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[23 Jan 2008|08:30am] |
Helsinki Window
for Anselm Hollo
Go out into brightened
space out there the fainter
yellowish place it
makes for eye to enter out
to greyed penumbra all the
way to thoughtful searching
sight of all beyond that
solid red both brick and seeming
metal roof or higher black
beyond the genial slope I
look at daily house top on
my own way up to heaven.
*
Same roof, light’s gone
down back of it, behind
the crying end of day, “I
need something to do,” it’s
been again those other
things, what’s out there,
sodden edge of sea’s
bay, city’s graveyard, park
deserted, flattened aspect,
leaves gone colored fall
to sidewalk, street, the end
of all these days but
still this regal light.
*
Trees stripped, rather shed
of leaves, the black solid trunks up
to fibrous mesh of smaller
branches, it is weather’s window,
weather’s particular echo, here
as if this place had been once,
now vacant, a door that had had
hinges swung in air’s peculiar
emptiness, greyed, slumped elsewhere,
asphalt blank of sidewalks, line of
linearly absolute black metal fence.
*
Old sky freshened with cloud bulk
slides over frame of window the
shadings of softened greys a light
of air up out of this dense high
structured enclosure of buildings
top or pushed up flat of bricked roof
frame I love I love the safety of
small world this door frame back
of me the panes of simple glass yet
airy up sweep of birch trees sit in
flat below all designation declaration
here as clouds move so simply away.
*
Windows now lit close out the
upper dark the night’s a face
three eyes far fainter than
the day all faced with light
inside the room makes eye re-
flective see the common world
as one again no outside coming
in no more than walls and post-
card pictures place faces across
that cautious dark the tree no
longer seen more than black edge
close branches somehow still between.
*
He was at the edge of this
reflective echo the words blown
back in air a bubble of suddenly
apparent person who walked to
sit down by the familiar brook and
thought about his fading life
all “fading life” in tremulous airy
perspect saw it hover in the surface
of that moving darkness at the edge
of sun’s passing water’s sudden depth
his own hands’ knotted surface the
sounding in himself of some other.
*
One forty five afternoon red
car parked left hand side
of street no distinguishing
feature still wet day a bicycle
across the way a green door-
way with arched upper window
a backyard edge of back wall
to enclosed alley low down small
windows and two other cars green
and blue parked too and miles
and more miles still to go.
*
This early still sunless morning when a chair’s
creak translates to cat’s cry a blackness still
out the window might be apparent night when the
house still sleeping behind me seems a bag of
immense empty silence and I feel the children
still breathing still shifting their dreams an
enigma will soon arrive here and the loved one
centers all in her heavy sleeping arm out the
leg pushed down bedclothes this body unseen un-
known placed out there in night I can feel all
about me still sitting in this small spare pool of
light watching the letters the words try to speak.
*
Classic emptiness it
sits out there edge of
hierarchic roof top it
marks with acid fine edge
of apparent difference it
is there here here that
sky so up and out and where
it wants to be no birds no
other thing can for a
moment distract it be
beyond its simple space.
— Robert Creeley
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[26 Nov 2007|01:00pm] |
Letter VII
To a waxberry,
Lime is a green-tasting rock. Robin's egg and bat skeleton. He crawls
down the ramp at a rapid pace, reaching to touch the false water,
covered in a layer of dust. The days in their sequential ceremony repeat
themselves and I take care to bury them deeply, so that no animals or
persons may come across them. This is said nonchalantly. A bit "a"
as he opens his mouth and gathers the bread. The gesture undone and
repeated a thousand times. This is my memory of the liminal status of
false dust. A tiny array of picture-settings of dusk, all lined up along a
window's edge, tangible tree branches in bud.
I search the dross of mechanics and otherwise fabled advice by placing
them in a fast flowing stream and may borrow that sense of purported
substance by traveling thousands of miles in a morning and yet we have
not as yet left the house. This mode of locomotion compared with the
memory of March - ascended a pitch of elevation where we walked
single-hipped, the other occupied by a child who seemed no longer a
baby though with baby skin and baby cheeks. Ascended polarizing
white light at an angle impossible in practice.
— laynie browne
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[05 Nov 2007|02:05am] |
Interviews (excerpt)
(1)
A: What disturbs you?
B: The fact that I have a skeleton inside.
A: May your anxiety be applicable to other forms
of art?
B: First, it should be noted that anxiety itself is a form of art, and that I am not concerned with forms.
— Loren Goodman
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[29 Oct 2007|01:15am] |
How did Emily come to lose faith in humans?
She admired their dialects, studied their genealogies,
"but with them she rarely exchanged a word."
Her introvert nature shrank from shaking hands with someone she met on the moor.
