Eine Klage-Welt

departure and invitation

2011-04-14T13:23:00.005-05:00

Last month was, astoundingly, five years since my first post on this blog. It has been good to me. Most essentially, I met all of you! But now it is time for change, a cleaner design, a better format for showing images.

I am more attached to the Klage-Welt than I would have ever expected to become, five years ago. Writing this post feels like turning the key for one last time in the door of the beloved house where I was born, but which has grown too small and cluttered with the debris of the years, and now turning toward the unexplored glow in the West ....

Please visit my my new blog, ein klage-himmel.

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a long pull against the heaviness of earth

2011-04-12T15:27:00.002-05:00

Poetics in the Season of Migration

After fog, the sun unhitches geese
from the gleaned-over stubble-ground
where they have huddled through the night.

They rise now, clumsy, angling up
to blue, above the planet’s shade,
the mist and morning slurred with calls.

How apologize for poetry?
For how it fails the flock’s long pull
against the heaviness of Earth,

against wind, the mortal shear
of entropy that scatters form?

Their one, blared note sums up a year,

but words falter and trip, waste breath,
lose the smell of dirt or rain,
the wings once more climbing sunlight.

Such a long work, waiting to hear
that hard, scraping honk as song….
No longer clumsy, the geese order

and wheel, squared-off and cutting south,
stars intuited along the way,
written tight into their wedge, and gone.

.

turbulent

2011-04-10T12:47:00.004-05:00

(click to enlarge)

words fail, cold wind in the separation

2011-04-07T23:25:00.003-05:00

take flight at dawn

2011-04-04T16:21:00.003-05:00

crocuses

2011-04-02T14:24:00.001-05:00

late March

2011-03-29T19:30:00.001-05:00

the gilded phalloi of the crocuses
are thrusting at the spring air

-- Ezra Pound

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abstraction

2011-03-27T21:49:00.001-05:00

and is nowhere, and is endless

2011-03-24T09:55:00.005-05:00

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin
from "High Windows"

window-watching

2011-03-21T17:14:00.003-05:00

Les fenêtres

XIII

Ce jour elle fut d'humeur fenestrière:
rien que de regarder lui semblait vivre.
Elle vit venir, d'inexistence ivre,
un monde à son coeur complémentaire.

On aurait dit que son regard arrose
abondamment un doux jardin d'images;
était-ce liberté ou esclavage
de ne pas changer l'indolente pose?

Son coeur, loin de ce qui vit et vire,
semblait un nombre qui soudain s'éclaire
pareil à la Balance ou la Lyre;
un presque-nom d'absences millénaires.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Windows

XIII

That day she was in a mood to window-watch;
to live seemed nothing but seeing.
She saw a world still dizzy from non-being
veer toward her, her heart‘s match.

One might have said that her gaze
watered a garden of images, abundantly.
Was it enslavement or liberty
in her unchanging, indolent daze?

Her heart, far from what lives and desires,
seemed a cipher in sudden incandescence
like the Scales or the Lyre --
an almost-name of ancient absence.

(my translation)

sand

2011-03-16T22:07:00.003-05:00

A poem, "Girl in Red," translated from R. M. Rilke: here

.

distance

2011-03-15T06:10:00.000-05:00

to beg

2011-03-12T13:06:00.003-06:00

.... par la fatigue, le malheur, la mort, l’homme est fait matière et consommé par Dieu.

Simone Weil
La pesanteur et la grâce

.... through weariness, sorrow, death, man is made matter and consumed by God.

Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace

breath and the beating heart

2011-03-10T11:46:00.006-06:00

Que je disparaisse afin que ces choses que je vois deviennent, du fait qu'elles ne seront plus choses que je vois, parfaitement belles.

Je ne désire nullement que ce monde créé ne me soit plus sensible, mais que ce ne soit plus à moi qu'il soit sensible. A moi, il ne peut dire son secret qui est trop haut. Que je parte, et le créateur et la créature échangeront leurs secrets.

