Thursday, April 30, 2009

Depth Charge: Flying Stag: Perla Negra: Jägerbomb—A Stimulating Depression of the Inevitable


Giant Sand's Stranded Pearl


Howe Gelb:
There is a power in that division
In that hour of revision
You revisit the dank and the dour
When the taste of love is all but gone
Sour


Howe Gelb and Isobel Campbell:
When I look in your eyes
I surrender
The surrender is rendered justified
You stand with one boot upon my fender
Reflecting on my
Glass eye
Isobel Campbell:
There, amongst the willows and the briars
On the streets between all the man-made spires
In an entangulation of too many wires
Love's translation still transpires
Howe Gelb:
Every girl is like a pearl

Howe Gelb and Isobel Campbell:
Heart strung along and then left stranded

Howe Gelb:
This world is worn
All frayed and torn

Howe Gelb and Isobel Campbell:
Admitting you to form is not
What love had demanded
Howe Gelb:
When I look in your eyes
I surrender
The surrender is rendered justified

Isobel Campbell:
Stand with a boot upon my fender
Gave up my time

Howe Gelb and Isobel Campbell:
Reflecting on my glass eye
...
I lost me my eye in a battle
Went there to rattle her cage
And I lost sight of the big picture
Now this permanent fixture is
Your rage
...
You are looking just so fine
Reflecting upon my glass eye.



Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Scene from Chromophobia

Tale of a Tongue, Robert M. Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide 1987-1988



Dead Whale Found With Car-Size Tongue

Agostino Brugo (GATTINARA)* *

1975 Gattinara ($9.00) 76
1976 Gattinara ($9.00) 82
1979 Gattinara ($9.00) 85
1975 Spanna ($6.00) 83
1976 Spanna ($6.00) 78

"Brugo's wines are generally robust, soundly made, and flavorful. They are usually rustic in style and, though lacking in finesse and elegance, are nevertheless good, rich, savory wines. Brugo produces wine under the Gattinara, Ghemme, and Spanna labels. Among the Spannas, the 1976 is ready to drink, spicy, tarry, medium-bodied, and robust. The 1975 has more richness and fruit, a pungent, earthy, tarry bouquet. It can age for 1-3 more years. Of the Gattinaras, the best is the 1979, which has a medium ruby color, a richly scented bouquet of cherry fruit and fresh leather, medium body, and good length. It should keep well for 2-3 years. The 1975 is lean and somewhat dry and tannic, whereas the 1976 is plump, simple, but quite satisfying in a robust, savory way" (Parker 404).

O Alquimista, pages 40--42:

"All around him was the market, with people coming and going, shouting and buying, and the aroma of strange foods...but nowhere could he find his new companion.

The boy wanted to believe that his friend had simply become separated from him by accident. He decided to stay right there and await his return. As he waited, a priest climbed to the top of a nearby tower and began his chant; everyone in the market fell to their knees, touched their foreheads to the ground, and took up the chant. Then, like a colony of worker ants, they dismantled their stalls and left.

The sun began its departure, as well. The boy watched it through its trajectory for some time, until it was hidden behind the white houses surrounding the plaza. He recalled that when the sun had risen that morning, he was on another continent, still a shepherd with sixty sheep, and looking forward to meeting with a girl. That morning he had known everything that was going to happen to him as he walked through the familiar fields. But now, as the sun began to set, he was in a different country, a stranger in a strange land, where he couldn't even speak the language. He was no longer a shepherd, and he had nothing, not even the money to return and start everything over.

All this happened between sunrise and sunset, the boy thought. He was feeling sorry for himself, and lamenting the fact that his life could have changed so suddenly and so drastically.

He was so ashamed that he wanted to cry. He had never even wept in front of his own sheep. But the marketplace was empty, and he was far from home, so he wept. He wept because God was unfair, and because this was the way God repaid those who believed in their dreams.

When I had my sheep, I was happy, and I made those around me happy. People saw me coming and welcoming me. he thought. But now I'm sad and alone. I'm going to become bitter and distrustful of people because one person betrayed me. I'm going to hate those who have found their treasure because I never found mine. And I'm going to hold on to what little I have, because I'm too insignificant to conquer the world.