What did Emily know of lover's lies or cursive human faith?
Among her biographers
is one who conjectures she bore or aborted a child
during her six-month stay in Halifax,
but there is no evidence at all for such an event
and the more general consensus is that Emily did not touch a man in her 31 years.
Banal sexism aside,
I find myself tempted
to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all the life withheld from Emily.
But the deeper poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.
As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought.
The heart is dead since infancy.
Unwept for let the body go. Suddenly cold I reach down and pull the blanket up to my chin.
The vocation of anger is not mine.
I know my source.
It is stunning, a moment like no other,
when one's lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.
I switch off the lamp and lie on my back,
thinking about Emily's cold young soul.
Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young
there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally disappear —
From the next room I hear my mother shift and sigh and settle
back down under the doorsill of sleep.
Out the windows the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on fading banks of sky.
— Anne Carson, The Glass Essay (excerpt)
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[09 Sep 2007|11:47am] |
And you are an atheist too? said Geryon.
I am a skeptic. You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God
with the good sense to doubt me.
What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God
suspends assent and POOF! we disappear.
It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them. Have an olive,
he added as the waiter's arm flashed between them with a plate.
Thank you, said Geryon
and bit into an olive. The pimento stung his mouth alive like sudden sunset.
He was very hungry and ate seven more,
fast.
— Anne Carson, An Autobiography of Red (excerpt)
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[12 May 2007|06:56pm] |
11 May 2007
Behind the cut not for content but because bigger is better, ( for this one. )
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[01 May 2007|02:34am] |
Of Violets and Neurons
Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet, I might offer, doing what we always do: defining one smell by another smell or another sense. In a famous letter, Napoleon told Josephine "not to bathe" during the two weeks that would pass before they met, so that he could enjoy all her natural aromas. But Napoleon and Josephine also adored violets. She often wore a violet-scented perfume, which was her trademark. When she died in 1814, Napoleon planted violets at her grave. Just before his exile on St. Helena, he made a pilgrimage to it, picked some of the violets, and entombed them in a locket, which he wore around his neck; they stayed there until the end of his life. The streets of nineteenth-century London were full of poor girls selling small bouquets of violets and lavender. In fact, Ralph Vaughan William's London Symphony includes an orchestral interpretation of the flower-girl's cry. Violets resist the perfumer's art and always have. It is possible to make a high-quality perfume from violets, but it's exceedingly difficult and expensive. Only the wealthiest people could afford it; but there have always been empresses, dandies, trend setters, and extravagants enough to keep perfumers busy. The thing about violets, which many people find cloying to the point of nausea, is that no response to them lasts long; as Shakespeare put it, they're:
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute.
Violets contain ionone, which short-circuits our sense of smell. The flower continues to exude its fragrance, but we lose the ability to smell it. Wait a minute or two, and its smell will blare again. Then it will fade again, and so on. How like Josephine, a woman of full-bodied if occasionally recondite sensuality, to choose as her trademark a scent that assaults the nose with a dam-burst of odor one second, and the next leaves the nose virginal, only to rampage yet again. No scent is more flirtatious. Appearing, disappearing, appearing, disappearing, it plays hide-and-seek with our senses, and there's no way to get too much of it. The violet so besotted the ancient Athenians that they chose it as their city's official flower and symbol. Victorian women liked to sweeten their breath with cachous, violet drops, especially if they'd been drinking. As I write this, I have been tasting a roll of "Choward's Violet" pastilles, "A delicious confection/Fragrance that refreshes," and the sweet, pungently musty ooze of violets has nearly swamped me. On the other hand, in the Amazon I brewed a pot of casca preciosa, a fragrant relative of the sassafras, whose steeped bark soon scented my face, my hair, my clothes, my room and my psyche with hot violets of exquisite subtlety.
- A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman
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[22 Feb 2007|12:10am] |
Robert Desnos and the Hummingbird
A poem about you would begin with a tiger, a cobra,
a salami sandwich, it would contain
taxonomic terms for woody plants: sessile, catkin,
schizocarp, dehiscent, involucre, whorl;
it would cruise rue Saint-Martin and pick up chicks
at the Musée de l'Orangerie between marble busts
of Etruscan warriors, a poem about you
would go everywhere, and never arrive.
It would list a series of phobias:
ailurophobia fear of cats
erythrophobia fear of red
nostophobia fear of returning home
It would indulge in hyperbole: you are as exotic
as an ocelot, or the merge of an abacus
with a hummingbird—a moving scale of song.
A poem about you would include an obituary,
Compiègne, Havana, rumba, tango,
plums, the language of pain which has no letters,
only cells and vortexes; however, a poem about pain
would not be a poem about you.
