the spread in intrinsic lumin-
osities" —the ethereal language of love in
brilliant suspense between us and the
hesitant arc. Yet I need it too and keep
one hand in my pocket & one in yours,
waiting for the first snow of the year.