Wednesday, March 25, 2009

We have learned over the past eight months that parenthood is not for us.



Say it's urgent, when the flowers have died from a change in the weather.
We have learned, over the past eight months, spouting nectar from the phone
That parenthood is not for us. And we are not the sort to be benefactors.
Tomorrow, on the decade, dawn birds will sing aside the bedroom window,

Reminisce in disposables, our eight months of spitting nectar under the phone.
There is no estimating the number of animals in it, this, our nurturing enterprise.
Tomorrow, on the decade, dawn birds will sing aside our bedroom window,
Winter constellations, steaming traces of afterbirth waft in from the barn window—

And mere labor was not enough for a flight animal, enclosed in the enterprise
As beautiful as surgical staples. With barbed wire, I had wanted all the more tightly
To rein you. Alas, these inexorable constellations. One foreleg advanced over a windowsill
In a vaulting pose—belonging to no one—just like a woman, and the one in front of me,

My successor. An object to be possessed, a porcelain or polymer doll once tightly
Held with the bangs smoothed, lives afterwards when playtime is done.You dully
Spit into the napkin, instead of pushing away the plate, and I, the one in front of me--
Lie awake in the exhaustive flow of keeping on, before the plate glass break of dawn.

The feeling beyond the doll kept from you, screaming alone in a cribYour teeth dully
Indicate—White prayer beads or, a bandolier rattling through the room of its benefactors.
This lie we had, in order to get an exhaustive flow keeping with the break of dawn,
Refracted through this vase of flowers, that would have died following a change in the weather.

9 comments:

Σφιγξ said...

http://www.horseweb-uk.com/features/foaling.htm

Σφιγξ said...

This is a turn from composing, composting, etc...

Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (First Vintage International Edition, 1997):

"No wonder I loved him. I would have loved him for the gift of the dream-hand alone; but as soon as I was old enough to understand he whispered an even greater secret into my nocturnal ear. He told me that as a result of a botched appendix operation many years ago there was a needle lost inside him. It gave him no trouble but one day it would reach his heart and he would die instantly, speared from within. This was the secret of his hyperactive personality...

...I could not understand how a man so outrageous and unconventional as the famous V. Miranda could accept such a dreadful fate so passively, why he did not seek to have the needle traced and then removed; so I came to think of the needle as a metaphor -- as, perhaps, the prick of his ambitions. But that childhood night, when Vasco tapped at this chest and made wincing faces, when he rolled his eyes and fell to the floor with his feet in the air, playing dead for my entertainment- then, then I believed him utterly; and, recalling this absolute belief in later years (recalling it even now. after finding him again in Benengeli, in thrall to other needles, his youthful slenderness swollen into old-aged obesity, his lightness grown dark, his openness slammed shut, the wine of love spoiled in him long ago, and turned into the vinegar of hate), I was able--I am able--to find a different meaning in his secret. Perhaps the needle, if indeed it really was in there, lost in the haystack of his body, was in truth the source of his whole self - perhaps it was his soul. To lose it would be to lose his life at once, or at least its meaning. He preferred to work, and wait. 'A man's weakness is his strength, and vercy visa,' he told me once. 'Would Achilles have been a great warrior without his heel?' and remembering that I can almost envy him his sharp, wandering, enabling angel of death.

In the well-known Hans Andersen story the young Kay, escaping the Snow Queen, is left with a splinter of ice in his veins, a splinter that pains his for the rest of his life. My whitehair mother had been Vasco's Snow Queen, whom he loved, and from whom, in the grip of an enraging humiliation, he finally fled, with the cold bitterness in his blood; which continued to ache, to lower his body temperature, and to chill that once-warm heart" (154-155).

Σφιγξ said...

"Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of New Man" (1943)

Σφιγξ said...

I remember reading this as a newspaper heading, and it steered a conversation, which ended with a sibling taking a doll from the youngest sibling. I remember taunting my younger brother, but not tormenting him until he cried.

There were a lot of other things that decided the fate of this relationship, but the retelling of that instance is very clear to me.


Also, the fact that I hadn't bothered to erase the other replies to this rambling mess does not mean that I had intended to sustain it. Like me, he was a parental afterthought, who still grapples at any prior connection for a raincheck. We have never slept together,and while I may have allowed him into my life as an intellectual and emotional (the two are inextricable, for me) construct, I did not entertain a life or a course of labors with him, or any man.

It takes too much energy and poison, the years have since drained, to insist on the reality with such a person.

Σφιγξ said...

Posting the cookbook description by Steven Forrest:


Moon in the Eighth House

The evolutionary intention here centers on healing the capacity to form an instinctual mating-bond in which an emotional sense of home arises. Integrating deep domestic familiarity with sexuality is part of the intent. Having children is not necessarily the aim, but finding a place in us that could do that and want that is central. A reaction exists here to prior-life dynamics involving a lack of "rootedness," or perhaps the social shaming associated with "barrenness."

Σφιγξ said...

Yes, finding a place that could want that.

Σφιγξ said...

https://books.google.com/books?id=H5GpDwAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&dq=charles+fenyvesi+trees&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiLxMLli-bmAhXNnuAKHQtdCrAQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=charles%20fenyvesi%20trees&f=false

Σφιγξ said...

Exercise 90 will go here. For my notes, it is based on the raku nest

Σφιγξ said...

Late entry. Exercise 90. Thank you for reminding me.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1No3QAuK_y8HHA83fPAQNW70i6tmRo5Qs/view?usp=sharing