"Ars Poetica" & "You, Andrew Marvell"

～two poems by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute  
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless  
As the flight of birds.

                         *              

A poem should be motionless in time  
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,  
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time  
As the moon climbs.

                         *              

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean  
But be.

{more ars poetica poems here}

Detail from Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles: Allegory on the Transitoriness and the Brevity of Life, Karel Dujardin, 1668.

+++

And here face down beneath the sun   
And here upon earth’s noonward height   
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east   
The earthy chill of dusk and slow   
Upon those under lands the vast   
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees   
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange   
The flooding dark about their knees   
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate   
Dark empty and the withered grass   
And through the twilight now the late   
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge   
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone   
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls   
And loom and slowly disappear   
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore   
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more   
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun   
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on ...

Hermine

    She spoke so seriously from a deep impulse of her very soul that I scarcely liked to encourage her. I tried to calm her down. She shook her head with a frown and with a compelling look went on: "I tell you, you must keep your word, my boy. If you don't you'll regret it. You will have many commands from me and you will carry them out. Nice ones and agreeable ones that it will be a pleasure for you to obey. And at the last you will fulfill my last command as well, Harry." 

    "I will," I said, half giving in. "What will your last command be?" 

    I guessed it already—God knows why. 

    She shivered as though a passing chill went through her and seemed to be waking slowly from her trance. Her eyes did not release me. Suddenly she became still more sinister. 

    "If I were wise, I shouldn't tell you. But I won't be wise, Harry, not for this time. I'll be just the opposite. So now mind what I say! You will hear it and forget it again. You will laugh over it, and you will weep over it. So look out! I am going to play with you for life and death, little brother, and before we begin the game I'm going to lay my cards on the table." 

    How beautiful she looked, how unearthly, when she said that! Cool and clear, there swam in her eyes a conscious sadness. These eyes of hers seemed to have suffered all imaginable suffering and to have acquiesced in it. Her lips spoke with difficulty and as though something hindered them, as though a keen frost had numbed her face; but between her lips at the corners of her mouth where the tip of her tongue showed at rare intervals, there was but sweet sensuality and inward delight that contradicted the expression of her face and the tone of her voice. A short lock hung down over the smooth expanse of her forehead, and from this corner of her forehead whence fell the lock of hair, her boyishness welled up from time to time like a breath of life and cast the spell of a hermaphrodite. I listened with an eager anxiety and yet as though dazed and only half aware.

(...)

Hermine was pale but smiling. Slowly she raised her arm and pushed back her hair. As she did so one arm caught the light and a faint and indescribably tender shadow ran from her armpit to her hidden breast, and this little trembling line of shadow seemed to me to sum up all the charm and fascination of her body like a smile.

～Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Pia de' Tolomei, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
oil on canvas, c.1868,
Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas

The Lake: Thomas Moore & Edgar Allan Poe

I wish I was by that dim lake
Where sinful souls their farewells take
Of this vain world, and half-way lie
In Death’s cold shadow, ere they die.
There, there, far from thee,
Deceitful world, my home should be,—
Where, come what might of gloom and pain,
False hope should ne’er deceive again!

The lifeless sky,—the mournful sound
Of unseen waters, falling round,—
The dry leaves quivering o’er my head,
Like man, unquiet even when dead,—
These, ay! these should wean
My soul from life’s deluding scene,
And turn each thought, each wish I have,
Like willows, downward towards the grave.

As they who to their couch at night
Would welcome sleep first quench the light,
So must the hopes that keep this breast
Awake be quench’d, ere it can rest.
Cold, cold, my heart must grow,
Unchanged by either joy or woe,
Like freezing founts, where all that’s thrown
Within their current turns to stone.

～"I wish I was by that dim Lake," by Thomas Moore

+++

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less —
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody —
Then — ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight —
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define —
Nor Love — although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining —
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

～"The Lake — To —" (1827), by Edgar Allan Poe

Mulholland Drive

～a poem by Donald Rawley

It's midnight on Mulholland Drive.   
You and I race   
beyond the guard rails  
where coyotes kiss  
under sudden red warnings. 

I am a raven haired whore  
trapped in a fast,  
black Jaguar,  
a smear on the windshield. 

I am a deliberate masquerade.  

My house is scrubbed with rum.  
In an airless bedroom  
I watch for you  
on bed sheets  
lousy with lies. 

You, with clinical blue eyes  
and a surgeon's lips;  
you are the time of my life;  
you are a back door kiss. 

You hiss and spray,  
your chest dancing  
like a lazy debutante,.  
Your whisper is cool and false  
as a eunuch's tongue. 

