Friday, November 18, 2016

Never Over, No Resistance

Kissing you is like drinking salt water, the more I drink my thirst increases.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Wait

Wait
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,   
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,   
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was   
for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.

It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,   
relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.
Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,
you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,   
my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,   
trying to heave itself back to its other way with you.

But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran
as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you?
Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds?
Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it,
a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I,   
not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve?

Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,
how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.
Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over
the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn,
to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"?   
We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."

When the spent day begins to frail

When the spent day begins to frail

by E. E. Cummings

when the spent day begins to frail
(whose grave already three or two
young stars with spades of silver dig)

by beauty i declare to you

if what i am at one o'clock
to little lips(which have not sinned
in whose displeasure lives a kiss)
kneeling, your frequent mercy begs,

sharply believe me, wholly, well
— did(wisely suddenly into
a dangerous womb of cringing air)
the largest hour push deep his din

of wallowing male(shock beyond shock
blurted) strokes, vibrant with the purr
of echo pouring in a mesh
of following tone: did this and this

spire strike midnight and did occur
bell beyond fiercely spurting bell
a jetted music splashing fresh
upon silence) i without fail

entered became and was these twin
imminent lisping bags of flesh;
became eyes moist lithe shuddering big,
the luminous laughter, and the legs

whereas, at twenty minutes to

one, i am this blueeyed Finn.
emerging from a lovehouse who
buttons his coat against the wind

Monday, October 17, 2016

And Then This Happened

Heroic physique
             Achilles
hidden, terrible
             trouble
Swishing & Flashing like a Tiger
The Lady or the...
Embodiment of Glorious Grief

Glorious grief of war
Beautiful, Graceful, Achilles
Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright
Burning, burning, but always
hidden, terrible
Grief, Lady, grief.

Grieve in silence,
like a Lady

His word "terrible" 
τρομερός Lady


Shame.
Hidden and terrible
Twice born Achilles
Escaped

With the Lady
Or was it the Tiger?

Proud, Predatory, Tiger
Women trouble
Hidden, terrible
Victim, Lady.
Play, Lady.

ωραίος Ένδοξος Ἀχιλλεύς
Sea spawned Achilles

Heroic Achilles, Dangerou
Hidden, terrible, trouble
Survived Lady
Desolate

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

The Lady or the Tiger?

I do not go and seek the youthful and inexperienced, but he comes and seeks me. When he shows the sincerity that marks the first recourse to divination, I instruct him. If he apply a second and third time, that is troublesome, and I do not instruct the troublesome.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Fire & Ice

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."


Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

Friday, July 15, 2016

"the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him"

“I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the world has never heard before. Like Yeats's great outburst at the end of his life. This comes out of a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent, Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. The incredible difference between the achievement of A and the achievement of B is that B wanted it, so he made all kinds of sacrifices. A could have had it, but he didn’t give a damn.[...]

But what I was going on to say is that I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, 'Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,' but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I'm out, but short of that, I don't know. I hope to be nearly crucified,”
― John Berryman

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Heating and Cooling--A Work in Progress

"Sure, come over so we can emotionally destroy one another. It's for my art." I'd said this as a joke. But I'm no longer laughing.
  
"Maybe I no longer find you smart, charming, or funny." I never said that. Not out loud. Never out loud.

"A tulip in the desert won't last long." You knew this to be true, you who claim to love nothing but your children and "hedonistic adventures." At least you love something. A man who loves something can never be truly evil.

I believe you loved me, but at the same time, somehow, deep down in my darkest heart, I also knew you played with my feelings. As if other people's feelings somehow weren't altogether real to you. As if you never trusted me to love you if I knew the truth. The truth of your fragility and terror. Life has been so cruel to you. I know. I smile and say nothing. We risk being subjected to worse cruelties.

But you have many cruelties.

I still can't escape the feeling that we've done this, all of this, before. There were portents; signs to be read and interpreted. We are familiar and yet do not know each other. Why did I even write this for you? In part, because you're so breathtakingly perfect that it makes my soul ache. I still have this fantasy of you. The perfect you. The dream I had of you and I in perfect union.

