"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