oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire!

poetry problem was getting out of hand. my main is @nulfaga

[maryolive]

The Days by Jon Anderson

[sivavakkiyar]

two Kannada original poems in translation by AK Ramanujan

[nulfaga]

No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we—or what we mistake for ‘we’—could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose of sleeping pills would do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?

—from C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed

[apoemaday]

Elegy

by Leonard Cohen

Do not look for him In brittle mountain streams: They are too cold for any god; And do not examine the angry rivers For shreds of his soft body Or turn the shore stones for his blood; But in the warm salt ocean He is descending through cliffs Of slow green water And the hovering coloured fish Kiss his snow-bruised body And build their secret nests In his fluttering winding-sheet.

[ghuroub]

“Look,” Beauford [Delaney] said one day as they walked along Broadway. They had stopped at a crosswalk and he was pointing down at a gutter. “What do you see?”

Baldwin saw nothing but a dirty puddle of water.

“Look again,” Beauford said.

Baldwin looked more closely this time and noticed a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter’s black water, distorted and radiant. It was a life-changing lesson in light and perception.

“The reality of his seeing,” he later recollected, “caused me to begin to see.”

Now he saw everything anew through Beauford’s eyes. Was a brown leaf really brown? No, not exactly. For he found that if he took the time to stare at it carefully enough, it actually contained many colors. “And though black had been described to me as the absence of light,” he later wrote, “it became very clear to me that if this were true, we would never have been able to see the colour; black; the light is trapped in it and struggles upward, rather like the grass pushing up through the cement. It was humbling to be forced to realize that light fell down from heaven, on everything, on everybody, and that the light was always changing.” Baldwin was learning to see the world around him as an artist sees it—alive with color and shades of difference and detail and unexpected beauty.

—from Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs

[ghuroub]

by Langston Hughes

[ghuroub]

by Langston Hughes

[ghuroub]

Oscar Wilde's Salome / Langston Hughes

[ghuroub]

by Langston Hughes

[nobrashfestivity]

Happy birthday Richard Brautigan

[nulfaga]

Every once in a while someone might be made uneasy by the color of my skin, or an expression on my face, or I might say something to make him uneasy, or I might, arbitrarily (there was no reason to suppose that they wanted me), claim kinship with the Arabs. Then, I was told, with a generous smile, that I was different: le noir Americain est très évolué, voyons! But the Arabs were not like me, they were not 'civilized' like me. It was something of a shock to hear myself described as civilized, but the accolade thirsted for so long had, alas, been delivered too late, and I was fascinated by one of several inconsistencies. I have never heard a Frenchman describe the United States as civilized, not even those Frenchmen who like the States. Of course, I think the truth is that the French do not consider that the world contains any nation as civilized as France. But, leaving that aside, if so crude a nation as the United States could produce so gloriously civilized a creature as myself, how was it that the French, armed with centuries of civilized grace, had been unable to civilize the Arab? I thought that this was a very cunning question, but I was wrong, because the answer was so simple: the Arabs did not wish to be civilized. Oh, it was not possible for an American to understand these people as the French did; after all, they had got on well together for nearly one hundred and thirty years. But they had, the Arabs, their customs, their dialects, languages, tribes, regions, another religion, or, perhaps, many religions—and the French were not raciste, like the Americans, they did not believe in destroying indigenous cultures. And then, too, the Arab was always hiding something; you couldn’t guess what he was thinking and couldn’t trust what he was saying. And they had a different attitude toward women, they were very brutal with them, in a word they were rapists, and they stole, and they carried knives. But the French had endured this for more than a hundred years and were willing to endure it for a hundred years more, in spite of the fact that Algeria was a great drain on the national pocketbook and the fact that any Algerian—due to the fact that Algeria was French, was, in fact, a French départment, and was damn well going to stay that way—was free to come to Paris at any time and jeopardize the economy and prowl the streets and prey on French women. In short, the record of French generosity was so exemplary that it was impossible to believe that the children could seriously be bent on revolution. Impossible for a Frenchman, perhaps, but not for me. I had watched the police, one sunny afternoon, beat an old, one-armed Arab peanut vendor senseless in the streets, and I had watched the unconcerned faces of the French on the café terraces, and the congested faces of the Arabs. Yes, I could believe it: and here it came.