This is delicious guilt,  
tended wisely,  
with hothouse tactics  
complex in mute rule. 

I have grown my tom cat garden  
with expectant palms,  
a blind moon,  
and clenched thighs. 

I can stretch my claws  
and assassinate memory. 

This tryst opens my skin,  
a painted wound,  
pornographic and hollow.  
This is ancient folly,  
elusive, and moist  
as a burial ground. 

It's midnight on Mulholland Drive.  
In my house above the rain clouds  
I wait for you  
with dark glasses  
in a mirrored room. 

We have always understood the immediate.  
You and I. 

          *  

I lay by you in  
this tinny blue gulf  
of conquered air  
in the last frieze  
of our static night. 

Your pant invades  
the morning damp  
in hot twisted acacia,  
in tethered reeds near  
steaming, still-lit swimming pools. 

You are the curl of fog  
hiding my naked ache.  
I want the sting  
of your arms  
and the music  
of your concrete pulse. 

I've smelled this dawn before. 

It's black leather and angora,  
broken glass, and burned-out bulbs. 

I fear your perfume  
and the itch of your blonde beard,  
fat, and petulant  
as your probing loins. 

My memory is  
acid and salt.   
I store your face  
in a box of  
tortoise and ebony. 

It is a delirious face  
wanton and marked with my breath.  
You stretch with the ease  
of a hypocrite.  
You say nothing when you come. 

Touch my back of oiled wood.  
I have the wet hide  
of a transient.  
I am all bedroom eyes, weak teeth,  
and shaked out legs. 

I will polish your hips  
into powder.  
I will make your ass a movie star. 

I can be bought. 

       *  

It's rattlesnake season on Mulholland Drive. 

They are the percussion  
of the Santa Ana,  
odalisques of night,  
a swarm of heavy bellies  
rubbing the cool grit  
of a dark, dry road.  

Coiled on limestone verandahs,  
under oriental rock borders,  
and behind electric gates,  
the sleep beyond the sprinklers. 

Do not walk this  
road of constant turns,  
you can't follow the  
squirm of the yellow line. 

You drive from the west  
from cliffs rotten  
with dim sunsets.  
You enjoy speeding east,  
entering my soil and shade. 

I fall into your skills.  
You with the rolling muscles  
of an anaconda,  
with a pure kiss,  
exact as a bite.  
I am lost in your  
treacherous limbs. 

I sit on Mulholland Drive  
amidst pines and lemon trees,  
grouped like school children.  
I am always alone. 

        *  

Baby I can keep secrets  
like jewels in a velvet case.  
I am the endless cirque,  
the lure of the flowered rope,  
and padded swing.  
I seldom give everything. 

I want to flutter  
your eyelids when you sleep.  
I want to make  
your solitary pounding  
a bracelet that fits. 

I want to meet your wife.  
You and I, cagey and right.  
I want to feel her eyes  
like a blind prophet.  
I am cruel with   
embraces and promises. 

And I with boxes and mirrors  
and jewels and glances that run,  
I still wait,  
watch for your car. 

You who drives without headlights,  
you who sheds color;  
you are she slam of a cadillac door,  
you are the last twist in the road;  
you are the shine of speed  
and the trouble with virgins;  
the reason I sit with my body  
and cry,  
the history I repeat,  
the sunsets and oceans I sometimes see  
when the day is clear of you,  
when my nights are stuck  
between your legs,  
and my mornings are full of fog. 

You ask me who I am.  
I am more than enough.


(For more of Donald Rawley's writing including poetry and short stories, visit here.)

徽宗之天青潤澤: Huizong's Celadon Tone Poems singing in Whistler's Visions

雨過天青雲破處，者般颜色做將來。 

Clouds part after the morning rain, colour of the sky,

Such is the colour of the days beyond.

白如玉、薄如纸、明如镜、聲如磐。

Fair as jade, fine as paper, brilliant as mirror, and sounds of grandeur.

+++

“You could say that when I slowly descended those rarely used steps to the small, always deserted beach, I was making use of a magical process in order to bring myself closer to the possible monad that is my self.”

～Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“...having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”

～Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

+++

*Two paintings by Whistler: “Nocturne Blue and Silver － Cremorne Lights” (1872) & “Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach”

Whistler’s emphasis on sensation and atmosphere over detailed description has been compared by some to the philosophy underpinning Gardner’s whole museum. “I see the entire museum as a correlative to these shadowy tone poems,’’ wrote the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum of Whistler’s nocturnes. (The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), On Lake Lucerne, looking towards Fluelen, around 1841. Watercolour, with scraping out and marks made with the thumb, over graphite on wove paper, 223 x 283mm. The Courtauld Gallery, London.