Monday, June 27, 2016

A Very Basic Misunderstanding

I realize, too late, that we have failed to understand something important. I've tried to pinpoint the exact moment of misunderstanding, but cannot. Nor am I able to discern the exact nature of this failure of understanding. I know only that it was important that we not fail. In this failure there was a decisive moment, that I cannot recall, when your heart hardened against mine and there is no going back. For us it was a point of no return. Don't worry. You can blame it all on me.

Monday, June 20, 2016

The Goodbye Notebook

You were lost to me the first moment I set eyes on you. I just didn't know it.

There is a universe where we are together and there is a universe where we are not.

There is a universe where I stroke your hair and give you the sun;
you are happy but 

I am not.

I want the light of the cold blue moon to touch my heart


                   to be loved for my mind and nothing more; it’s okay 
to change your mind.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."
 
—  Werner Herzog

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Happy Bloomsday!

A Memory Of the Players In a Mirror at Midnight

James Joyce

They mouth love’s language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love’s breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat’s breath,
Harsh of tongue.

This grey that stares
Lies not, stark skin and bone.
Leave greasy lips their kissing. None
Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.
Dire hunger holds his hour.
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears:
Pluck and devour!

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know

"She’s mad but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire."
 — Bukowski

Thursday, April 21, 2016

"I know the purity of pure despair"

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,   
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   
And in broad day the midnight come again!   
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.


Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.  Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. 

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Word of the Day

entropy, n.

Frequency (in current use): 
Etymology:  < Greek τροπή transformation (lit. ‘turning’), after the analogy of energy n. 
Physics.

 1. The name given to one of the quantitative elements which determine the thermodynamic condition of a portion of matter. Also transf. and fig. In Clausius' sense, the entropy of a system is the measure of the unavailability of its thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work. A portion of matter at uniform temperature retains its entropy unchanged so long as no heat passes to or from it, but if it receives a quantity of heat without change of temperature, the entropy is increased by an amount equal to the ratio of the mechanical equivalent of the quantity of heat to the absolute measure of the temperature on the thermodynamic scale. The entropy of a system = the sum of the entropies of its parts, and is always increased by any transport of heat within the system: hence ‘the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum’ (Clausius). The term was first used in English by Prof. Tait (see quot. 1868), who however proposed to use it in a sense exactly opposite to that of Clausius. In this he was followed (with an additional misunderstanding: see quot. 1875) by Maxwell and others; but subsequently Tait and Maxwell reverted to the original definition, which is now generally accepted.

1868   Tait Sketch Thermodynamics 29   We shall..use the excellent term Entropy in the opposite sense to that in which Clausius has employed it—viz., so that the Entropy of the Universe tends to zero.
1875   J. C. Maxwell Theory of Heat (ed. 4) 189 (note) ,   In former editions of this book the meaning of the term Entropy as introduced by Clausius was erroneously stated to be that part of the energy which cannot be converted into work. The book then proceeded to use the term as equivalent to the available energy...In this edition I have endeavoured to use Entropy according to its original definition by Clausius.
1885   H. W. Watson & S. H. Burbury Math. Theory Electr. & Magn. I. 245   As in the working of a heat engine, the entropy of the system must be diminished by the process, that is, there must be equalisation of temperature.
1925   A. Strachey & J. Strachey tr. Freud Coll. Papers III. v. 599   In considering the conversion of psychical energy no less than of physical, we must make use of the concept of an entropy, which opposes the undoing of what has already occurred.
1933   W. E. Orchard From Faith to Faith xi. 280   The deduction which one of our greatest physicist astronomers draws from the second law of thermodynamics: namely, that since there must be a maximum entropy, there must have been once its maximum opposite.
1955   Sci. Amer. May 124/2   Certain combinations of balls yield a greater change in entropy than others. Those combinations in which entropy change reaches maximum value lead to solutions.
1955   Sci. Amer. June 64/1   This equilibrium state..is the thermodynamic condition of maximum entropy—the most disordered state, in which the least amount of energy is available for useful work.
1965   Financial Times 11 Aug.   Moralising by those whose industrial entropy is an accepted fact of life is neither likely to persuade the workers nor assist the trade unions in the task of trying to meet the nation's difficulties.
 2.

 a. Communication Theory. A measure of the average information rate of a message or language; esp. the quantity −Σpi log pi (where the pi are the probabilities of occurrence of the symbols of which the message is composed), which represents the average information rate per symbol.

