Poetic Essence: Erotikos Logos／青玉案

清 郎世寧 畫瓶花 (Giuseppe Castiglione, Flowers in a Vase, Qing dynasty)

          I

Rose of fate, you looked for ways to wound us
yet you bent like the secret about to be released
and the command you chose to give us was beautiful
and your smile was like a ready sword.

The ascent of your cycle livened creation
from your thorn emerged the way’s thought
our impulse dawned naked to possess you
the world was easy: a simple pulsation.


          II

The secrets of the sea are forgotten on the shores
the darkness of the depths is forgotten in the surf;
the corals of memory suddenly shine purple. . .
O do not stir. . . listen to hear its light

motion. . . you touched the tree with the apples
the hand reached out, the thread points the way and guides you. . .
O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves
if it were but you who would bring the forgotten dawn!

May lilies blossom again on the meadow of separation
may days open mature, the embrace of the heavens,
may those eyes alone shine in the glare
the pure soul be outlined like the song of a flute.

Was it night that shut its eyes? Ashes remain,
as from the string of a bow a choked hum remains,
ash and dizziness on the black shore
and dense fluttering imprisoned in surmise.

Rose of the wind, you knew but took us unknowing
at a time when thought was building bridges
so that fingers would knit and two fates pass by
and spill into the low and rested light.


          III

O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves!
Come forth sleepless form in the gathering silence
raise your head from your cupped hands
so that your will be done and you tell me again

the words that touched and merged with the blood like an embrace;
and let your desire, deep like the shade of a walnut tree, bend
and flood us with your lavish hair
from the down of the kiss to the leaves of the heart.

You lowered your eyes and you had the smile
that masters of another time humbly painted.
Forgotten reading from an ancient gospel,
your words breathed and your voice was gentle:

‘The passing of time is soft and unworldly
and pain floats lightly in my soul
dawn breaks in the heavens, the dream remains afloat
and it’s as if scented shrubs were passing.

‘With my eyes’ startling, with my body’s blush
a flock of doves awakens and descends
their low, circling flight entangles me
the stars are a human touch on my breast.

‘I hear, as in a sea shell, the distant
adverse and confused lament of the world
but these are moments only, they disappear,
and the two-branched thought of my desire reigns alone.

‘It seemed I’d risen naked in a vanished recollection
when you came, strange and familiar, my beloved
to grant me, bending, the boundless deliverance
I was seeking from the wind’s quick sistrum. . .’

The broken sunset declined and was gone
and it seemed a delusion to ask for the gifts of the sky.
You lowered your eyes. The moon’s thorn blossomed
and you became afraid of the mountain’s shadows.

. . . In the mirror how our love diminishes
in sleep the dreams, school of oblivion
in the depths of time, how the heart contracts
and vanishes in the rocking of a foreign embrace. . .


          IV

Two serpents, beautiful, apart, tentacles of separation
crawl and search, in the night of the trees,
for a secret love in hidden bowers;
sleepless they search, they neither drink nor eat.

Circling, twisting, their insatiable intent
spins, multiplies, turns, spreads rings on the body
which the laws of the starry dome silently govern,
stirring its hot, irrepressible frenzy.

The forest stands as a shivering pillar for night
and the silence is a silver cup where moments fall
echoes distinct, whole, a careful chisel
sustained by carved lines. . .

The statue suddenly dawns. But the bodies have vanished
in the sea in the wind in the sun in the rain.
So the beauties nature grants us are born
but who knows if a soul hasn’t died in the world.

The parted serpents must have circled in fantasy
(the forest shimmers with birds, shoots, blossoms)
their wavy searching still remains,
like the turnings of the cycle that bring sorrow.


          V

Where is the double-edged day that had changed everything?
Won’t there be a navigable river for us?
Won’t there be a sky to drop refreshing dew
for the soul benumbed and nourished by the lotus?

On the stone of patience we wait for the miracle
that opens the heavens and makes all things possible
we wait for the angel as in the age-old drama
at the moment when the open roses of twilight

disappear. . . Red rose of the wind and of fate,
you remained in memory only, a heavy rhythm
rose of the night, you passed, undulating purple
undulation of the sea. . . The world is simple.


                                          Athens, October ’29—December ’30

George Seferis, "Erotikos Logos" translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from Collected Poems (George Seferis). Copyright © 1995 by George Seferis, Princeton University Press. *via The Poetry Foundation

孫郡，青玉案之夏至與白海棠；新文人畫攝影。
Sun Jun, Still Life series, Photography of New Literati Painting, 2013.