Voir un paysage tel qu'il est quand je n'y suis pas...

Quand je suis quelque part, je souille le silence du ciel et de la terre par ma respiration et le battement de mon coeur.

Let me disappear so that these things I see should become, because they will no longer be things that I see, perfectly beautiful.

I desire not at all that this created world should be no more sensible to me, but that it no longer be to me that it is sensible. To me, it cannot say its too lofty secret. Let me part, and the creator and his creation will exchange their secrets.

To see a landscape as it is when I am not there….

When I am somewhere, I sully the silence of the sky and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.

Simone Weil
La pesanteur et la grâce

The End of Winter

A crow stabs himself in a puddle
and dies in the broken water.

I learned that effacement is a duty.
Disappearing is yet hard

in this field stripped of green,
without even snow,

in silence and mud,

days when the pulse of her lost hands
beats in my throat, in my breath,

a fist of blood and fog.

.

wings

2011-03-02T08:44:00.004-06:00

Under a picture

Swarming of ravens over a wheat billow.
Blue of which heaven? The higher? Neither?
Late arrow that the soul released.
Louder whirring. Nearer glow. This world and the other.

Paul Celan

Under a picture

I was too proud to say “the heart.”

Not anymore.

In the brown and gray of winter ending
a roil of birds over an empty field
shivers at once from chaos into a living tissue,
all dark resonance and unison,
one true thing, together.

Then chaos again.

It rends the heart
that waits here, too late for everything else.

the skin of snow

2011-01-31T22:58:00.003-06:00

Chilean poet Raul Zurita, reading at Notre Dame

from "The Descent"

I touch your skin, your body, and the tips of my fingers, which always used to follow yours, sense in the darkness that we are descending. They have destroyed all the bridges and the cordilleras are sinking, the Pacific is sinking, and its remains are sinking in front of us as the remains of our heart also sink. In the face of death someone said something to us about resurrection. Does that mean your empty eye sockets will see? That my fingertips will go on touching yours? My fingers touch your fingers in the darkness and go down as now the peaks, the seas, go down, as our dead love, our dead gaze, these dead words go down. Like a field of daisies that bend I touch your skin, your body, and my hands try to find in the darkness the skin of snow in which we may perhaps live again. But no, of the peaks of the Andes only the traces of these words remain, of these dead pages, of a wide, dead field of flowers where the cordilleras like white shrouds, with us beneath them and still embracing, are sinking down.

Raul Zurita
translated by William Rowe

hands and wings

2011-01-27T11:58:00.003-06:00

Peisaj cu mâini și aripi

În spatele fiecărui om
stă de veghe un înger. Îngerul
din spatele meu a căzut
și totuși ale cui sunt mâinile astea,
aceste mâini fine ca niște aripi
ce atât de nostalgic
îmi acoperă ochii?

Nichita Danilov

Landscape with hands and wings

At every man’s back
an angel stands guard. The angel
behind me has fallen --
so whose hands are these,
hands tender as wings
where longing for the past
darkens my eyes?

(my translation)

as if there is no other world

2010-12-25T23:31:00.003-06:00

a doe fades into memory

2010-12-13T15:02:00.006-06:00

Zwielicht

Dämmrung will die Flügel spreiten,
Schaurig rühren sich die Bäume,
Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume -
Was will dieses Grau'n bedeuten?

Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern,
Laß es nicht alleine grasen,
Jäger ziehn im Wald und blasen,
Stimmen hin und wider wandern....

Joseph von Eichendorff

At Twilight

If you love a little doe,
don’t let her go grazing alone.
Hunters beat the woods and sound the horn.
Voices wander to and fro….

Be dark for her now, be forest.
Her wholeness cascades into many shapes.
The luminous death in her eyes leaps
and shelters in your unrest.

[ Note: Obviously not exactly a translation. But, then, not exactly not a translation, either. I'll leave that up to you.... Thanks also to Rilke and to her ....]

sky

2010-12-10T12:41:00.006-06:00

This is a story

The birds were there and not there, flickering as darkly as the forest, in and out of the wind, those quick needles sewing the day to our blood.