1948   Bell Syst. Techn. Jrnl. 27 396   Consider a discrete source of the finite state type... There is an entropy Hi for each state. The entropy of the source will be defined as the average of these Hi weighted in accordance with the probability of occurrence of the states in question... This is the entropy of the source per symbol of text.
1953   S. Goldman Information Theory 329   The amount of language information (i.e., entropy) in the sequence is..a measure of the choice that was available when the sequence was selected.
1953   D. A. Bell Stat. Methods Electr. Engin. x. 145   Since entropy increases as the arrangement of a system becomes less distinguishable from other possible arrangements, while the value of a pattern for conveying information depends on its uniqueness, the information capacity of a signal is the negative of its entropy.
1960   D. Middleton Introd. Stat. Communication Theory vi. 301   H(X) is called the (communication) entropy of the X ensemble, since..it is the direct mathematical analogue of the more familiar entropy measure of statistical mechanics.
1964   Language 40 210   The basic probability concept, ‘entropy’, and its quantum, the ‘bit’, are now part of the metalanguage of linguistics.
 

 b. Math. In wider use: any quantity having properties analogous to those of the physical quantity; esp. the quantity −Σxi log xi of a distribution {x1, x2,…}.

1951   Jrnl. Royal Statist. Soc. B. 13 60   The idea of selective entropy provides us with a new and important concept in the analytical theory of probability.
1961   Proc. Cambr. Philos. Soc. (Math. & Physical Sci.) 57 839   The analogue of Boltzmann's H-theorem is not a statement about the monotonicity of the entropy of the chains..but a statement about the ‘entropy’ of the frequency distribution (s1,..sn).
1968   P. A. P. Moran Introd. Probability Theory i. 50   Since −x log x is a convex function the entropy of a finite set of events is a maximum when their probabilities are equal.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Still I Rise...

Lady Lazarus

By Sylvia Plath
 
I have done it again.   
One year in every ten   
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine   
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin   
O my enemy.   
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be   
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.   
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.   
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.   
The peanut-crunching crowd   
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.   
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands   
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.   
The first time it happened I was ten.   
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.   
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.   
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.   
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute   
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.   
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   
For a word or a touch   
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   
So, so, Herr Doktor.   
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,   
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.   
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,   
A wedding ring,   
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair   
And I eat men like air.
 
 
Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Analogy of Simile

It's like pain yet also unlike pain
It's like feeling yet also unlike feeling
It's like love and yet

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

Life Story

By Tennessee Williams
 
After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
       Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,

and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.
 
 
"Life Story" by Tennessee Williams, from The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, copyright © 1937, 1956, 1964, 2002 by The University of the South.

Thursday, March 31, 2016

The Endless Return

The Gardener 

 
by Rabindranath Tagore
 
 
An unbelieving smile flits on your eyes when I come to you to
take my leave. 


I have done it so often that you think I will soon return.
To tell you the truth I have the same doubt in my mind.
For the spring days come again time after time; the full moon
takes leave and comes on another visit, the flowers come again
and blush upon their branches year after year, and it is likely
that I take my leave only to come to you again. 


But keep the illusion awhile; do not send it away with ungentle
haste.


When I say I leave you for all time, accept it as true, and let a
mist of tears for one moment deepen the dark rim of your eyes.
Then smile as archly as you like when I come again.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Cold, so cold

The Snow Man

By Wallace Stevens 

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Sick Rose


You are a cultivated rose; imprisoned
unaware of your hybridity. Or that you’ve lost
your sense
for sharp, painful beauty.

I am a cactus flower; tenuous
in my hard case of thorns. Impatient
for the night. 
in which I bloom.