He opened his pouch to see what was left of his possessions; maybe there was a bit left of the sandwich he had eaten on the ship. But all he found was the heavy book, his jacket, and the two stones the old man had given him.

As he looked at the stones, he felt relieved for some reason. He had exchanged six sheep for two precious stones that had been taken from a gold breastplate. He could sell the stones and buy a return ticket. But this time I'll be smarter, the boy thought, removing them from the pouch so he could put them in his pocket. This was a port town, and the only truthful thing his friend had told him was that the port towns are full of thieves."





The lover’s religion and nationality is the Beloved (God).
The lover’s cause is separate from all other causes
Love
is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.

Monday, April 27, 2009

How Important Do you Think?


How important do you think you are, among the piles of pocket Audubon's, clearly
Reduced to your actual size, you are two, hunched figures on wire-mesh armatures
Where I am, and where I am starting something you respect among your bent-back necks,
Distress calling, like the men who run past me, walking, soon walk, should their hearts fail.

Like dead people we've seen, your fondest würst's too heavy to take you, an armature
Himself in a grown-up cage, at least it allows the current through as I imagine. Somewhere true
Freedom spits, as sea spritz off a gull's wing. Without spitting into his hazel motes, should a heart fail,
I pull a valve, and sound tears from the euphonium, as well from you, his dearest mouthpiece.

Himself in a gulag and a caged dream of overcoming, somewhere he scrambles for lunch--True,
This energy of the Appetite gets away from me, and loosens my mind and legs, which are the same.
I'll let you supply The Carnival of Venice and I'll lower my mask. It is so difficult being mother, mouthpiece
The worst, I have seen dressed up as his dessert plate. Remember this twitch of evident distress

Was the very same you sent out, a sad face before which a supremacy is now cowering. The same,
With broken wings: you are multiplied among the pocket Audubon's, as if it were done yesterday, clearly
Reduced to your actual size, and unearned sophistication, warding off this twitch of evident distress
As I fly off--Where you are suppressing something you vaguely respect between your bent-back necks.





Saturday, April 25, 2009

Trois Colours: Bleu

film score by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Friday, April 24, 2009

Black Diamond / Podocarpus elatus


Imagine parallel vehicles with the windows closed,
A rescued creature damaged in the release,

Mined and turned out [for] the sublime weather,
And
the flesh your kiss has torn away.

The bruise is read as ripe fruit falling
From what I suspect is the last tree, espaliered,
Preserved by the height of the city's walls
No, a falling bough heavy with the fruit.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Study the Map of the World in Laminate




Man with the Glove : "Titian's
portraiture in the 1520's enters a similar phase of dignity and reserve. No expression crosses the face of [...], and the triangular relationship of hands and face functions within a color scheme restricted to black, white, and flesh tones. Yet one cannot escape the solemnity of the gaze, the luminosity of the eyes, the naturalism of the face, and the informality of the pose, all of which give the portrait a strong sense of individual character. Titian clearly sees the limited color palette as a challenge, and the effect of living, warm flesh against the black and white of the costume and the beige of the torn glove, which gives the painting its modern name, is impressive" (645).

Marta : "When a Maid's in the House, I Lose Half My Freedom"

"And this is what I find so difficult about being her mistress. This is a profound difficulty for me, and it creates a conflict with my husband. He always puts it like this: 'Well, I need a maid because you don't want to do anything. You say you'd rather not have a maid because you prefer to do it yourself, but when you do it, you always complain.' And I say, 'I complain about the way you're exploiting me, because if we didn't have a maid and shared the work half and half, wonderful, I wouldn't want to have a maid in the house.' It's even a situation that makes me feel bad. I feel invaded, as if my house were split, with a foreign universe that isn't mine, and that makes me feel constrained. Then he says, 'Well, you spoil the maid because you don't know how to be a mistress, you don't know how to yell at her, how to give her orders'" (200).