She said, “They are seeds on the first breath of creation.”

She said, “Maybe there is a world where chaos is distinguishable from order, but I won’t go there.”

She said, “My bones are hollow, too, and when I tumble onto the grass with my arms wide, the sky falls into me.”

Her face was shining.

It breaks my heart when I remember that this was the day before the storm.

(click to enlarge images)

sky

2010-12-01T00:13:00.000-06:00

Annie

2010-11-07T07:18:00.002-06:00

Indiana

2010-11-02T23:11:00.002-05:00

(click to enlarge)

night in the lonesome October

2010-10-31T09:39:00.007-05:00

In all that I endured there was no physical suffering but of moral distress an infinitude. My fancy grew charnel, I talked "of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs." I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night. In the former, the torture of meditation was excessive - in the latter, supreme. When the grim Darkness overspread the Earth, then, with every horror of thought, I shook - shook as the quivering plumes upon the hearse. When Nature could endure wakefulness no longer, it was with a struggle that I consented to sleep - for I shuddered to reflect that, upon awaking, I might find myself the tenant of a grave. And when, finally, I sank into slumber, it was only to rush at once into a world of phantasms, above which, with vast, sable, overshadowing wing, hovered, predominant, the one sepulchral Idea.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Premature Burial"

La Première Nuit

Voici venir le soir doux au vieillard lubrique.
Mon chat Mürr, accroupi comme un sphinx héraldique,
Contemple inquiet de sa prunelle fantastique
Monter à l'horizon la lune chlorotique.

C'est l'heure où l'enfant prie, où Paris-Lupanar
Jette sur le pavé de chaque boulevard
Les filles aux seins froids qui sous le gaz blafard
Vaguent flairant de l’œil un mâle de hasard.

Moi, près de mon chat Mürr, je rêve à ma fenêtre.
Je songe aux enfants qui partout viennent de naître,
Je songe à tous les morts enterrés d'aujourd'hui.

Et je me figure être au fond du cimetière
Et me mets à la place en entrant dans leur bière
De ceux qui vont passer là leur première nuit.

Jules Laforgue

The First Night

Here comes the evening, sweet to old letches.
My cat Mürr, crouched heraldic sphinx, watches
-- uneasy behind his fantastic pupil -- the moon
Gliding chlorotic across the horizon.

This is the hour when the child prays, when Paris-Lupanar
Ejects its cold-breasted girls onto the boulevards,
And they trawl the gaslit pavements, bold to try
Any random male with the wink of an eye.

But at the window, with Mürr, I lead my revery.
I think of all the babies drawing their first breath.
I think of the day’s new dead laid in the earth.

And I imagine myself in the depth of the cemetery
And put myself in their place, stretched on the bier--
Those who will be spending this first night there.

(my translation)

Happy Halloween!

An October country: 5

2010-10-29T23:08:00.002-05:00

October country ... that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist, where noons go quickly and midnights stay.... That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain....

--Ray Bradbury, The October Country

An October country: 4

2010-10-24T06:59:00.000-05:00

An October country: 3

2010-10-22T14:37:00.010-05:00

the hem of the wind unravels
in milkweed down

standing yet in my mouth
the little fire of your name

flickers and speaks
to heal my breath

l’ourlet du vent s’effile
en duvet d’asclépiade

et debout dans ma bouche
le petit feu de ton nom

vacille et parle
à me guérir le souffle

tivul vântului se deșiră
în puf și semințe

dreapta însă în gura mea
flacăra numelui tău

pâlpâie și vorbește
să-mi vindece răsuflarea

An October country: 2

2010-10-21T15:37:00.001-05:00

An October country: 1

2010-10-20T10:24:00.006-05:00

La nature déchire ses manuscrits, démolit sa bibliothèque, gaule rageusement ses derniers fruits….