孫郡，青玉案之红芍药；新文人畫攝影。
Sun Jun, Still Life series, 2013, Photography of New Literati Painting.

孫郡，明月清風系列：微花 3-1；新文人畫攝影。
Sun Jun, Small Flower, 2012, Photography of New Literati Painting.

+

Lastly, something I came upon which very much agrees with what I consider the "poetic essence" in literature, in words (last sentence in particular):

'That behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined. Actually, every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of all mankind. Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world. I'm afraid most people use words as something to throw away without sensing the burden that lies in a word. Of course, that is what is significant about poetry, or the lyric, in which this can be brought about more intensively than in prose, although prose has the same function.' 

～Heinrich Böll, on language and the power of imagination,
　via The Paris Review

Coracias Caudatus (lilac-breasted roller)

With a wide beautiful smile she walks back into his arms, the home of their hearts, like a black swan sweating out of the sweet tropics’ heat and humid scents—she is dressed too warm for the sun and for his embrace. No one can understand the intense ivory in her voice, the aroused gem inside her body, save him, and his eyes: there is wind in the sky, there is gentleness that day in his usually inescapably fiery gaze.

Soon after they live their love she sleeps for two days. When she wakes, she covers herself with a white cashmere shawl. He wonders why she feels cold during a time when her body temperature should naturally be raised a few degrees. “I am always cold. I am a sickly child.” She says in a tone whose intention is to seduce more words from him. He strokes her face and says, “You look good—you look rested.” All she can think about is his hands and his face and how much she longs for a cheesecake made with rose petals.

***

At night, in bed, her thoughts are racing, without logic, with no real purpose. She thinks he has fallen asleep next to her. “What is your emotional state after coming back to me?" Out of the blue he says. Stunned, and almost as if she was a child caught stealing candy from the glass jar, she stays silent for a while, breathing very quietly. “_________________”

She isn’t sure if he is convinced by her answer.


(To be continued...?)

Detail of a gown by Alexander McQueen, Spring 2007 Ready-to-Wear collection.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, born 1948), Bust of Venus,
November 26, 1840, 2009. Gelatin silver print.
Image: 36 7/8 x 29 1/2 in. Framed: 48 7/8 x 41 1/2 in. © Hiroshi Sugimoto

我的美麗與哀愁：some fragments on poetry and soul

“Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.” 

—Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands

A poet's soul is written down in words and expressed through the soul of his poetry. A sigh becomes the poetic essence of his soul, a recognition of this delicate and evanescent beauty that is universal, paradoxically transient and eternal at the same time. A breath, the pearlescent powder on a butterfly's wing, an evening breeze, colours of the world at dusk, a mirage on sand, a thought, a melody, a poem lasting for as long as it is sung silently, soundlessly. The efflorescence of fallen petals on a floating piano in slumber of emptiness, nonchalantly awaiting reveille from repose.

*
A poet's soul can always foresee the aching sadness that comes with/after beauty－something that "is," and not "caused"－the featherlight imprint of a butterfly's kiss upon one's heart that weighs heavier than the blood of a velvety scarlet rose...

*
This is the moon's phosphorescence... As exquisite and mysterious as the poetry of the moon, of the stirring illusion of crazing inside jade.


I shall quote from one of the poems dearest to my heart－“Invitation to the Harp” by Rafael Alberti (translated by Mark Strand):

Go even farther away than that.
Where the moon is torn between a poplar leaf and a passionate book,
where there are midnight frosts that candelabra conceal
and where death shivers in the unsteady sleep of the candles,
where a puppet in mourning dies over a tuberose,
where a voice from oblivion stirs the sleeping water of pianos.

Go always farther away, farther away.
Go where floors retain the echoes and shadows of footsteps,
where moths watch over the silence of neckties,
where a hundred years is a harp that has been forgotten.

film x-ray radiograph of roses, by bionerd (via flickr)

“Today in my heart
a vague trembling of stars
and all roses are
as white as my pain.”

―Federico García Lorca, from “Canción Otoñal” (Autumn Song)

Mughal gem set gold mounted jade mirror, Northern India, 18th century.

We hardly ever see the moon any more
                                                          so no wonder
   it’s so beautiful when we look up suddenly
and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges
brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans
       your hair over your forehead and your memories
              of Red Grooms’ locomotive landscape
I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather
                jacket Norman gave me
                                                and the corduroy coat David
     gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco
heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions
                                                 in a vast tragic veldt
     that is far from our small selves and our temporally united
passions in the cathedral of Januaries


     everything is too comprehensible
these are my delicate and caressing poems
I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past
                                                  so many!
but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl
                                                  to my equally naked heart

～Avenu A, by Frank O’Hara

*
One's heart can be a riddle to oneself. Is it possible, could it be an intimation of not loving one's own soul would there be a soulmate out there with whom one was not in love?