—James Baldwin, from No Name in the Street

[nulfaga]

"I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something: for one thing, I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by then, been for me—according to me—nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibilities, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself. [...] In any case, the world changes then, and it changes forever. Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before—perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see—and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound. Free, paradoxically, because, now, you have a home—your lover’s arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world."

—James Baldwin, from No Name in the Street

[nulfaga]

Epigraphs from Baldwin's No Name in the Street

[havingapoemwithyou]

Flight by Christian Wiman

[gatheringbones]

minnie bruce pratt, from sinister wisdom issue 122: How Can A Woman Who Is With A Trans Man Call Herself A Lesbian? spring 2024

[thirteens-earring]

[ There are all kinds of moments in learning how to live together. I do the laundry in the basement, one old beat-up slot machine of a washer, and can’t understand why she doesn’t take a turn with that.

“Don’t think I’m a man because I have fabric dyslexia,” she says, and at first it’s a joke but then it isn’t. And finally it’s not exactly a fight but a strain, an exasperation, and she says: “You are talking to me as if you think I don’t have a clitoris.”

Meaning that I think she is a man, that she is a he who doesn’t think laundry is his work. Then she tells me about trying to do laundry for another femme lover, and turning everything pink because she didn’t know about reading the labels. She didn’t know about reading the labels because her mother didn’t teach her, and her mother didn’t teach her, because her mother thought something was wrong with her.

That’s a whole long story that I learn over time, about what her mother and her father did to her that meant she left home one way or another very early, and without knowing much about laundry, for instance. There are a lot of other stories that I don’t learn at once, that I only learn over time. There are a lot of stories that I never hear, that she never tells me.

Years later, fifteen year later, after she’s gotten very sick, and we are stuck in traffic in Jersey City, we were hot and very tired on the way back from walking at the Green Swamp. Wanting to be home and she was impatient with me about something, I can’t even remember what now.

A sharpness in her voice, something that hurts my feelings. I tell her I’m suddenly reminded of the man I was married to, my pain at that memory, please don’t.

Suddenly the chasm. She is devastated with horror and full of distrust. How could I say that, after all these years?

I kept saying no, no, not you, my memory, the memory of someone else’s anger. She is the one who said to me at the very beginning: “Tell me what makes you feel loved.”

Then, twenty-two years after we first met, in the days before she dies, she begins to tell me of old hurts coming back. Or was it that she was trying to know if she could trust me to the end?

She brings back that moment in the car: I was driving, she was sick and sitting beside me. And then I understood she was telling me she thought or she feared that all along I’ve experienced her as a man.

All of our love life together, that was what I saw her as?

Never. Never. Never. I told her: Never.

Including sex, when she was fucking me? That moment—not that either, ever. Never. I sat on the couch by her, and talked into her eyes. I said: “Remember when you first got sick, how I was getting reminded of my Pa sick at home so much, recovering from drinking binges? And I told you it’s not you, it’s just my memory from the past?”

I kept talking, I didn’t know if she could hear me, she was so sick. The pain in my heart—twenty-two years and she doubted that I loved her for her complete self. I wrote a whole book about loving her because of her everything. And yet—

And I know, yes, I know, reader, that writing this now will never, never bring her back to answer my questions. I know that and yet I keep writing because I want her to answer, I want her to answer. ]

[ontologicalevil]

You can't be parasocial with dead musicians and writers btw. It's called having a soul bond

[letterful]

Both [Osip Mandelstam] and [Anna Akhmatova] had the astonishing ability of somehow bridging time and space when they read the work of dead poets. By its very nature, such reading is usually anachronistic, but with them it meant entering into personal relations with the poet in question: it was a kind of conversation with someone long since departed. From the way in which he greeted his fellow poets of antiquity in the Inferno, [Osip] suspected that Dante also had this ability. In his article, “On the Nature of Words” he mentions Bergson’s search for links between things of the same kind that are separated only by time—in the same way, he thought, one can look for friends and allies across the barriers of both time and space. This would probably have been understood by Keats, who wanted to meet all his friends, living and dead, in a tavern.

Ahkmatova, in resurrecting figures from the past, was always interested in the way they lived and their relations with others. I remember how she made Shelley come alive for me—this was, as it were, her first experiment of this kind. Next began her period of communion with Pushkin. With the thoroughness of a detective or a jealous woman, she ferreted out everything about the people around him, probing their psychological motives and turning every woman he had ever so much as smiled at inside out like a glove. — NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, from Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Hayward.

[thirdity]

“As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves. Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us.”

— Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art”