Nature is tearing up her manuscripts, demolishing her library, madly goading her last fruit from the trees....

Francis Ponge, La fin de l’automne

my beloved with the hair like autumn,
with the smell of autumn wind in your hair,

i will carry red leaves to make you a dress, a veil,
and you will go through the fog of morning
and beneath the muted birdcalls of afternoon,

warm in your scarlet, rustling dress --
as i have touched the leaves
to warm you, as i have gathered

my wounded breath to give you,
here, in the folds of these dying colors

an autumn city

2010-10-16T22:51:00.003-05:00

(montreal)

different again

2010-09-30T12:02:00.002-05:00

Late September, Here

Early mist burns from the lake. The chipmunk
scitters along a lichen-spotted fallen locust,

from cool shade into sun, from sun
through bands of shade.

Small things, yes,
but there is no grief in them.

The pulse of the season finds itself in my body.
I am a vein, a nerve ---

I am different
when a yellow leaf breaks from its twig

to glint down the air,
and different again

when a red leaf falls.

more, and still more

2010-09-07T15:25:00.002-05:00

.... to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

from John Keats, "To Autumn"

a meager fire

2010-09-02T14:23:00.004-05:00

Le Travail du Poète

L’ouvrage d’un regard d’heure en heure affaibli
n’est pas plus de rêver que de former des pleurs,
mais de veiller comme un berger et d’appeler
tout ce qui risque de se perdre s’il s’endort.

*

Ainsi, contre le mur éclairé par l’été
(mais ne serait-ce pas plutôt par sa mémoire),
dans la tranquillité du jour je vous regarde,
vous qui vous éloignez toujours plus, qui fuyez,
je vous appelle, qui brillez dans l’herbe obscure
comme autrefois dans le jardin, voix ou lueurs
(nul ne le sait) liant les défunts à l’enfance…
(Est-elle morte, telle dame sous le buis,
sa lampe éteinte, son bagage dispersé ?
Ou bien va-t-elle revenir de sous la terre
Et moi j’irais au devant d’elle et je dirais :

« Qu’avez vous fait de tout ce temps qu’on n’entendait
ni votre rire ni vos pas dans la ruelle ?
Fallait-il s’absenter sans personne avertir ?
Ô dame ! revenez maintenant parmi nous… »)

*

Dans l’ombre et l’heure d’aujourd’hui se tient cachée,
ne disant mot, cette ombre d’hier. Tel est le monde.
Nous ne le voyons pas très longtemps : juste assez
pour en garder ce qui scintille et va s’éteindre
pour appeler encore et encore, et trembler
de ne plus voir. Ainsi s’applique l’appauvri,
comme un homme à genoux qu’on verrait s’efforcer
contre le vent de rassembler son maigre feu…

Philippe Jaccottet

The Work of the Poet

The labor of a gaze weakened hour by hour
is no more in dreaming than in shaping tears,
but holding vigil like a shepherd and calling
all that risks being lost if he falls asleep.

*

Likewise, against a wall illuminated by summer
(or perhaps by summer‘s memory),
in the quiet of the day I watch you,
moving ever farther away, fleeing,
I call you, you who shine in the dark grass
as once in the garden, voices or glimmers
(no one knows) tying the deceased to childhood….
(Is she dead, that lady under the boxwood,
her lamp extinguished, her baggage scattered?
Or will she truly come back from underground?
And I would go before her and say:

“What have you done with all that time we heard
neither your laughter nor your footfall in the lane?
Did you have to vanish without warning anyone?
Lady … now come back among us….”)

*

The shade of yesterday hides in shadow
and today’s hour, wordless. Such is the world.
We don’t see it for very long: just enough
to grasp what sparks from it and will go out,
to call again and again, and to tremble
at seeing no more. So the impoverished man
exerts himself --- whom we might see on his knees,
who cobbles up a meager fire against the wind….

