Il y a longtemps

Pantoum for Hotel Bedroom (1954) searching.

McSweeney's is taking pantoums until March 8th.

Hang on, off and back

Snow in Turkey, Blue Arrows, Mick Harvey

Ἀμφιτρίτη

Jan Hopkins, "Amphitrite"

_____________-1-________________________

The rip currents are home to her, such is the involuntariness.

Harboring all tide-thrust fins and limbs insulated in a foam
She is a battering embryo, heldfast naked as if embedded in mucilage,

Beneath a translucent skin. Her loud groans grating a rocky berm.

Harboring all tide-thrust fins and limbs insulated in a foam,

Skittering on peacock flounder, keeping a clean house, things regularly

Flushed by her anger--her's is a suite of loud groans grating the rocky bench.

With dolphins throttling, probable cursors to the rage were being tied

To a body that won't take to the waves, rather insulated in keeping a clean
House free from her accompanying flotsam. Amphitrite's clenched
Temples--in a crown of cancer--her hands, pincers enraged of being tied
Suggest the worst. Her wants winnow away in the regularly-flushed depths.

Clenching Amphitrite, clouds with her alkaline love, amounting to a skeleton
Inside. The soft creatures blanching in her wake, swallowed and hollowed
In her sea-churned eyes, where your wants winnow away in the depths.
Wrapped in the sheets, she swims between your legs. Long after her escape.

____________________-2-___________________________________

Such are her corrosive sprays at your offering, to spend a life swallowed, hollowed
As she swims between your legs. In a missing page of the wedding night
Recall how things cooled off as she tried to gore you with your trident. In escape
You at once thought urchins were knitted into the salt-braid of her hair.

As she swims between your legs in a ruined map of your wedding night
Her tears stain the coral bed and bloom into life for the spring moon
To seed. Beyond sham giveaways. Concoct searches for the salt-braid of her hair
Her strong currents and convictions unyoked these shared images of the vase.

Her previously overlooked strain of sex glistens, conferencing with the moon.
Nestling in stinging cells--love the hippokampoi carried off. Ever obsolete, the vase.
She surfaces at night to float on her back, and riding out the storm waves she creates,
In the surrounding third quarter, and what remains in the erotics of waiting

Nestling in stinging cells, vestiges of the nymphs she loved and lost to ensure
Her pinched expression on the vase, with him. Her livid face has a terrifically illicit
Sheen reflecting back the waste of the moon. Riding out the storm waves she creates
Needful of the claim, her body netting all in the acrobatic twists of one vast loneliness.

Currents and Convictions [for a pantoum] circa 2000

Russian fishermen catch Mermaid alien and eat it

Dolphin


My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Robert Lowell

Chafing, Chipping Away at Parts Unequal Pantoum [Sleep (1937)]

Oozing a sweet, dark cool sleep to us in loving, not suicide
They come dragging the big sooted bag of possibility,
Whereto they schlep them, to their various therapies,
Shame, like a cipher, reappears now to add us together—

Grabbing the scroll of our instruments, in the possibility,
Dissected frog twitching-sparks in pitted collagen
Of the lip-bitten reader, privately elaborating to die happy, if naturally,
But frankly, there is not much life surrounding making

Lips speak ghosts, still and before the unraveling collagen
Fibers of the face, so painfully striking during store hours.
Something, waves in wallpaper, lies waiting and making
Mental notes of those thrown confusedly together at a table:

She, who with swaying balsam stick posed, so often during store hours,
Dips back in dismay, to keep her pliant heart held together.
She cannot outsmart this monument, cryptically thrown on a table
Of their bargaining; and thus, we are only to be taught a slackening

In this not so subtle form of life—adjusting to a clearing together
And bracing the difference, wondering which of these props to use?
Scratched, and sleepwalking through, sending all branches scrolling
Out of concern for her neighbors, in each deep swallow of sleep.

Sleep is the gauntlet thrown by two shrugging actors, a useless prop
Of the past has fallen out of place, ah but for the fear of walking up and catching
It in the vacancies of an afternoon, where the body's burning and bearing
The loss of radio contact with the ground, ending everything with a guttering

Wind that has sent for you—her manner is coaxing and is catching,
Up ahead, this moment you and another built an embrasure, just for you,
Complete with the sincerest send off to researches into flight, beyond
To founder, where you float thoughtfully misconstruing the possiblities.