‘The aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts.’ ～John Ruskin

"Lord, there is no such city anywhere, But all a vision."

And Gareth likewise on them fixt his eyes
So long, that even to him they seemed to move.
Out of the city a blast of music pealed.
Back from the gate started the three, to whom
From out thereunder came an ancient man,
Long-bearded, saying, 'Who be ye, my sons?'

Then Gareth, 'We be tillers of the soil,
Who leaving share in furrow come to see
The glories of our King: but these, my men,
(Your city moved so weirdly in the mist)
Doubt if the King be King at all, or come
From Fairyland; and whether this be built
By magic, and by fairy Kings and Queens;
Or whether there be any city at all,
Or all a vision: and this music now
Hath scared them both, but tell thou these the truth.'

Then that old Seer made answer playing on him
And saying, 'Son, I have seen the good ship sail
Keel upward, and mast downward, in the heavens,
And solid turrets topsy-turvy in air:
And here is truth; but an it please thee not,
Take thou the truth as thou hast told it me.
For truly as thou sayest, a Fairy King
And Fairy Queens have built the city, son;
They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft
Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand,
And built it to the music of their harps.
And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son,
For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King; though some there be that hold
The King a shadow, and the city real:
Yet take thou heed of him, for, so thou pass
Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become
A thrall to his enchantments, for the King
Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame
A man should not be bound by, yet the which
No man can keep; but, so thou dread to swear,
Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide
Without, among the cattle of the field.
For an ye heard a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever.'

 ～ Idylls of the King (1872) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

無常: “we embrace a shadow and love a dream”

Beauty exists because perfection does not. What is beautiful and alluring is not perfect, and what mesmerises and arrests, is illusion.

Transience: a rose in bloom
*image via Lili Price

*Post title in English is taken from Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg: “We know so little about one another. We embrace a shadow and love a dream.”

+

“[...] I have got new curtains for my study; pure white. When I awoke this morning, I first thought it had been snowing. In my room the light was exactly as it is after the first fall of snow. I even fancied I caught the scent of snow freshly fallen. And soon it will come, the snow. One feels it in the air. 
It will be welcome. Let it come. Let it fall.” 

― Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

An Ode to Entanglement & Modigliani Suite

Ode to Hands
(written by Halina Poświatowska, translated by Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn)


Greetings to you my palms, my grasping fingers, and my finger smashed by the car door. My X-rayed palm looks like a sprained wing, like a tiny piece of bone drawn by its own contour. My left hand's ring finger once decorated by a band is widowed now, deprived of its adornment. The one who gave me the ring long since has no fingers. His arms are woven with the tree's roots into one.

My hands have so often touched the frozen palms of the dead, and the warm, strong palms of the living. They know how to caress unusually by touch losing the space that separates existence from existence, and heaven from earth. My hands knowing the pain of helplessness cling to each other like two frightened birds, homeless, blindly seeking everywhere the trace of your hands.

the body of my garden
woven from the living and painful branches
cries at night
recalling the down of birds' wings
the moon's face wet among the leaves
it peers into a nest full of absence
the green fingers quiver
clenched in the throat of the wind
dawn

the seeing fingers dance
on black and white keys
I greet them with my breath
with my hand I touch the lips
with my smile I bring to life
the colors and I use the most beautiful of them
to write in red blood: myself

in our eternal departures
on outstretched wings
we are ever closer
to each other and earth

you are my hand
I am your hair
and that shadow behind us
is neither this nor that

the shadow—our united lips enclosing
all-
embracing
both love and death

I broke off the bough of love
I buried it in the earth
and look
my garden has blossomed

one cannot kill love
if you bury it in the earth
it grows back
if you toss it into the air
it grows leaf-like wings
dropped into the water

it flashes with gills
immersed in the night
it shines

so I wanted to bury it in my heart
but my heart was home to my love
my heart opened its heart's door
and it rang out with song from wall to wall
my heart danced on my fingertips

so I buried my love in my head
and people asked
why my head has blossomed
why my eyes shine star-like
and why my lips are brighter than the dawn

I wanted to tear this love to pieces
but it was supple it entangled my hands
and my hands are bound with love
people ask whose prisoner I am 

*To read more of Poświatowska's poetry, visit here.