(my translation)

swift

2010-08-25T09:24:00.003-05:00

sparkle

2010-08-15T11:54:00.002-05:00

half-created shadow

2010-08-06T08:47:00.002-05:00

Fragment

To thirst and find no fill - to wail and wander
With short unsteady steps - to pause and ponder -
To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle
Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle;
To nurse the image of unfelt caresses
Till dim imagination just possesses
The half-created shadow, then all the night
Sick...

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

rain, the imagined and the real

2010-06-23T13:18:00.005-05:00

Two things of opposite nature seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change:
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace,
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

--Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

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If you are a reader of this blog, thank you. Your being here has meant very much to me. Now the Klage-Welt will be silent for a time. I am emptied and have nothing to say. Maybe I never did.....

allegory

2010-06-08T09:52:00.001-05:00

the flesh and veil of beauty and innocence and sin

wondering what we had been

2010-06-01T12:02:00.004-05:00

Photo by Roxana Ghita

A poem, "Absolution," in Chantarelle's Notebook.

the world of dew is a world of dew....

2010-05-22T09:02:00.001-05:00

the momentary sky
in this drop of dew

will return to the sky,
will be lost there

what is joy --
definition or release?

hatching

2010-05-12T13:37:00.005-05:00

private life

2010-05-09T01:06:00.007-05:00

A poem at The Cortland Review.

If you go there and click on the little arrow, you can hear me read it (though the recording is not all that great).

spiders

2010-05-07T07:27:00.002-05:00

robin's eggs

2010-04-30T13:16:00.002-05:00

a nest above my front door

dandelions, again....

2010-04-26T19:37:00.002-05:00

wing

2010-04-24T00:08:00.005-05:00

Walking on the beach, I found -- on pebbles and sand, as if thrown there casually ... but am I really so cruel, that I will make you imagine such a horror? yet, isn't beauty always cruel? -- I found a wing -- not a dead bird, no, a wing of yellow and black feathers, torn from a bird, a white length of bone dangling at one end, discarded....

But beauty is difficult? Is this beautiful?

nerve sewn to world

2010-04-21T23:02:00.006-05:00

A review of Rachel Galvin's Pulleys & Locomotion in The Pedestal Magazine

Trains Pass, Close But Invisible

But isn’t concealment half of beauty?
The air’s tremble as it ungloves
each finger, sets strands

of web to glint. The uplift of cedars,
free of gravitas, their vault
and nave unencumbered

by the unfinished business of the soul,
its shivering coastlines.
Nearby aspens ring their yellow bells,

hungry, uncertain how to spend their days.
But this may be a failure of the eye,
vertex of nerve sewn to world.

The yellow rustle may not be bells,
but a roomful of readers
turning pages of newspaper.

--Rachel Galvin

secret

2010-04-15T01:08:00.002-05:00

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

-Galway Kinnell

cathedral 2

2010-04-07T00:35:00.001-05:00

cathedral

2010-04-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

guest post

2010-04-02T10:51:00.004-05:00

Today I have a guest post at Claire Burge's blog,
Claire B.

If you go, take some time to appreciate Claire's own beautiful photographs and writing.

Thank you, Claire, for putting me in such good company!

dandelion

2010-04-02T09:21:00.002-05:00

missing All

2010-03-30T06:58:00.002-05:00

The missing All -- prevented Me
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World's
Departure from a Hinge --
Or Sun's extinction be observed --
'Twas not so large that I
Could lift my forehead from my work
For Curiosity.

Emily Dickinson

a narrow fellow in the grass

2010-03-26T13:27:00.000-05:00

spring

2010-03-24T12:16:00.003-05:00

Lake Michigan

i have been dreaming

2010-03-17T23:42:00.002-05:00

When You Disguised Yourself as Munch’s Madonna

I dreamed you were dreaming of me.
Have I truly been myself on any other night?

If you dream of me
I don’t shatter like glass --

if you dream of me
I don’t have to break

like a mirror thrown against a stone wall.