When the Skinheads Start to Grow Hair, It's Time to Leave Town "...Prague sounded terribly romantic. There were a lot of writers there. They have a dissident playwright for president. It was easy to get work even if you didn't speak the language. I had the vague impression that it was cheap. I was so ignorant that I didn't yet know they make the best beer in the world.

But I delighted in my ignorance. Prague was my great frontier. Prague was in that long pink stretch of globe that nobody would talk about in grade school, where, if you ventured, you'd encounter Communists" (110).
...

Saudades: "Things began to snowball, and my health began to suffer. I was frequently sick from a combination of loneliness, unhappiness, and lack of antibodies to your basic all-around tropical crud. Disillusioned and lonely, I slept little and was bone weary. It was summer and too hot for my fair skin at the beach. When I went anyway, the beaches were crowded, loud and dirty, and even in the midst of thousands of people having fun, [and] I felt myself to be an insignificant island of anonymity. Sundays dragged, and I longed for the lonely weekend to end so that I could bury myself in the frantic rush of work. Even in the shallow consolation of the office my composure was a façade and my self-confidence precarious. I explained all this to Ana that cool tropical night in Jurumirim.

'I was so lost and confused that day you walked into my office.'

'I remember. I was surprised you worked only two floors below me. What month was that?'

'I'm not sure, but it was just before Easter, the end of summer, because the quaresmeira was blooming in Tijuca along our running route,' I replied. 'I remember seeing you and Roberto running at 5:30 A.M. on the beach. You started saying good morning to me and I couldn't figure out why!'

'I recognized you from work, and I thought it must be hard for a foreign woman here by herself. I wanted you to have a good experience with Brazilians.'

I couldn't easily tell her how her offer of friendship had affected me, because she would have been embarrassed and denied having done anything special. I remember running back to my apartment at the base of Dos Irmãos mountain on dark cloudy mornings, and a tiny woman with Rapunzel-length dark hair and her nondescript running partner waving good morning and startling me out of my isolationist reverie. Some mornings I dreaded seeing them, dreading having to wave back. It's hard to understand now, but my isolation was so profound that I wanted no intruders. When she appeared in my office tentatively offering the treasure of friendship, my life in Brazil began to turn around" (216-217).











En Tu Ausencia (In Your Absence) (2008) - Trailer

Sunday, April 19, 2009

coyote in chicago

Found Poem from pages 12-13 of John Updike's Thirteenth Novel


I could not possibly need convincing, when shopping a wide selection--and smooth skins--I can,
And do, wonder in the same number of calories as you. And then my unhappiness is insubstantial,

Knowing it only from a can. Who he is, and where we are lovegazing together, really grates your beets
When, muttering about the gem of a vegetable he was, the fat man has stopped pretending to be asleep.

For the most inspired work of Narcissus, I needed another you. One I had found in a book--insubstantial,
Imagined on the becalmed waters of
the ferocious sea of my seeking, reflecting back the blue sunshine.
A gem of a carrot grows through a keyhole or a cast-off ring, like a versatile root spreads in your sleeping
Heavy, next to a spoiled man. In my middling years would I go this far? Afforded the rank of the earth?

In his gross voice, he has the temerity to tell of a cyclist's weekend of splitting his pants. The sunshine
Benefaction for his blindness. He needn't fear for his life, my desire being longer, hot and fresh enough
To eat. His personal "achievements" on the waves of air. Wholly disintegrate the dignified useful life in the earth.
Covered now with blue in green moss, lichen aging in millimeters. Interchangeably used for the ranting miniaturist

Bemoaning her in-grown state here descending into revenge's cake. Again, rice-powdered regrets aren't enough.
Called upon are the ripped hibiscus, the promise-packing punch, and we will change again into being, for a moment, Enough. Day in and day out, the tote bag of love is used. Interminably, for aging each other--miniaturists
Ourselves should be in every woman's rotation beyond the two, tired centerpieces of a frozen wedding cake.