Georgia O'Keeffe — Hands, 1919
Alfred Stieglitz (American, Hobokan, New Jersey, 1864-1946 New York)
via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

untitled musing

“Des Esseintes also derived a specious pleasure from handling this minuscule booklet, with its covers of Japanese felt as white as milk curds, fastened by two silk cords, one Chinese pink, the other black. Concealed behind the binding, the black braid met the pink braid which, like some licentious handmaid, added a whisper of powder, a suggestion of modern Japanese rouge, to the antique whiteness, the artless flesh-tints of the book; it would itself round the pink, intertwining its sombre colour with the light one in a dainty bow, and introducing a discreet hint of that regret, a vague threat of that sadness which follow in the wake of burnt-out passion and satiated sensual frenzy.” 

(Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours, trans. by Margaret Mauldon)

常玉畫作：雙裸女，1929年。
Sanyu, Two Pink Nudes, oil on canvas, 1929 (via Ravenel Art)

“However, by delving into his own mind, he first of all grasped that, to appeal to him, a work must possess that aura of strangeness which Edgar Allan Poe required; but he readily ventured further along that path, demanding over-subtle creations of the intellect and complex deliquescences of language; what he wanted was a disturbing ambivalence he could muse about, until he chose to make it either vaguer or more precise, according to his state of mind at that particular moment. In a word, he wanted a work of art both for what it intrinsically was and for what it potentially allowed him to impart to it; he wanted to go forward with it and because of it, as if aided by an acolyte, as if transported in a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated feelings would induce in him a state of turmoil which was unexpected, and the causes of which he would, over a long period, try—though quite in vain—to analyse.” (ibid)

常玉畫作：鏡前母與子，1930年代。
Sanyu, Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, oil on canvas, 1930s (via Sotheby's HK)

我的生命中一無所有，我只是一個畫家。對於我的作品，我認為毋須賦予任何解釋，當觀賞我的作品時，應該清楚瞭解我所要表達的... 只是一個簡單的概念。～常玉
“I have nothing in my life, I am merely a painter. Regarding my works, I do not think explanations are necessary. When looking at my paintings, one should understand with clarity, what I am trying to express... is but a simple concept.” —Sanyu






Death and ecstasy... “[Art] is about connecting with human beings emotionally, not intellectually.” (Tamara Rojo)

Evening Prayer & Sensation

Oraison du Soir

Je vis assis, tel qu'un ange aux mains d'un barbier,
Empoignant une chope à fortes cannelures,
L'hypogastre et le col cambrés, une Gambier
Aux dents, sous l'air gonflé d'impalpables voilures.
Tels que les excréments chauds d'un vieux colombier,
Mille Rêves en moi font de douces brûlures :
Puis par instants mon coeur triste est comme un aubier
Qu'ensanglante l'or jeune et sombre des coulures.
Puis, quand j'ai ravalé mes rêves avec soin,
Je me tourne, ayant bu trente ou quarante chopes,
Et me recueille, pour lâcher l'âcre besoin :
Doux comme le Seigneur du cèdre et des hysopes,
Je pisse vers les cieux bruns, très haut et très loin
Avec l'assentiment des grands héliotropes.

*
Evening Prayer

I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.
Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,
And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern.


～Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works. Translated from the French by Paul Schmidt. Harper Colophon, 1976.

+++

Sensation

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue :
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, -- heureux comme avec une femme.

*
Through blue summer nights, I will pass along paths,
Getting pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.

Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond,
In Nature, -- as happily as with a woman.


～"Sensation," by Arthur Rimbaud, March 1870. From Rimbaud Complete, translated and edited by Wyatt Mason and published by Scribner (2003).

Poetry Pairing (series i): petals & gardens in flames～"Though It Be Thy Will" & "Self-embrace on Silk Prayer"

One communicates and exchanges in poetry, as in music, as in silence...


Though It Be Thy Will

by Abdias DeMarin

(Special thanks to Graceful-Jen for providing the lament
that served as its humourous counterpointe)


Though it be thy will to wrest thy breast from mine,
Though no Roman heart can make Sabian claim,
My pate is parched from excess prate and pine,
Such showes bring shame and diminish my fame.
At first light found a golden garden gave to me,
Lillie nymphs umteen litt'ring shade of tree,
The dewy petals rolled with fond embrace,
their kisses painting the tears on my face.
When bored with the bevy the breeze answered all,
Did a hundred more nymphs from the branches fall,
In beauty's bower, thus burdened with bliss,
I nearly forgave thy deeds gone amiss.
My love for thee is like a sorrowe blinde,
Obscur'ng the garden within my minde,
Though beauty is thine, 'tis a hair of the world's,
Nor canst thou wrest me, 'tis a flame unfurled.

+++

*Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, — (Keats, To Autumn)*

The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
oil on canvas, 132.1 x 213.7 cm, private collection.
As it was painted during the winter, Tadema arranged to have roses sent weekly from the French Riviera for four months to ensure the accuracy of each petal.