Found Object: Show Room Furniture

Sleep (1937) Pantoum

Sleep is the only suicide for responsible adults.
Dragging the big sooted bag of possibility
Whereto they schlep them, to their various therapies;
Shame, like a cipher, appears to now add together

Dragging the big sooted bag of possibility
Dissected frog-twitching-sparks in pitted collagen
Of the lip reader, privately elaborating to die happy, naturally.
But frankly, there is not much life in the time making

Lips speak ghosts—still and before—the unraveling collagen
Of the face, which is painfully striking during store hours.
Something billows behind the waiter, waiting and making
Mental notes of those thrown confusedly together at a table--
She, who with swaying balsam stick posed, so often during store hours,
Dipped back in dismay, to keep her pliant heart held together.
She cannot outsmart this monument, thrown confusedly at a table
Of their bargaining, and thus, only to be taught a slackening
In this not so subtle form of life--adjusting to a clearing together

And bracing the difference, wondering which of these props to use?
Which proprietary formula sends all branches scrolling into a fixed sum?
In the clearer example, of fame with food, in each a deep swallowing,
Sleep is the gauntlet thrown by two actors shrugging, a useless prop

Of the past falling out of place, for fear of one walking up and catching
It in the vacancy of an afternoon, the body burning and bearingThe loss of radio contact with the ground, with the guttering
Wind that has sent for you--her manner is coaxing, and is catching
Ahead of the moment you and another built an embrasure, just for you,
And this is the sincerest send off to researches into flight beyond
To founder, where you float thoughtfully misconstruing the possibilities.

C'est un médicament trés efficace.

Free personality analysis from ColorQuiz.com.Generated on Wed Feb 18 04:46:45 2009.

Your Existing Situation
Seeks to share a bond of understanding intimacy in an esthetic atmosphere of peace and tenderness.

Your Stress Sources
Wants to overcome a feeling of emptiness and to bridge the gap which she feels separates herself from others. Anxious to experience life in all its aspects, to explore all its possibilities, and to live it to the fullest. She therefore resents any restriction or limitation being imposed on her and insists on being free and unhampered.

Your Restrained Characteristics
Feels that she is burdened with more than her fair share of problems. However, she sticks to her goals and tries to overcome her difficulties by being flexible and accommodating.

Your Desired Objective
Has a powerful drive towards sensuousness.

Your Actual Problem
Seeks security and a position in which she will no longer be troubled by demands being made on her.

Your Actual Problem #2
The fear that she might be prevented from achieving the things she wants increases her need for security and freedom from conflict. Is therefore seeking stability and an environment in which she can relax.

The Reader

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns: driven time and again off course,

Everything You Touch Becomes a Crutch.

Nurturing an Established Melodrama

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On the Occasion of Seeing

"Two Handbuilt Leaf Bowls in Blue or Fuschia Glazes"

Decorations for a guest room, or form in exile?

This love is to be found in high-fired tableware
Among things we frequently brush up against--
Receipts and receptacles--our infrequent combings
Into the clay, if, as we elect first to build a foundation.

This is the sprigged bowl I mention as if it has changed
Hands, as if we've conjugated again from our strong
Contrasts, of colored oxides. But first, a coffee break.
And a gift, carried out with great verve, a fired ware

That reeks of the most each has suffered by the finish,
When the mood lurches glazed leaves of sweet gum
Red maple-incised, draping, thin slabs, like your fallen skin
Hardening with no hint of the mold.

I found this today in a used edition I've read for months.

Jeweled Asterisks

L'acqua è [brulicante di squali].

Expository English for a [wo]man ? If the subject matter is assigned, then where is it possible to discern the gender of the writer in the spare argument here? No, you do not have to heave your intro text out again...  

   

632  

   

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—  

For—put them side by side—  

The one the other will contain  

With ease—and You—beside—  

The Brain is deeper than the sea—  

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—  

The one the other will absorb—  

As Sponges—Buckets—do—  

The Brain is just the weight of God—  

For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—  

And they will differ—if they do—  

As Syllable from Sound— 

Via Negativa or The Proof of God by Negation in Emily Dickinson's "632"   

Emily Dickinson never fails to pile controversy on top of controversy in the conception of her deceptively neat, ballad-metered poetry. Poem "632" or "The Brain—is wider than the Sky"—is such case in point. She juxtaposes the brain as a physical reality and as the epicenter of abstract thought, yet she overturns both of these notions. First, there is the "weight" (9) of the brain "[a]s Sponges—Buckets[...]" (8), which she revisits in the universal act of when we "[h]eft them" (10). The possibilities of human thought are as boundless or as she asserts in her first line, "wider than the [s]ky (1). What is sensed as a localized entity, the mind inside the brain, is actually much more diffuse at its visionary status--it is able to "contain / [w]ith ease" (3-4). The complement of the sky is the sea, that other fluid beneath us, which is qualified as the receding, "Blue to Blue" (6). By extension, the sky, the sea—are they contained in the mind or are they canvases created by it?  

 The final stanza concludes this far-reaching notion of human knowledge by situating it in a spiritual, if oddly doctrinaire, sense: "[t]he Brain is just the weight of God— / ...Nor we so much as check our speech..." (9,11). Dickinson is treating the human mind like an assumption carried in our heads, but rarely consciously spoken of as a separate entity from what it filters and perceives. That being said, the concept of God is a given, and the religious demonstration that is so quickly discarded underscores this fact. Poem "632" first speaks in terms of the profoundity of the sky, the sea, which are terms appended to God. What God is not, is a personhood to be appeased by the performance of a ritual, which humans fail to genuinely uphold in any case. Perhaps Dickinson concludes that the cultivated experience of God, lastly, is as individual as the aspirant (since they are equated to each other) in each of us.  

Followed by a faintly allusive photograph of Mermaid's wineglass: The original is from BPotD. 

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