I am deep if you look into me
in the shiny mirror you carry

behind your shadowy breasts --
I am a clean cold spring in the forest

where deer and foxes drink
and birdsong drifts like mist

and the images of birds skim the sky,
if you trail your dreaming fingers through me.

the dream of travel

2010-03-16T09:05:00.003-05:00

2010-03-14T10:18:00.000-05:00

The Erotic

I am a lock.
Your name is
a silver key
that I carry
folded in my
breath (exactly
as a child--
devoted and
shy and
already hearing
the first music
that will open him--
carries a coin
to church
in a bright
silk handkerchief).

skunk cabbage

2010-03-10T09:48:00.002-06:00

sprouting from mud and decay
as many beautiful things do

still winter....

2010-03-09T07:36:00.004-06:00

light whispers through the skin of stones

2010-03-04T13:32:00.004-06:00

[ .... ]

one stone on another stone
a little click when you tap them together

stillness
there is nothing else

longing shivers in the blood

beckoned, not driven

2010-03-03T20:44:00.011-06:00

“….people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do, beckoned, not driven, invented by belief, author and hero of a real dream by which our own courage and cunning are tested and tried, so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be."

- Diane Arbus, "The Full Circle"

Of course, Diane Arbus -- whom I can’t help being a little in love with, these past few weeks -- is talking about her circus freaks and crazy street preachers and tattooed strippers. But what I have to offer is this, ordinary people in the midst of their ordinary lives. It is all I have today against the inevitability of death, the wild despair and dread in the voice of one who means so much to me.

A complete and utter failure. It doesn’t help. How could it help? --- This little girl with her halo. This very serious boy. To see the movement that is not outside time, but rather woven into the fabric of the ordinary second. To see. To be the one who sees. To love them, and be separate, at the boundary stones…..

seed pods

2010-02-25T05:59:00.004-06:00

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!)

Shakespeare variations

2010-02-22T12:11:00.008-06:00

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)

across the river

2010-02-21T12:57:00.000-06:00

winter: the sun setting

2010-02-17T17:01:00.007-06:00

…. 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

the mystical

2010-02-15T09:35:00.015-06:00

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.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

red and blue

2010-02-13T10:03:00.001-06:00

white fire

2010-02-11T23:09:00.009-06:00

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.

Acquainted with the Night

2010-02-10T09:35:00.008-06:00

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.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night

--Robert Frost

self 2

2010-02-07T23:02:00.003-06:00

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

self

2010-02-06T13:12:00.002-06:00

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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the world's edge is its heart: a week of silent images: 7

2010-02-04T13:13:00.001-06:00

the world's edge is its heart: a week of silent images: 6

2010-02-03T14:31:00.001-06:00

the world's edge is its heart: a week of silent images: 5

2010-02-02T15:41:00.004-06:00

the world's edge is its heart: a week of silent images: 4

2010-02-01T15:48:00.001-06:00

the world's edge is its heart: a week of silent images: 3

2010-01-31T16:08:00.002-06:00

the world's edge is its heart: a week of silent images: 2

2010-01-30T16:10:00.003-06:00

the edge of the world is its heart: a week of silent images: 1

2010-01-29T12:00:00.004-06:00

morphe

2010-01-25T12:02:00.006-06:00

There is a wonderful page early in Sartre’s La Nausée when the narrator describes his love of finding discarded scraps of paper in the street. (Well … understand, I am saying I remember this page … I can’t promise that it is really there, or that it is as I remember.…) It is one of my favorite passages in modern literature, even though it comes from this writer who is not one of my favorite writers, because I recognize myself with an unsteady little smile. I cannot walk past a stray piece of paper blowing across the sidewalk in the winter breeze without trapping it under my shoe and stooping over to investigate. Grocery lists, some child’s lost homework, a lover’s desperate postcard sent from Prague and asking her to remember a kiss in a park under frozen trees, a page torn from the Book of Ecclesiastes with underlining in red and Chinese marginalia, a suicide note.