The strokes I am tempted not to take, for both our sake, holding onto our pets, champagne splits, these moments
Are pulled out after the first year. After our own genteel atrocities of coldness, when to be sick all over again, in the air Spun scarf. Indoors beckons with a fresh bouquet by one beating the sweetness into the typical sponge cake
Over which the human pilot has resumed the controls from a moon-haunted silence to make granita, not grudges

Like me, thinking that my solitary rebellion was fully-weaned. Your understanding proves it yet substantial as air.
I could not possibly need convincing, promising everything, my mind, my body's secrets to who will listen--That I can.
Looking towards me, you are spurned into auto-pilot again, into moon-haunted silence to make granita, grudges
Toward the same face at thirty, glaring. As you grate your beets, your heart, where we are together lovegazing.















The writer Annie Dillard has said that turning a text into a poem doubles that poem's context. "The original meaning remains intact," she writes, "but now it swings between two poles [or two people.]"













Blood Falls - A hint at extraterrestrial life?

Blood Ocean, Moon Ice...preparing now for this eventide's writing.

Ramachandran on how "blind-sight" gives us clues about the nature of consciousness

There are stronger forces at work...what if all of humankind's esoteric attributions are mental processes spared from consciousness ? Foresight, in any case, happens.

Seed Magazine Presents: A Video Portrait of E.O. Wilson

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Stalking the Reader...a curtain of grasses

A bevy of notes (2000)

Watching
, "...Then I saw something dark like an engorged leech rummaging over the spittle, and then I saw the praying mantis.

She was upside-down, clinging to a horizontal stem of wild rose by her feet which pointed to heaven. Her head was deep in dried grass. Her abdomen was swollen like a smashed finger; it tapered to a fleshy tip out which bubbled a wet, whipped froth. I couldn't believe my eyes. I lay on the hill this way and that, my knees in thorns and my cheeks in clay, trying to see as well as I could. I poked near the female's head with a grass; she was clearly undisturbed, so I settled my nose an inch from that pulsating abdomen. It puffed like a concertina, it throbbed like a bellows; it roved, pumping, over the glistening, clabbered surface of the egg case testing and patting, thrusting and smoothing. It seemed to act so independently that I forgot the panting brown stick at the other end. The bubble creature seemed to have two eyes, a frantic little brain, and two busy, soft hands. ...

The male was nowhere in sight. The female had probably eaten him. Fabre says that, at least in captivity, the female will mate with and devour up to seven males, whether she has laid her egg cases or not. The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, in effect, "No, don't go near her, you fool, she'll eat you alive." At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, 'Yes, by all means, now and forever yes'" (57-58).

...

"I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want seen. It demands my full attention. Several times waiting for muskrats, however, I have watched insects doing various special things who were, like the mantis laying her eggs, happily oblivious to my presence. Twice I was not certain what I had seen.

Once it was a dragonfly flying low over the creek in an unusual rhythm. I looked closely; it was dipping the tip of its abdomen in the water very quickly, over and over. It was flying in a series tight circles, just touching the water at the very bottom arc of each circle. The only thing I could imagine it was doing was laying eggs, and this later proved to be the case. I actually saw this, I thought--I actually saw a dragonfly laying her eggs from not five feet away.

It is this peculiar stitching motion of the dragonfly's abdomen that earned it the name "darning needle"--parents used to threaten their children by saying that, if the children told lies, dragonflies would hover over their faces as they slept and sew their lips together. Interestingly, I read that only the great speed at which the egg-laying female dragonfly flies over the water prevents her from being 'caught by the surface tension and pulled down.' And at that same great speed the dragonfly I saw that day whirred away, downstream: a drone, a dot, and then gone" (188).

Portable Identity : "Watching Them Grow Up" by Laura Fokkena, Al tufle taht al siara. The baby is under the car.

It was the first sentence I learned in Arabic. I was in Egypt taking classes at the American University in Cairo, where my instructor was teaching us prepositions. As first-semester students we had to make do with the limited number of nouns we'd already learned, ergo the creation of improbable constructions such as "the elephant is on top of the sink" and "the rose is next to the airplane." I have always loved and remembered "al tufle taht al siara," because the monotone in which my instructor chanted it was a perfect reflection of Egypt's total inattention to the myriad dangers faced by young children. This was a country that raised its kids haphazardly, nonchalantly; heavy on trust, low on panic.