Beneath the stars I stole for you.

the pleasures of rolling in a bog some call the Milky Way

2 POEMS FROM THE OHARA MONOGATARI 
 
1 

My love is coming in a glass 
the blood of the Bourbons 

saxophone or cornet 
qu'importe ou? 

green of glass flowers dans le Kentucky 

and always the same handkerchief 
at the same nose of damask 

turning up my extravagant collar 
tossing my scarf about my neck 

the Baudelaire of Kyoto's never-ending pureness 
is he cracked in the head? 


2 

After a long trip to a shrine 
in wooden clogs so hard on the muscles 
the tea is bitter and the breasts are hard 
so much terrace for one evening 

there is no longer no ocean 
I don't see the ocean under my stilts 
as I poke along 

hands on ankles feet on wrists 
naked in thought 
like a whip made from sheerest stockings 

the radio is on the cigarette is puffed upon 
by the pleasures of rolling in a bog 
some call the Milky Way 
in far-fetched Occidental lands above the trees 
where dwell the amusing skulls 
 
 
1954 
 
 
From Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. 
Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. 

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Echo's Lament

Echo's Lament for Narcissus

 By Ben Jonson

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet, slower yet; O faintly, gentle springs;
List to the heavy part the music bears;
Woe weeps out her division when she sings.
Droop herbs and flowers;
Fall grief in showers,
Our beauties are not ours;
O, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Echo, Echo, Echo II





Once a noisy Nymph,
(who never held her tongue when others spoke,
who never spoke till others had begun)
mocking Echo, spied him as he drove,
in his delusive nets, some timid stags.—

for Echo was a Nymph, in olden time,—
and, more than vapid sound,—possessed a form:
and she was then deprived the use of speech,
except to babble and repeat the words,
once spoken, over and over.

Juno confused
her silly tongue, because she often held
that glorious goddess with her endless tales,
till many a hapless Nymph, from Jove's embrace,
had made escape adown a mountain. But
for this, the goddess might have caught them. Thus
the glorious Juno, when she knew her guile;
“Your tongue, so freely wagged at my expense,
shall be of little use; your endless voice,
much shorter than your tongue.” At once the Nymph
was stricken as the goddess had decreed;—
and, ever since, she only mocks the sounds
of others' voices, or, perchance, returns
their final words.

One day, when she observed
Narcissus wandering in the pathless woods,
she loved him and she followed him, with soft
and stealthy tread.—The more she followed him
the hotter did she burn, as when the flame
flares upward from the sulphur on the torch.

Oh, how she longed to make her passion known!
To plead in soft entreaty! to implore his love!
But now, till others have begun, a mute
of Nature she must be. She cannot choose
but wait the moment when his voice may give
to her an answer.

Presently the youth,
by chance divided from his trusted friends,
cries loudly, “Who is here?” and Echo, “Here!”
Replies. Amazed, he casts his eyes around,
and calls with louder voice, “Come here!” “Come here!”
She calls the youth who calls.—He turns to see
who calls him and, beholding naught exclaims,
“Avoid me not!” “Avoid me not!” returns.

He tries again, again, and is deceived
by this alternate voice, and calls aloud;
“Oh let us come together!” Echo cries,
“Oh let us come together!” Never sound
seemed sweeter to the Nymph, and from the woods
she hastens in accordance with her words,
and strives to wind her arms around his neck.
He flies from her and as he leaves her says,
“Take off your hands! you shall not fold your arms
around me. Better death than such a one
should ever caress me!” Naught she answers save,
“Caress me!”

Thus rejected she lies hid
in the deep woods, hiding her blushing face
with the green leaves; and ever after lives
concealed in lonely caverns in the hills.

But her great love increases with neglect;
her miserable body wastes away,
wakeful with sorrows; leanness shrivels up
her skin, and all her lovely features melt,
as if dissolved upon the wafting winds—
nothing remains except her bones and voice—
her voice continues, in the wilderness;
her bones have turned to stone. She lies concealed
in the wild woods, nor is she ever seen
on lonely mountain range; for, though we hear
her calling in the hills, 'tis but a voice,
a voice that lives, that lives among the hills.

Thus he deceived the Nymph and many more,
sprung from the mountains or the sparkling waves;
and thus he slighted many an amorous youth.—
and therefore, some one whom he once despised,
lifting his hands to Heaven, implored the Gods,
“If he should love deny him what he loves!”
and as the prayer was uttered it was heard
by Nemesis, who granted her assent.