Last Saturday I found the note card above, wet and muddy and lying in the street in South Bend, Indiana. I carried it home and dried it under a lamp. Black marks on gray paper. Someone wrote these words and stared at this rectangle of paper for a while, her mind taking this shape. Such evocative words. Are they not, themselves, about the experience of finding this note card, the mysteries that step shyly out of the shadows, into the light, for a moment? I say nothing more.

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1) If can then x
2) If cannot then x

~ (1.)
~ (2.)

morphe = shape

eidos = form

character = trait / portrait

schema = outline / appearance

grammar of assent

ice music

2010-01-22T23:43:00.008-06:00

Orga de gheaţă

Se aude ceva,
Nu-i aşa?
E muzica
Orgii de gheaţă
Care-mi atârnă de streaşină.
Nu reuşesc să disting
Nici un sunet,
Dar ştiu,
Sunt convinsă,
Că nu se poate
Să nu se audă nimic,
Iar acest instrument
Perfect
Şi atât de repede pieritor
Să fi fost inventat
Numai
Pentru cine ştie ce
Nevăzut, îndepărtat,
Indiferent
Ascultător.

Ana Blandiana

The Ice Organ

You hear something,
Don‘t you?
It’s the music
Of the ice organ
Hanging from my eaves.
I can’t make out
A sound.
Still I know,
I am convinced,
It can't be
That there is nothing to be heard---
And that instrument,
Perfect
And so quickly vanishing,
Could have been invented
Only
For who knows what
Unseen, remote,
Indifferent
Listener.

(my translation)

L’Orgue de glace

On entend quelque chose,
N’est-ce pas?
C’est la musique
De l’orgue de glace
Suspendue de mon avant-toit.
Je ne peux pas distinguer
Une seule note.
Pourtant, je sais,
Je suis convaincue,
Qu'il est impossible
Qu'il n'y ait pas de musique,
Et que l’on ait inventé
Cet instrument
Parfait
Et si éphémère
Seulement
Pour qui sait quel
Auditeur
Invisible, lointain,
Et indifférent.

(ma version française)

I am grateful to Roxana, who first showed me this poem!

.

lighthouse

2010-01-20T13:45:00.002-06:00

2010-01-17T01:16:00.006-06:00

The Woman in the Snow

I dreamed of her breath
and her dark eyes for a year

I dreamed I wandered the labyrinths
of her fingerprints for a year

I dreamed for a year of the taste of kissing
the soft skin at the backs of her knees

I dreamed for a year that her voice her blood
her thighs were scarlet calligraphy in my veins

I dreamed of caressing her smooth breasts
and the rising tight buds of her nipples for a year

I dreamed for a year that my sleep
was tangled in the night of her hair

When I woke I found the day beating
in her throat like a hummingbird’s wings

.

2010-01-13T22:02:00.011-06:00

self-portrait when the weather is a mirror

the eye in which i wait

2010-01-11T13:18:00.024-06:00

Do You Remember the Beach?

Do you remember the beach
Covered with bitter shards
On which
We could not walk barefoot?
The way in which
You gazed at the sea
And said you were listening to me?
Do you recall
The hysterical gulls
Spinning in the toll
Of bells from unseen churches
With congregations of fish,
The way in which
You were running away
Towards the sea
Shouting to me that you needed
Distance
To look at me?

The snow
Was going out
Mingled with birds
In the water.
With an almost joyful desperation
I watched
Your footprints on the sea
And the sea
Closed like an eyelid
Over the eye in which I was waiting.

-Ana Blandiana
(Translated by Peter Jay and Anca Cristofovici)

dream ice wind

2010-01-09T11:18:00.033-06:00

rêve
sans fin
ni trêve
à rien

-Samuel Beckett

reive--
no end
nor leave--
the wind

(my own not-exactly-translation)

in die Traumwäscherei ohne sorge sei ohne sorge
was aber geschieht
am besten
wenn Totenstille

eintritt

-Ingeborg Bachmann

in the dream laundry carefree be carefree
but what happens
best of all
when dead silence

sets in

(translated by Peter Filkins)

----------------------------------------------------------

To the Roaring Wind

What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.