*

“La noche habla suspiros de hojas.

En el silencio,

una sombra camina la huella de mi susurro.”

"Walk my sigh.

I knew there was none reflected in each step."

“It was the night sea

deep breathing silence.

The message of the conch you told in your look from sirens

where dream gorges of fire.

Ancestral Elixir

walking the stone beating.”

～Three poems: Untitled i & ii, and Deep Blue by Nube Alix

from the series Dialog, 1973, by Rudolf Bonvie (via)

Musicality in Poetic Narratives

“It was counterpoint in a narrative form.

I’m just using polyphony as an analogy here. Let’s say there are two musical lines, a treble and a bass line, that you’re hearing simultaneously. You’re experiencing each one, but you’re also experiencing what’s happening between them. Each line has complete integrity, but the space between them, the harmonic relationship, is just as critical an element, and it’s that tension, the way it all works together—that is what is uncannily exciting. How I would love to be able to do something like that! I would love to make some experience for the reader that entails the words and could not be made with other words, but that is much more, and other, than what the words are. And I would love to make some experience that creates all kinds of reverberations between different elements. /.../

But the message that is found cannot be exactly the message you’ve sent. Whatever bunch of words the writer transmits requires a person, a consciousness on the other end, to reassemble it. You know how it feels when you read something that opens up a little sealed envelope in your brain. It’s a letter from yourself, but it’s been delivered by somebody else, a writer.

Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.”

～Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218, interviewed by Catherine Steindler; from Paris Review Spring 2013 issue, No. 204

The Intelligence of Flowers, 1907, by Alvin Langdon Coburn

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed

& that necessary.

～from “Variation on the Word Sleep,” by Margaret Atwood

Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, Paysage russe (Russian Landscape), c.1859

Antoine’s Women; Rosalba’s Muse

“Watteau’s women do not care to represent Womanhood or Love or Beauty, certainly not with a capital W or L or B. They are not the sort of women who want to be regarded as forces of nature. They are not interested in being idealized or idolized. They are too much at ease to be caught up in such fantasies.

They stand apart from their own beauty and their amorous adventures, as if they felt free to consider the value of love or beauty, but only the value it might have for them, for now—a private matter. They are in some sense natural aristocrats, with a freedom from social constraints that gives them the aura of supernatural beings, even of goddesses.

But Watteau’s women are not goddesses in any classical sense. They have none of the traditional responsibilities of goddesses. They do not personify some value or virtue. They do not have supernatural powers. And that is precisely their charm, the key to their comic exuberance. They are goddesses who are freed from all responsibility. They are goddesses who have resigned from their roles.

They are goddesses on the lam.”

～Jed Perl, Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World

A Muse, by Rosalba Carriera, Italian, about 1725,
pastel on laid blue paper, 12 3/16 x 10 1/4 in., via The Getty Museum.

Portrait of Archduchess Maria Isabella, from The History of Florence: From 59 B.C. to 1966: the two-thousand-year story of a unique city, whose way of life has influenced the world, by Marcello Vannucci.

Lady Beatrice, by George Clausen

Combing Hair, by Torii Kotondo (Japanese, 1900-1976). Japan, Oct 1929.
Prints; woodcuts. Color woodblock print; embossed.
Image: 16 1/8 x 10 5/16 in. (41 x 26.2cm);
Sheet: 18 9/16 x 11 3/4in. (47.2 x 29.8cm)

Mirror (Kagemi), by 恩地孝四郎 Onchi Koshiro (Japanese, 1891-1955), ca. 1930, 
woodblock print with gofun and mica, 33 x 23.1cm

“Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible
its multitudinous Charlatans—everything in short but
the Enchantress of Numbers.” 
～Charles Babbage to Ada Lovelace  

*Portrait (detail) of Ada by British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836).

Con la rosa tra le labbra, 1895, by Ettore Tito (Italian 1859-1941).

Portrait of Countess Elisa Dadiani, by Savelij Abramovich Sorin, 1919 (via)

Nayika Shringara: the romantic herione adorns herself, preparing her hair. 

Jodhpur, circa 1830 (artist unknown). Gouache & gold on paper. 15 x 10.3cm. 