It would speak of the heart though,
not as symbol but as organ and orator
of the body's blood. Its hollow muscularity
and conical shape, obliquely placed,
its vena cava and auriculo-ventricular groove;
endocardium, myocardium, pericardium.
A poem about you would switch subjects
suddenly and lilt word duets: creeper vine,
adder's tongue. It would contemplate
the prepositional phrase and carry the glare of stars
beneath the innuendoes of trees. It would abound
with women: Madeleine, Yvonne, Youki.
A poem about you would tell a story about a girl
who might one night while steeping tea, spilled
honey on a book and discovered you.
In the end every poem is drenched
with honey and history and so the girl
leaned near the window with violet light
falling through like liquid and wrote a poem
to you called
Crepuscule
A hummingbird quivers near my ear:
wind singed with sumac, the dusky
sibilance of your name: Desnos,
Desnos. Sky thick with cumulonimbus and
the whining of blue jays. How odd
to never hold the heft of you
knowing already your absence, like echo
and snow, but to think of this
is to sink into a subterranean landscape
of crows and curses. Permit me
the traffic of a broken heart.
Blue slate of this day stains
my dress, but the rain's veneer is beautiful
and contains the language of lost causes.
Such lassitude in this wet darkness—lamps
locate bodies like pearls
rolling across a dresser. Light
diffracts through my glasses in the rain—
a microscopic slide of amoeba
that glitters in my periphery. Every word spoken
is a city sunk beneat a verdigris sea.
My heart is full of seaplants smelling
like lead and laundry.
Wet bark skimming my spine while
rivulets write your words upon my bodice:
J'ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.
—Simone Muench
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[21 Feb 2007|11:42pm] |
I'm Like You, My Dear
I'm like you, my dear
a leafleteer of belle-lettres.
A fan of lentissimo,
doloroso.
Leeks and lemon verbena.
A funambulist with zero
visibility.
I'm blue sugar
on the lunar line. Iron
pyrite and diamondbacks.
Luminescent,
nascent. A shell pink
shack. I'm the lot
you draw, the hammock
where you sip elixers
in exile. Where whitetails
forage the yard, tearing up
dogtooth violets.
A geography
of gypsum and hooves.
I'm like you, my dear.
Though you're a fig tree borer
and I'm a goldfinch watching you
funnel your way through my home.
Like virga you disappear
before I even reach your shadow.
Though you leave a residue,
texture of red
falling across the unsung
country of Arkansas. Light
like a woman's sleeve
sweeping over the field.
I'm like you, my dear. Just a little
too near the Scylla. Sea-
level and singing
a cappella.
— Simone Muench
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| (excerpt) Under Milkwood |
[14 Feb 2007|10:56pm] |
FIRST VOICE
Captain Cat, at his window thrown wide to the sun and the clippered seas he sailed long ago when his eyes were blue and bright, slumbers and voyages; ear-ringed and rolling, I Love You Rosie Probert tattooed on his belly, he brawls with broken bottles in the fug and babel of the dark dock bars, roves with a herd of short and good time cows in every naughty port and twines and souses with the drowned and blowsy-breasted dead. He weeps as he sleeps and sails, and the tears run down his grog-blossomed nose.
SECOND VOICE
One voice of all he remembers most dearly as his dream buckets down. Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch, whom he shared with Tom-Fred the donkeyman and many another seaman, clearly and near to him speaks from the bedroom of her dust. In that gulf and haven, fleets by the dozen have anchored for the little heaven of the night; but she speaks to Captain napping Cat alone. Mrs Probert -
ROSIE PROBERT
from Duck Lane, Jack. Quack twice and ask for Rosie
SECOND VOICE
. . . is the one love of his sea-life that was sardined with women.
ROSIE PROBERT [Softly]
What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?
CAPTAIN CAT
I'll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like seals,
Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.
ROSIE PROBERT
What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun?
CAPTAIN CAT
As true as I'm here
Dear you Tom Cat's tart
You landlubber Rosie
You cosy love
My easy as easy
My true sweetheart,
Seas green as a bean
Seas gliding with swans
In the seal-barking moon.
ROSIE PROBERT
What seas were rocking
My little deck hand
My favourite husband
In your seaboots and hunger
My duck my whaler
My honey my daddy
My pretty sugar sailor
With my name on your belly
When you were a boy
Long long ago?
CAPTAIN CAT
I'll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
ROSIE PROBERT
Knock twice. Jack,
At the door of my grave
And ask for Rosie.
CAPTAIN CAT
Rosie Probert.
ROSIE PROBERT
Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for
ever. I have forgotten that I was ever born.
CHILD
Look,
FIRST VOICE
says a child to her mother as they pass by the window of Schooner house,
CHILD
Captain Cat is crying.