Egypt is not a society that has safety boards just for elevators, nor one particularly concerned about catching bilharzia from the water. In contrast to the United States, a country in which the phrase "but it's for the children!" is used to justify every inane political agenda, Egyptians don't even enforce drunk-driving laws, much less regulate bumper cars at the amusement park. Infant car seats are considered to be more hassle than they are worth, and precautions on the underside of buckets warning that a two-year-old could tip them over and drown--well, that is just out of the question. 'The baby is under the car. Repeat. The baby is under the car. Repeat'" (120-121).

Susan Sontag, who has been in love seven times in her life--Five women. Four men.--means:

"Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. More beautiful, by modern taste. Recall that it was Breton and other Surrealists who invented the secondhand store as a temple of vanguard taste and upgraded visits to flea markets into a mode of aesthetic pilgrimage. The Surrealist ragpicker's acuity was directed to finding beautiful what other people found ugly or without interest and relevance--bric-a-brac, naïve or pop objects, urban debris.

As the structuring of a prose fiction, a painting, a film by means of quotations--think of Borges, of Kitaj, of Godard--is a specialized example of Surrealist taste, so the increasingly common practice of putting up photographs on living-room and bedroom walls, where formerly hung reproductions of paintings, is an index of the wide diffusion of Surrealist taste. For photographs themselves satisfy many of the the criteria for Surrealist approbation, being ubiquitous, cheap, unprepossessing objects. A painting is commissioned or bought; a photograph is found (in albums and drawers), cut out (of newspapers and magazines), or easily taken onself. And the objects that are photographs not only proliferate in a way that paintings don't but are, in a certain sense, aesthetically indestructible. Leonardo's "The Last Supper" in Milan hardly looks better now; it looks terrible. Photographs, when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better. (In this, as in other ways, the art that photography does resemble is architecture, whose works are subject to the same inexorable promotion through the passage of time; many buildings, and not only the Parthenon, probably look better as ruins.)










Thursday, April 16, 2009

The Mountain of Books In Between

Chapter Seven : "Ni Klinyar, now the six-year-old daughter of Wisti and Tulu, was a queer-looking little girl, subject to violent changes of color--sometimes entirely lavender, sometimes entirely lime green, even to her eyelashes. When she was in a bad temper, she seemed to pulsate in repugnant switches of burnt orange and chocolate bog. It was during these last color spells that she was inclined to kill things, such as big, sleepy spiders and butterflies, but also plants in flower and kittens. Once her mother found her in a tangerine rage, with nothing else to injure than half a dozen freshly gathered eggs, which she was methodically pressing against the kitchen wall, slowly, as if to savor the crushing of the shell and the luminescent ooze of life lost.
...
In the floating world of that particular kind of balian, there existed an inner hierarchy of sorcery--not precisely political, but rather orbits of admiration that gravitated toward an elusive center. When Klinyar's parents thought about these events later, they recalled that long before they'd noticed it, there had been significant interest in Klinyar from some obscure but significant magical quarter. That interest emanated from the archwitch Dayu Datu.

A child with faculties of mutation and a bad temper could be molded into a formidable weapon. A deal was arranged.
The transaction, carried out through intermediaries and with all due account for protocol both calendric and personal, took forty-two days to negotiate.

In intervals of three days, and five and seven, with adjustments for the progress of the moon and the decay of the season, it was gradually determined that the child Ni Klinyar, aged eight, accompanied by four sacks of raw rice, a black rooster, three batiked sarongs, two thousand Chinese coins, several loops of cotton string (black, red, and plain white), a young yellow coconut and various other implements of Balinese ritual, plus several more unusual items--a size 32AA brassiere, a bottle of nail polish remover, and a Japanese-Indonesian dictionary--for this bride-gold, then, little Klinyar would be taken off the hands of her exhausted and embarrassed parents, although by exactly whom they never knew."