*via Indian Miniature Paintings

Ideal Female Heads, French, 1769-1770,

by Jacques Augustin Pajou (1730-1809),

Terracotta on white marble socle, via The Getty Museum.

Detail of Bacchante tenant un tambour de basque, avec deux enfants 
(Bacchante holding a tambourine, with two children),
by Jacques Augustin Pajou (1730-1809); Marble, Musée du Louvre.

Three Studies of a Woman and a Study of Her Hand Holding a Fan, 
by Antoine Watteau c.1717

Detail of a Female Nude Study, by George Lawrence Bulleid (British 1858-1933).

Vioets, Sweet Violets (detail), 1906, by John William Godward

When the Heart is Young (detail), 1902, by John William Godward. 

Oil on canvas, private collection

Jacques-Louis David, Psyché Abandonnée (detail), 1795, Musée du Louvre

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, 1864, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Helene Caroline Therese, Duchess in Bavaria (4 April 1834 – 16 May 1890) 
of the House of Wittelsbach, nicknamed Néné, was a Bavarian princess and, 
through marriage, temporarily the head of the Thurn and Taxis family.

Spices, Perfumes, Toxins!

"Spices, Perfumes, Toxins!" by Avner Dorman: I am desperately in need of the CD or DVD of this full-length concert...








The title Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! refers to three substances that are extremely appealing, yet filled with danger. Spices delight the palate, but can cause illness; perfumes seduce, but can also betray; toxins bring ecstasy, but are deadly. The concerto combines Middle-Eastern drums, orchestral percussion, and rock drums with orchestral forces – a unique sound both enticing and dangerous.

Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! is a result of years of collaboration with PercaDu. While we were still students at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv, Tomer and Adi asked me to write a piece for them. All three of us aimed at a piece that would be markedly Israeli and would reflect young Israeli culture. The process of composing the piece involved working closely with PercaDu on my ideas and testing them on the instruments long before the piece was done. In hindsight, I believe that the most important choice in making the piece sound Israeli was the use of four Darbukas and Tom-Toms in addition to the Marimbas. The piece, Udacrep Akubrad (PercaDu Darbuka spelled backwards) became one of PercaDu’s signature pieces and my most performed composition and is the basis for the first movement of the concerto.

Spices – the first movement draws its inspiration from the music of our region (extending its boundaries to the east as far as the Indian sub-continent). The piece is largely based on Middle-Eastern and Indian scales and uses the Indian system of Talas for rhythmic organization. I use these elements within a large-scale dramatic form and employ repetitive minimalism as it appears in the music traditions of the East and in the works of Western minimalists of the past forty years. Approximately at the movement’s golden section there is a cadenza that precurses the last movement of the concerto.

In Perfumes, the sonic world changes as one of the percussionists leaves the marimba and plays on a vibraphone. In Perfumes I use what I call multicultural polyphony. The opening theme of the movement (in the marimba) is reminiscent of Baroque arias. The three flutes that accompany the melody (regular, alto, and bass) echo the ornamental nature of the melody and transform it into lines characteristic of Middle-Eastern folk music. At the same time, the bass line borrows its sound from the world of Jazz. Each part of the texture contributes the “soul” of its genre, so to speak, in an effort to create a humanistic whole that express the diversity of our time and culture. As the movement progresses the soloists and orchestra embark on a colorful journey from the seductive to the dangerous.

In Toxins! the soloists use the entire variety of percussion instruments at their disposal. The movement is based on alternation between an aggressive rhythmic pattern (played on drumsets) and passionate outbursts in the orchestra. It swings like a pendulum between extreme joyous ecstasy and obsessive anxiety, pain, and delusions. As the movement develops, the music becomes increasingly fanatical until the final outburst of catharsis and death.

{*text via Avner Dorman website linked above}

soundless music (to the new year) & Emily

W. S. Merwin's poetry never ceases to move me... his words and images create a realm of soundless music where I long to be, where poetic yearning is such poignant and yet quiet beauty.


With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

～"To the New Year," by W. S. Merwin

+++

And my beloved Emily... on this new day.

It's all I have to bring today— 

This, and my heart beside— 

This, and my heart, and all the fields— 

And all the meadows wide— 

Be sure you count—should I forget 

Some one the sum could tell— 

This, and my heart, and all the Bees 

Which in the Clover dwell.

～"It's all I have to bring today," by Emily Dickinson

A fine and rare celadon-glazed shell-shaped brush washer, seal mark and period of Qianlong.
Photo credit: Sotheby's.

"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