FIRST VOICE
Captain Cat is crying,
CAPTAIN CAT
Come back come back,
FIRST VOICE
up the silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal night.
CHILD
He's crying all over his nose,
FIRST VOICE
says the child. Mother and child move on down the street.
CHILD
He's got a nose like strawberries,
FIRST VOICE
The child says; and then she forgets him too...
― Dylan Thomas
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[13 Feb 2007|12:23pm] |
&
i hate
everything that moves faster than my body because
everything that moves faster than my body
does so by a cheap trick
- Andrei Codrescu
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[13 Feb 2007|12:21pm] |
PARANOIAD
1.
No one listens
As magnetically. Those rife
Interpretations set you free
From doubt and error,
And the business end of your imagination
Can befriend the dread that teems in sundry —
Forms you break and recompose
Like tangrams. When you wake, how many facts
Arise, eager for you to telephone
And brief them on the new
Projections for the week,
Auspicious dates. . . . Not everything,
Of course, cooperates. Outside,
One dense, divinatory tree
Has tried to block, a bit transparently,
Interception of its leaves —
And failed. (You know its names
And habits; detailed reports
Are being drafted even now, pivotal
For the Project "Golden Bow.")
2.
Does evidence ever lack? And what you see, others
Come to see — supplying supererogatory
Clues at your unspoken behest, the tang of meaning
As contagious and arbitrary as health itself.
Spontaneity prepense on the late-night talk show;
Repertory of team numbers assigned defensive
Linebackers in the professional leagues; sly layout
Montage of news tabloids and magazines; the casual
But fated encounter with a namesake stevedore,
Vicariously burdened, it was madness to doubt,
With your own griefs, an impromptu martyrology
Of everyday life. Brave profusion! And so many
Transmitters, there would seem almost an embarrassment
Of truth, inevitable as dawn over the world.
Yet few respond, unexhorted, to the sharp demands
Of epic existence — marathons; argosies; new
Invasions of chaos to be countered with reserve,
Loyalty, wise, premonitory orchestrations
Of will, and the almost churlish assumption of high
Destiny. . . . Yet, for the sake of argument, suppose
That someone, that I, had inquired about enrollment
In this discipline: the inducements that you touched on,
Would they begin with words like, "As the kaleidoscope
Encrusts with gems its snowflake rondeaux by a thousand
Hairsbreadth juxtapositions, so you will decipher
The labyrinth, thread by thread piece out its web, labor
Requiring an alertness as of the textual
Exegete minutely seizing on themes and patterns,
Yes, all the inherent detective flair long ago
Discernible in you. A rigorous calling, ours,
But so is purgation — nor can anything rival
The savage rush of insight that follows a meeting
With and vanquishing the sphinx of blank information;
Insight that once accomplished cries to the listening
Hills and valleys, 'This intends me! My story is here!'
Then perhaps a skull in the dust at your feet will seem
To whisper through its rictus and hint that neither you
Nor I have the final say, are the smallest instruments
Of purposes our lot is not to fathom until
The fullness of time — if time should ever fill. Please know
That even as you plot your choices, as you dictate
Your private testament, you embody a mystery
Outside, above, and yet deep within you. Who are you
Writing? For what ear is this message? For whoever
Brought you forth into abounding strength — you, but also
Me; for the invisible author of our being
Is one whose inscrutable will and plan have involved
You in my pursuits and concern, have led me to see
You as sharing my dreams. My secret companion,
My stowaway, the world lies before us, we have but
To go up to the place intended and name it home."?
But wait. Grandstanding's too easy. With designs on your
Listeners so naked, how could I or anyone
Be taken in? An orator of real cunning would
Try for a more natural, more plausible tone.
One of us is being rather naive, aren't we?
Though clearly you subscribe to your every word. Don't count
On being spared as a harmless holy fool. Well, no,
I take that back. After all, you are the opposite
So and so qualify for special handling — not that
There have been, till now, alibis or pleas. You might say
Our relationship is like a marriage of ten years,
The first blush of romance replaced by bracing routine,
A sense of resigned disillusion, misdeeds balanced
By forbearance, weapons we would prefer not to use.
So the unwritten drama in progress is, One hand
Washes the other and watches the other, waiting
(Calm suspense of the DMZ) for the telltale word,
Trust itself as straw before the risk of making signs.
You say this will conclude badly. . . . There I go again,
Putting words in your mouth — where they won't melt? Nor be safe
From thieves that break in and steal. To come an unbidden
Guest under that roof would be to drown out the host — O
Eclipse! you strike the indelible gong of midnight,
So like that other universal clap of doom I
Would rather hear you speak your worst, your most abysmal
Or sardonic, anything not to content with that
Silence which, once heard, will never hold its peace again.
— Alfred Corn
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