Understand that there is a beast within you
that can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand
that it will use the conventions of the visible world
to turn your tongue to stone. It alone
knows you. It does
not wish you well.
—Frank Bidart, excerpt of "The Third Hour of the Night", in Half Light
My boyfriend did not die in 1991. I told a lie and it turned into a fact, forever repeated in my official biography. He died on Christmas Day, 1990, when his family disconnected the mechanical breathing machine. He was a composer in the school of music. We were working on a piece for voice and strings. I liked writing the words under the whole notes, hyphenating them to make them last. I liked sitting on the bed in his apartment, writing on the sheet music—bigger paper, thicker, how it sounded when it fell to the floor when we got tired. It was winter break, friends in town, we hopped from party to party, catching up but separately. It was late, the night was clear, the roads were empty. The four of them were sober, the driver in the other car was not. I was a few miles away, in a bar, waiting. When the bar closed, I left him an angry message for standing me up. A few hours later, a friend called and told me. He suggested I break into the apartment and start removing things before the family arrived. For several minutes I didn’t understand, then—evidence. He hadn’t told his family and it didn’t seem right to tell them now, to suggest that they didn’t really know him. I drove in the darkness between the accident and dawn. I climbed through the window. I couldn’t figure which things looked suspicious and which things would be missed. I was sloppy, rushed. I grabbed the wrong sheet music. It was a piece that had already been performed. A few days after Christmas there was a memorial. I sat in the back. As part of his speech, his father mentioned the missing music and made an appeal for its return. I couldn’t give it back. On New Year’s Eve, in a black velvet jacket, at a party in the lobby of a downtown hotel, with a drink in each hand—one for him, one for me—I kept asking where he was, if anyone had seen him. I had his passport in my back pocket. I shouldn’t have taken that either. It was the only picture of him I could find.
—Richard Siken, Cover Story, published in Pithead Chapel
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
Sergey Yesenin, 20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel; from 'Only one final trick...’, tr. Geoffrey Thurley
So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead […]
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath — July 1950 - July 1953
Anne Carson (2009)
Arthur S. Way (1898)
George Theodoridis (2010)
Ian C. Johnston (2010)
E.P. Coleridge (1910)
Theodore Alois Buckley (1892)
John Peck, Frank Nisetich (1995)
R. Potter (1906)
M. L. West (1987)
William Arrowsmith (1958)
Philip Vellacott (1972)
Michael Wodhull (1782)
Kenneth McLeish (1997)
David Kovacs (2002)
Andrew Wilson (1993)
Euripides - Original (408 BCE)
You don't know what it's like to think of one person, one thing, day and night.
Iris Murdoch, from 'The Philosopher's Pupil'
And he sets the sea of my life steady, flooding it with the deep rich color of his mind and his love […]
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath — 17th July 1957
Mary Szybist, Incarnadine; from 'Knocking or Nothing'
“(…) Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it. I just don’t want to die anymore.”
— Richard Siken, from Saying Your Names
Folie à deux - Merriam-Webster definition // Dead Ringers (1988) dir. David Cronenberg // In Two - Nine Inch Nails // The Lovers (art installation) - Sneha Solanki // Vessel - Nine Inch Nails // Xolo & Cuintle (sculpture) - Xolo Cuintle // Where I End and You Begin - Radiohead // Into one another to P.P.P. (sculpture) - Berlinde de Bruyckere // Immaterial - SOPHIE // White Gauze (photo) - Robert Mapplethorpe //
I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; from ‘The Bloody Chamber’
