Depression Before Spring
The cock crows
But no queen rises.
The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
threading the wind.
Ho! Ho!
But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.
But no queen comes
In slipper green.
--Wallace Stevens
(Note: I am away from home this week and may be slow in replying to comments and in visiting others' blogs. Thank you for being here. I look forward to catching up!)
A review of Paul Hoover's
Sonnet 56,
in The Pedestal Magazine
Haibun
Late afternoon: half-moon sky whitewashed by weather. She is gone and he misses her. Thinking of her now, he sharpens her distance, wounds himself with her warmth. The taste of her mouth was shocking in its pleasure. Each time dreamt, some of her still disappears. There had been a misunderstanding, damaging words. Spring would come someday, with its rush of white water, nut-like buds, and first flowers. He was knee-deep in sorrow. The taste in his mouth was metal, like the residue of war.
Let this sad interim
fill with kindness, kill dullness.
Love sharpens oceans.
Paul Hoover
Sonnet 56
(a rewrite of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 56” as haibun)
…. The sun is lower in the sky,
And as one turns towards what had felt like home,
The windows start to flicker with a loveless flame,
As though the chambers they concealed were empty. Is this
How heaven feels? The same perspective from a different room,
Inhabiting a prospect seen from someone else’s balcony
In a suspended moment---as a silver airplane silently ascends
And life, at least as one has known it, slides away?
….The evening air feels sweeter. The moon,
Emerging from a maze of clouds into the open sky,
Casts a thin light on the trees. Infinitely far away,
One almost seems to hear---as though the fingers of a solitary giant
Traced the pure and abstract schema of those strings
In a private movement of delight---the soundless syllables’
Ambiguous undulations, like the murmur of bees.
John Koethe
from "Sunday Evening"
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Thank you to ANNE for this water tower, at her blog, miscellanéesanne
6.44 Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
6.44 Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.
6.45 The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.
The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.
6.5 For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.
6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it would doubt where a question cannot be asked.
For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.
6.421 (Ethics and æsthetics are one.)
Salamander
Like a clutch of wet leaves
kicked up in the snow
on the path beside the swamp.
Ice frozen to its sides
he couldn’t brush clean.
Eyes frozen to blind shards.
Trembling. --- He left it there,
but all day, he feels
it dying, an amputation
hugged to his chest,
a sleeve in the wind,
soft with ghost pain.
This will happen to some of us.
A spark misfires
in the hibernating brain,
and you wake to the wrong season.
Born again from the nourishing,
amniotic mud, ready
to thrum with love
for the day---
you crawl into
a stunned world
of inconceivable white fire.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil, the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit, like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is a Noah’s ark on the sea of eternity, containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold, and the back for the front, and smiles for tears, and no for yes, with the most unutterable nostalgia.
--Diane Arbus
Nothing is ever the same as they said it would be. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.
--Diane Arbus
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