The Two Numantias: "I spend hours at a time sitting on my throne facing the orange tree in my courtyard in Rome. It's about to bear fruit, and I want to be the first to see it flower. I shall make the orange tree my interlocutor during these afternoon hours. I've given up shaving; I can only think if I caress my neck, which is covered in bristles. The problem of duality obsesses me. I invent a theory of geometric duality. If it is true that any two lines define a point at their intersection and that any two points determine a line, it follows that when all points touch an ellipse they exhaust themselves. Their unity concentrates and immediately requires the protection of a double to shield and prolong that unity. From this it follows that all unity, once attained, requires a duality in order to prolong itself, to maintain itself."

Friar Park: "Another of our secret meetings took place in London one afternoon. The Dominos had finally left Hurtwood Edge and moved into a flat in South Kensington, which that afternoon was empty. Eric took me there because he wanted me to listen to a song he had written. He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume, and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard.

It was "Layla"--about a man that falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable. He had read the story in a book he had been given by a mutual friend, Ian Dallas. Ian had given me a copy too. It was called The Story of Layla and Majnun by the Persian writer Nizami. Eric had identified with Majnun, and was determined that I should know how he felt. He had written the song at home and recorded it in Miami with the Dominos."

Love and Trust: "Women, by contrast, are able to bond with a romantic partner once they experience the release of dopamine and oxytocin, triggered by touching and the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure. Perhaps keeping my feet warm isn't my husband's primary responsibility in bed, but cuddling to release oxytocin is. Over time, even the sight of a lover can cue a woman to release oxytocin.

The exceptional bonding power of oxytocin and vasopressin has been studied in great detail by Sue Carter in those furry little mammals called prairie voles, who form lifelong mating partnerships. Like humans, the voles are filled with physical passion when they first meet and spend two days indulging in virtually nonstop sex. But unlike in humans, the chemical changes in the voles' brains can be examined directly in the source of this frolicking. These studies show that sexual coupling releases large amounts of oxytocin in the female's brain and vasopressin in the male's. These two neurohormones in turn increase levels of dopamine--the pleasure chemical--which makes the voles love-struck only for each other. Thanks to that strong neurochemical glue, the pair is mated for life.

In both males and females, oxytocin causes relaxation, fearlessness, bonding, and contentment with each other. And to maintain its effects long-term, the brain's attachment system needs repeated, almost daily activation through oxytocin stimulated by closeness and touch. Males need to be touched two to three times more frequently than females to maintain the same level of oxytocin, according to a study by the Swedish researcher Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg. Without frequent touch--for example, when mates are apart--the brain's dopamine and oxytocin circuits and receptors can feel starved. Couples may not realize how much they depend on each other's physical presence until they are separated for a while; the oxytocin in their brains keep them coming back to each other, again and again, for pleasure, for comfort, and calm."

Robert Penn Warren's "Birth of Love"

Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky
Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she,
From water the color of sky except where

Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver,
Rises. Stands on the raw grass. Against
The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness
Glimmers and, at bosom and flank, drips
With fluent silver. The man,

Some ten strokes out, but now hanging
Motionless in the gunmetal water, feet
Cold with the coldness of depth, all

History dissolving from him, is
Nothing but an eye. Is an eye only. Sees

The body that is marked by his use, and Time's,
Rise, and in the abrupt and unsustaining element of air,
Sway, lean, grapple the pond-bank. Sees
How, with that posture of female awkwardness that is,
And is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge

______down in
The pure curve of their weight and buttocks
Moon up and, in that swelling unity,

Are silver, and glimmer. Then

The body is erect, she is herself, whatever
Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each

_____hand,
Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but
With face lifted toward the high sky, where
The over-wash of rose color now fails. Fails, though no star
Yet throbs there. The towel, forgotten,
Does not move now. The gaze
Remains fixed on the sky. The body,

Profiled against the darkness of spruces, seems
To draw to itself, and condense in its whiteness, what light
In the sky yet lingers or, from
The metallic and abstract severity of water, lifts. The body,
With the towel now trailing loose from one hand, is

A white stalk from which the face flowers gravely toward the
_____high sky.
This moment is non-sequential and absolute, and admits
Of no definition, for it
Subsumes all other, and sequential, moments, by which
Definition might be possible. The woman,

Face yet raised, wraps
With a motion as though standing in sleep,
The towel about her body, under the breasts, and,

