"Like the flakes of gold in the chinks of some faded masterpiece, the Orientalism of Poe is so sparingly dispersed--an almost imperceptible touch, here and there--that none save a connoisseur is able to feel what the loss would have been, if that touch had not been given." --Norman Douglas


    "Ash City Grill" (Pessoa X.)

Guernica is the ticking of Argus asleep,
reveille in the vampire-walking day.
The fulvous pulpit where the poppies sleep
is mine, is always mine, whatever you say.
Delusions that leave cinders in their wake
have brought us scads of nondelusive pleasure
wherefore these toppling opposites mistake
cats with MySpace pages for right measure
and Solomon song. One-armed semaphor [for]
launches a vast conspiracy of joy
buzzards. Here, where catnip's scriptures flower
there's really nothing to enjoy
and nothingness absorbs the monkey-picked heart
into its own, my sanguine counterpart.


"An interior decorativeness seems clearly to me to be the superior, enlightened mode by which to give a destiny to ourselves." --The Book of Disquiet


"...'as if' (slovno) a notion inseparable in the Russian from 'the word' itself (slovo)." --Sidney Monas, in: Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam (tr Raffel & Burago, 1973)