Self-embrace on Silk Prayer

by Ting-Jen Hwang, on 8th January 2012

(With thanks to Hamlet-at-Sea of this incarnation, 

for being the final catalyst of my poem.)

"Is it a blessing for a poet to be a natural poet-magnet?"

The romantic thinker wonders to herself.

'Oh you Little Fool,' she whispered,

A foolish thinker I am.

All these men, coming

in and out of me. All this pleasure and pain,

flickering like dying blue flames.

An instant garden trampled upon for hundreds of years

by those he loves with his Life－ah, such blasphemous

Beauty. An instant paradise turned

into the most exquisite ice ablaze.

A bruised garden amidst the flames.

The love and devotion that it takes to create

－such Beauty－

I can never fully comprehend.

Threads of a thousand hues are weaving themselves 

in and out of each other; breathing esoteric, 

breathing erotic, into

the weakest Bird of the most powerful strength－

A Bird without a name－

Can I be spared－Can I be

abstract like your patterns of this mesmerising nature, again?

I plead with my heart to be

as romantic and as abstract, like

your Little Brother, again.

Tears from the eyes of his heart are still rolling,

shining on my quill 

like dews on those pink Oleander flowers－

falling, falling, fallen. 

(And in case you were wondering, I was not speaking of 

your little brother, I was speaking of

Mine. Like all these quests for Beauty and pleasure－I was

speaking, and thinking, of Mine.)

Breathing erotic. Breathing esoteric.

All these fiery blossoms burning way below sub-zero,

I could faint,

just listening to them.

Voice Poetry: my recording of "Self-embrace on Silk Prayer"

I have always loved hearing the sounds of poetry: reciting quietly to myself, listening to poetry recordings, and those lovely songs set to poems as well as lyrics composed for music. Being particularly drawn to, and as a firm believer in, the "poetic essence" in written words (and in all artistic mediums), I love reciting and hearing the sounds of many different literary genres, not restricted to poetry－this awakens in me the beautiful psychological state of "flow"...

Here is a recording I made the other day reciting my recent poem Self-embrace on Silk Prayer. It was my first attempt at recording my poetry. :-)

宋徽宗，欲借風霜二詩帖。

Huizong's poem and exquisite Dancing Crane/ Slender Gold calligraphy, 

Northern Song dynasty.

Adagio of Thyrsus' Seduction

Fallen leaves from the maple tree slowly consumed
like a melody, into meticulous scales scattered on soft earth.
Blushing petals floating whirling dancing twisting in welkin,
delicately weaving heaven.
What is bound by faded rose gold are memories sealed
in the arms of wood;
What mesmerises from underneath that silken surface
pliably embraces the tree－
in soft compliance, nibbling ancient bark.

Paradise, featherlight, touches his earth,
gazing upon the heaviness of her kiss standing lifted
by branches of ethereality.

Self-embrace on Silk Prayer

*With thanks to Hamlet-at-Sea of this incarnation, for being the final catalyst of my poem.


"Is it a blessing for a poet to be a natural poet-magnet?"
The romantic thinker wonders to herself.
'Oh you Little Fool,' she whispered,
A foolish thinker I am.

All these men, coming
in and out of me. All this pleasure and pain,
flickering like dying blue flames.
An instant garden trampled upon for hundreds of years
by those he loves with his Life－ah, such blasphemous
Beauty. An instant paradise turned
into the most exquisite ice ablaze.
A bruised garden amidst the flames.
The love and devotion that it takes to create
－such Beauty－
I can never fully comprehend.

Threads of a thousand hues are weaving themselves
in and out of each other; breathing esoteric,
breathing erotic, into
the weakest Bird of the most powerful strength－
A Bird without a name－

Can I be spared－Can I be
abstract like your patterns of this mesmerising nature, again?
I plead with my heart to be
as romantic and as abstract, like
your Little Brother, again.
Tears from the eyes of his heart are still rolling,
shining on my quill
like dews on those pink Oleander flowers－
falling, falling, fallen.

(And in case you were wondering, I was not speaking of
your little brother, I was speaking of
Mine. Like all these quests for Beauty and pleasure－I was
speaking, and thinking, of Mine.)

Breathing erotic. Breathing esoteric.
All these fiery blossoms burning way below sub-zero,
I could faint,
just listening to them.

I have no refuge in the world other than thy threshold.
There is no protection for my head other than this door. ~Hafiz
(inscription on the Ardabil Carpet)

+See also Lisa Creagh's Floriculture 1 and the artist's website.