baudelairies

baudelairies

[apoemaday]

Black Cherries

by W.S. Merwin

Late in May as the light lengthens toward summer the young goldfinches flutter down through the day for the first time to find themselves among fallen petals cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows of the garden beside the old house after a cold spring with no rain not a sound comes from the empty village as I stand eating the black cherries from the loaded branches above me saying to myself Remember this

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[srednod]

Jack Kilgour (1900-1987) The Convalescent 1938

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Odysseus Dying - Sheila Wingfield

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Rodney Ewing: My Country Needs Me (1996)

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Fishnet by Robert Lowell

Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise, your wandering silences and bright trouvailles, dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish… Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them, the archetypal voices sing offkey; the old actor cannot read his friends, and nevertheless he reads himself aloud, genius hums the auditorium dead. The line must terminate. Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope; the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten, nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

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Marcel Duchamp: Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (1910)

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The Fiction-Makers

by Anne Stevenson We were the wrecked elect, The ruined few.  Youth, Youth, the Café IrunÞa And the bullfight set, Looped on Lepanto brandy But talking ‘truth’ – Hem, the 4 a.m. wisecrack, The hard way in, That story we were all at the end of And couldn’t begin – We thought we were living now, But we were living then. Sanctified Pound, a knot Of nerves in his fist, Squeezing the Goddamn iamb Out of our verse, Making it new in his Archaeological plot – To maintain ‘the sublime’ In the factive?  Couldn’t be done. Something went wrong With ‘new’ in the Pisan pen. He thought he was making now, But we was making then. Virginia, Vanessa, A teapot, a Fitzroy fuss, ‘Semen?’ asks Lytton, eyeing a smudge on a dress. How to educate England And keep a correct address On the path to the river through Auschwitz? Belsen? Auden and Isherwood Stalking glad boys in Berlin – They thought they were suffering now, But they were suffering then. Out of pink-cheeked Cwmdonkin, Dylan with his Soho grin. Planted in the fiercest of flames, Gold ash on a stem. When Henry jumped out of his joke, Mr Bones sat in. Even you, with your breakable heart In your ruined skin, Those poems all written That have to be you, dear friend, You guessed you were dying now, But you were dying then. Here is a table with glasses, Ribbed cages tipped back, Or turned on a hinge to each other To talk, to talk, Mouths that are drinking or smiling Or quoting some book, Or laughing out laughter as candletongues Lick at the dark – So bright in this fiction Forever becoming its end, We think we are laughing now, But we are laughing then.

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You're wondering if I'm lonely: OK then, yes, I'm lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns' first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it's neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning.

Adrienne Rich

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Let’s start with some history. Following the end of the Second World War there was a huge desire for change throughout British society. This resulted in the creation of a kind of semi-sociali…

“First, they had a voice not because they’d been given a platform to “mouth off”, but because their opinions had been structurally linked to the levers of power. That’s what having a voice really means; anything less than that is a sham. It is shouting into the void.”

[poetsandwriters]

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses & livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that…. Like water, I remember where I was before I was straightened out.”

—Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”

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There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart   só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time   Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind   like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,   with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;   thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.   Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing. 

Dream Song 29, John Berryman

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since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world

my blood approves and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

e.e. cummings

[insomniaclullaby01-deactivated2]

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Rainer Maria Rilke, The Windows (1924)

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As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster

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