-Wallace Stevens

New poems are coming soon. I promise.

I’ve been so entranced by newfound possibilities that this has turned into a photography blog in recent days --- though I haven’t forgotten (as it says on the tin) that the original aim was poetry. I am, yes, in love with the silence of photographs, just as I have always loved the quiet at the end of poems --- the poem is essentially a way of finding a better silence, nicht wahr? --- (and I categorically reject the thought that photography and poetry are fundamentally different) --- but still, I feel a bit of a slacker, as Dylan Thomas:

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

….The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

But no, not “bitterly.”

Poems are coming….
.

winter

2010-01-06T19:05:00.002-06:00

continual departure

2010-01-05T06:48:00.004-06:00

from Les Roses

VI

Une rose seule, c'est toutes les roses
et celle-ci : l'irremplaçable,
le parfait, le souple vocable
encadré par le texte des choses.

Comment jamais dire sans elle
ce que furent nos espérances,
et les tendres intermittences
dans la partance continuelle.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A single rose is all roses
and this one: irreplaceable,
perfect, supple vocable
the text of things encloses.

How could we say, without her,
what were our hopes,
and the brief, tender stops
in continual departure.

.

2010-01-04T00:19:00.002-06:00

unmarked, then silence

2009-12-28T22:17:00.001-06:00

not to take the curve of things

2009-12-25T23:59:00.005-06:00

Être mort

Quel effort pour ne pas prendre la courbe des choses
Pour ne pas épouser la forme de son ombre

L’angoisse sue aux portes de la nuit
Le vent charrie des oiseaux taciturnes
Mêlés de rires
Et l’eau se berce aux bras de ses noyés

Quel effort pour ne pas
Prendre la courbe du temps

Quand l’astre dit minuit
Et l’horloge est silence
Et l’heure est prisonnière
De son déroulement

Libre captée
Visage d’agonie
Visage spolié

Quel effort pour ne pas être mort

André Brochu

Being dead

Such effort not to take the curve of things
Not to marry the shape of one’s shadow

Anguish sweats at the doors of night
Wind carries away taciturn birds
Mixed with laughter
And the water rocks itself in the arms of its victims

Such effort not
To take the curve of time

When the star says midnight
And the clock is silence
And the hour is prisoner
Of its own unrolling

Freed captive
Face of agony
Stripped face

Such effort not to be dead

.

2009-12-24T11:37:00.017-06:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

the sweet silence of now

2009-12-23T21:34:00.006-06:00

A review of Anthony Abbott's
New & Selected Poems, 1989 - 2009,
in The Pedestal Magazine

The Man Who Feels The Sleeves Of The Snow

On the day after the snow
he takes his usual walk.
The trees
reach out to him.
Their silver sleeves
have no history
no memory of grief.
Their long white fingers know only
the sweet silence
of now.

--Anthony Abbott

.

2009-12-21T12:41:00.009-06:00

naiad dreams in winter

--these are for the water girls--

Sunday afternoon

2009-12-20T14:31:00.003-06:00

Two pictures today, to celebrate the end of the series.

walkway in the local park

lily pads and ice

train station window, snow

2009-12-19T12:00:00.001-06:00

silly but harmless

2009-12-18T15:50:00.007-06:00

Par exemple

--pour R

On écrit. La machine-à-l’art s’engage---
Le marteau de la rime,
Descendant du sublime
Avec les coups
D’un son qui réverbère,
Tape les bouts de vers
Comme des clous
Qui fixent la poésie sur la page.

.

cloudy afternoon

2009-12-18T12:52:00.002-06:00

dock, ice

2009-12-17T13:00:00.002-06:00

already here and there in the meadows

2009-12-16T23:09:00.004-06:00

A translation from Rilke's French, Autumn's Hammer,
in Language and Culture

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