Holding it there, hieratic as lost Egypt and erect,
Moves up the path that, stair-steep, winds
Into the clamber and tangle of growth. Beyond
The lattice of dusk-dripping leaves, whiteness
Dimly glimmers, goes. Glimmers and is gone, and the man,

Suspending in his darkling medium, stares
Upward where, though not visible, he knows
She moves, and in his heart he cries out that, if only
He had such strength, he would put his hand forth

And maintain it over her to guard, in all
Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever
Inclemency of sky or slur of the world's weather
Might ever be. In his heart
He cries out. Above

Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he

____sees
The first star pulse into being. It gleams there.

I do not know what promise it makes to him.

Primavera: "The last word about this perpetually alluring allegory has yet to be written. For example, the orange grove, so similar to the one that separates foreground from background in Uccello's San Romano panels, may have other connotations. Oranges cannot be raised outdoors in the Arno Valley, and to a Florentine Quattrocento eye these golden orbs could hardly have failed to suggest the Medici coat of arms. Also, Mercury's: beautiful rose-colored chlamys is strewn with golden flames, a proper attribute of the god but one that also belongs to St. Lawrence (Lorenzo). They decorate his vestments in Fra Angelico's San Marco alterpiece made for Cosimo de' Medici, and many other representations; the meteor showers that descend on the earth in August each year are known in Italy as "fires of St. Lawrence" because they occur at the time of his feast. This attribute shared by the two Lorenzos also decorates Venus's white gown, which is bordered at the neckline with a continuous row of golden flames, while loops of these flames encircle her breasts. Finally, Mercury also bore the responsibility for doctors, whose symbol, the caduceus, he bears. Medici means "doctors," and the Medici patron saints were the doctors Cosmas and Damian.
The metaphor was standard in any eulogy of the Medici family."





Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Ghazal for...




ansa cervicalis, this loop of nerves in your neck,
With bone scooped out. Under struts of collarbone, this neck

Verse, is the hope that hangs us, cuts your suppliant vessel
Bleeding for you. Where a growth is removed below your neck

Just above your breast's jaunty point, I am left suckling so
The honey seeps out from the dark comb, nestled at your neck.












Dermatomes
C3 is a high turtleneck shirt
T4 is at the nipple
L1 is at the inguinal ligament (or L1 is IL -Inguinal ligament)
Randy Travis Drinks Cold Beer--Brachial plexus
Robert Taylor Drinks Cold Beer
Roots, Trunks, Divisions, Cords, Branches









































Saturday, April 11, 2009

Ho intenzione di fermarmi finché non trovo quel che sto cercando.

Your rainbow is intensely shaded green, violet, and orange.


What is says about you: You are an intelligent person. You appreciate beauty and craftsmanship. You are patient and will keep trying to understand something until you've mastered it. Others are amazed at how you don't give up.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.

Ho sentito le sirene cantare.


Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Endormie--Strive to Guess and Gass





* * * * * * *
So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if
the blue genii were its belly, the lamp's breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look.
There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve the
roofs of metal, and steal the pipes too. There's the blue pill that is the bullet's end, the nose, the
plum, the blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of death.
Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual
incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? What brings the
rouge to our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief...each is an absence in us. We
have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the lips that meets our lip is always one half of our
own. Our state is precisely the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces,
come to view us and to say to one another that we have never looked better; that we seem at last
at peace; that our passing was--well--sad--still--doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the
dead should hear.) Disappointment, constant loss, despair...a taste, a soft quality in the air, a color,
a flutter: permanent in their passage. We could not retain it. It will never be back. Joy-breaking
gloom continues to hammer. So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

William Gass




Sunday, April 5, 2009

Posso provarla? Saturn in the Twelfth House



How I choose to interpret Saturn's placement in the Twelfth House--from out of the confines of one's perceived limitations and restrictions emerges the detailed work. It is truly satisfying to have someone inquire about one's endeavors, 'how long did this take?' Several lifetimes all in one.

The fear is always there, and has been for so long. The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such a real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt and suddenly go out the way the moon would in the Blake poem. - Sylvia Plath (Saturn in the twelfth house)