NARCISSUS
There was a fountain silver-clear and bright,
which neither shepherds nor the wild she-goats,
that range the hills, nor any cattle's mouth
had touched—its waters were unsullied—birds
disturbed it not; nor animals, nor boughs
that fall so often from the trees. Around
sweet grasses nourished by the stream grew; trees
that shaded from the sun let balmy airs
temper its waters. Here Narcissus, tired
of hunting and the heated noon, lay down,
attracted by the peaceful solitudes
and by the glassy spring. There as he stooped
to quench his thirst another thirst increased.
While he is drinking he beholds himself
reflected in the mirrored pool—and loves;
loves an imagined body which contains
no substance, for he deems the mirrored shade
a thing of life to love. He cannot move,
for so he marvels at himself, and lies
with countenance unchanged, as if indeed
a statue carved of Parian marble. Long,
supine upon the bank, his gaze is fixed
on his own eyes, twin stars; his fingers shaped
as Bacchus might desire, his flowing hair
as glorious as Apollo's, and his cheeks
youthful and smooth; his ivory neck, his mouth
dreaming in sweetness, his complexion fair
and blushing as the rose in snow-drift white.
All that is lovely in himself he loves,
and in his witless way he wants himself:—
he who approves is equally approved;
he seeks, is sought, he burns and he is burnt.

And how he kisses the deceitful fount;
and how he thrusts his arms to catch the neck
that's pictured in the middle of the stream!
Yet never may he wreathe his arms around
that image of himself. He knows not what
he there beholds, but what he sees inflames
his longing, and the error that deceives
allures his eyes. But why, O foolish boy,
so vainly catching at this flitting form?
The cheat that you are seeking has no place.
Avert your gaze and you will lose your love,
for this that holds your eyes is nothing save
the image of yourself reflected back to you.
It comes and waits with you; it has no life;
it will depart if you will only go.


Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, trans. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922.

Echo, Echo, Echo

Late Echo 

by John Ashbery

Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

Monday, March 21, 2016

I'm Not the Dragon

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

By Richard Siken 
 
Every morning the maple leaves.
                               Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
            from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
                                             You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
         of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
                   Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
         and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
                                                         You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
                  Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
            Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
                                                                                               flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
                that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
                           Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
               I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
         glass, but that comes later.
                                                            And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
            shut up
I’m getting to it.
                                    For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
                                                                                                the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
          young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
            but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
                                                               and getting stabbed to death.
                                    Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.
          You still get to be the hero.
You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
                  What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
            really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
                                                       Let me do it right for once,
             for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
                   Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
                                                               and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
                               Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
             Hello darling, sorry about that.
                                                       Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
                                    and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
            Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
            to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
                  I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
                                                   against a black sky prickled with small lights.
            I take it back.
The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
                                                I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
                                                                                               Crossed out.
            Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
                   Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
                                                                                                reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
               forgiven,
even though we didn’t deserve it.
                                                                    Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
            in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
                           from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
                                                                                              darkness,
                                                                                     suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
                                  in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
          bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
             my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
                                                            of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
          smiling in a way
                    that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
          up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
                                                I looked out the window and said
                                This doesn’t look that much different from home,
            because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
                                           We walked through the house to the elevated train.
            All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
                                                                                             mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
            smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
                                                                                      just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
                                 is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
                                                                                                 terrifying. No one
                                                                                 will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
                        here’s the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
            is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
            Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
                                                                                                                 Jerusalem.
                            We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
             a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
             another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
             Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
                                                                                                 Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
                                        Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
             in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
             lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
                                                the blue rings of my eyes as I say
                                                                                                   something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
             and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
                                                            There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
             and the grains of sugar
                              on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry
                                                                                  it’s such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
                     we have had our difficulties and there are many things
                                                                                                  I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
             years later, in the chlorinated pool.
                                      I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
             these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
                                                            We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .
             When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.
                  I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
                                                  Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
 
 
“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” by Richard Siken. From Crush, © 2006 by Yale University, published by Yale University Press.