December 2009
47 posts
AND what is love? It is a doll dress’d up For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle; A thing of soft misnomers, so divine That silly youth doth think to make itself Divine by loving, and so goes on Yawning and doting a whole summer long, Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara, And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots; Then Cleopatra lives at number seven, And Antony resides in Brunswick...
Early one morning just before the sun was up I walked the long straight road beside the sea. The lambs, in pairs, black nose to black nose, sheltered cosy, calling, crying. Here and there a lark would rise to start his early song; and all along the way the wind made barbed wire fretted lace, black, blue and white, of man’s discarded plastic waste. Showing off his speed to me, a hooded crow...
And the soul of the rose went into my blood, As the music clash’d in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood, For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, Our wood, that is dearer than all; From the meadow your walks have left so sweet That whenever a March-wind sighs He sets the jewelprint of your feet In violets blue as your eyes, To the...
From under the crunch of my man’s boot green oat-sprouts jut; he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout legging it most nimble to sprigged hedge of bramble, stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.
Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt up from delved worm-haunt; blue fur, moles have; hefting chalk-hulled flint he with rock splits open knobbed quartz; flayed colors ripen rich, brown, sudden in...
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to Blossom.
Anaïs Nin, Risk
A casement high and triple-arch’d there was, All garlanded with carven imag’ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings; And in the midst, ‘mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon...
I am in need of music that would flow Over my fretful, feeling fingertips, Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips, With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low, Of some song sung to rest the tired dead, A song to fall like water on my head, And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow! There is a magic made by melody: A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and...
A GLIMPSE, through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove, late of a winter night—And I unremark’d seated in a corner; Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand; A long while, amid the noises of coming and going—of drinking and oath and smutty...
The sun sets in molten gold. The evening clouds form a jade disk. Where is he? Dense white mist envelops the willows. A sad flute plays “Falling Plum Blossoms.” How many Spring days are left now? This Feast of Lanterns should be joyful. The weather is calm and lovely. But who can tell if it Will be followed by wind and rain?
Li Ching Chao, The Sun Sets in Molten Gold
How still, How strangely still The water is today, It is not good For water To be so still that way.
Langston Hughes, Sea Calm
Tonight my love is sleeping cold Where none may see and none shall pass. The daisies quicken in the mold, And richer fares the meadow grass. The warding cypress pleads the skies, The mound goes level in the rain. My love all cold and silent lies- Pray God it will not rise again!
Dorothy Parker, Requiescat
I read a book about John Dos Passos and according to the book once radical-communist John ended up in the Hollywood Hills living off investments and reading the Wall Street Journal this seems to happen all too often. what hardly ever happens is a man going from being a young conservative to becoming an old wild-ass radical however: young conservatives always seem to become old conservatives....
Not many people know that broccoli grows in the armpits of very big green men who live in the forest and brave broccoli cutters go deep into the forests and they creep up on the very big green men. They wait for the very big green men to fall asleep and the broccoli cutters get out their great big broccoli razors and they shave the armpits of the very big green men. And that’s...
She’s happy, with a new Content — That feels to her — like Sacrament — She’s busy — with an altered Care — As just apprenticed to the Air —
Emily Dickinson, She’s happy, with a new Content
In days of old, when men were bold And toilets weren’t invented, They laid their loads upon the roads And walked away contented.
Slanting and shadow-cutting a flickering eddy Trickled in gusts of gold to the shiny flagstone Where the ambre atoms in the fire mirroring themselves Mingled their sarabande to the gymnopaedia
J. P. Contamine de Latour, Les Antiques (“The Ancient”)
I am not yours, not lost in you, Not lost, although I long to be Lost as a candle lit at noon, Lost as a snowflake in the sea. You love me, and I find you still A spirit beautiful and bright, Yet I am I, who long to be Lost as a light is lost in light. Oh plunge me deep in love — put out My senses, leave me deaf and blind, Swept by the tempest of your love, A taper in a rushing wind.
...
And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember.
No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time. No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your...
The windows were curtainless, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in through the diamond panes, enabled one to see even colours, whilst it softened the wealth of dust which lay over all and disguised in some measure the ravages of time and moth. My lamp seemed to be of little effect in the brilliant moonlight, but I was glad to have it with me, for there was a dread loneliness in the place which...
To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me- That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the sun, Dance! Whirl! Whirl! Till the quick day is done. Rest at pale evening… A tall, slim tree… Night coming tenderly Black like me.
Langston...
I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm, On a day I already remember. I shall die in Paris— it does not bother me— Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn. It shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders To the evil. Never like today have I turned, And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone. César Vallejo is dead....
He bowed. Certainly. Good men first, violets afterwards. They proceeded briskly through the undergrowth, which became thicker and thicker. They were nearing the edge of the promontory, and the view was stealing round them, but the brown network of the bushes shattered it into countless pieces. He was occupied in his cigar, and in holding back the pliant boughs. She was rejoicing in her escape from...
In the burned city I see the almond flower As though with great cathedral fall, barbarian rage sets free That angel of the fresco from a cloister wall. This flesh petal tree, angel of Fra Angelico, with folded hands Bended knee, and arc of eloquent wing See the plumes like tongues grow, promising the rainbow To our world of ash will bring announciation of spring.
Natasha Spender, Almond Tree in a...
As I was going to St Ives I met a man with seven wives Said he, ‘I think it’s much more fun Than getting stuck with only one.’
Roald Dahl, St Ives
Further back in the gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars. This was the abode of a large polecat-ferret, which a friendly butcher-boy had once smuggled, cage and all, into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted hoard of small silver. Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most...
I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, “Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!”
For then I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.
Thomas Hardy, I Look Into My Glass
Somewhere afield here something lies In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust That moved a poet to prophecies - A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust The dust of the lark that Shelley heard, And made immortal through times to be; - Though it only lived like another bird, And knew not its immortality. Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell - A little ball of feather and bone; And how it perished,...
Although I enter not, Yet round about the spot, Ofttimes I hover, And near the sacred gate, With longing eyes I wait, Expectant of her. The minster-bell tolls out Above the city’s rout, And noise and humming; They’ve hushed the minster-bell, The organ ‘gins to swell, — She’s coming, — coming! My lady comes at last, Timid and stepping fast, And hastening...
Michel knew that the photographer always worked as a permutation of his personal way of seeing the world as other than the camera insidiously imposed upon it…but he lacked no confidence in himself, knowing that he had only to go out without the Contax to recover the keynote of distraction, the sight without a frame around it, light without the diaphragm aperture or 1/250 sec.
Julio Cortázar, Las...
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Alice. ‘It’s dreadfully confusing!’ ‘That’s the effect of living backwards,’ the Queen said kindly: ‘it always makes one a little giddy at first—’ ‘Living backwards!’ Alice repeated in great astonishment. ‘I never heard of such a thing!’ … ‘For instance,...
And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (No. 1 of Four Quartets)
…a change in our view of objects from passive and outside the social could help to undo the subject-object binary and all of its attendant orderings, including, for example, male-female, mental-manual, us-them.
Lucy Suchman, ‘Agencies at the Interface’ in Human-Machine Reconfigurations
Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see, But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtle than the parent is Love must not be, but take a body too, And...
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep ...
When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact it does both at the same time.
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual
We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life
She was deliberately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched...
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate...
Good Morning -- Midnight -- I'm coming Home -- Day -- got tired of Me -- How could I -- of Him? Sunshine was a sweet place -- I liked to stay -- But Morn -- didn't want me -- now -- So -- Goodnight -- Day! I can look -- can't I -- When the East is Red? The Hills -- have a way -- then -- That puts the Heart -- abroad -- You -- are not so fair -- Midnight -- I chose -- Day -- But -- please take a...
I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose. Many a road and track That, since the dawn's first crack, Up to the forest brink, Deceived the travellers, Suddenly now blurs, And in they sink. Here love ends, Despair, ambition ends; All pleasure and all trouble, Although most sweet or...
‘So let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian wolf and the British lamb…we cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog breed and then suddenly pose as gazelles.’
George Bernard Shaw, Common Sense About the War
‘You musta caught too many in the ring, sonny, ‘cause your seabag’s leaky. Einstein couldn’t remember the names of all Betty’s boyfriends, and my name ain’t Albert.’
James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia
This is just to say
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
William Carlos Williams
‘What I remember best is the grimace that twisted his mouth askew, it covered his face with wrinkles, changed somewhat both in location and shape because his lips trembled and the grimace went from one side of his mouth to the other as though it were on wheels, independent and involuntary. But the rest stayed fixed, a flour-powdered clown or bloodless man, dull dry skin, eyes deepset, the nostrils...
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges
Escape me? Never— Beloved! While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue. My life is a fault at last, I fear: It seems too much like a fate, indeed! Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed. But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry...