efflorescence · iceberg
easily marred cardboard
windbag's silent wailing
awarded stern furnace
in sight of fit finish
"...Expiring in the frore and foggy air." --Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, Canto IX. xxv.
Saturday, November 25, 2023
"The boundary whereon I break to mist" --The Ring and the Book
the material is wanting
for ev'rything i'd make
& old themes haunt
a heart worn out with breaking
nothing solves in art
i look out at my neighbors
each bungalow that harbors
full complements of hate
& wonder as the light
deepens into evening
whether this bated thriving
is itself defeat
"In loneliness,
That the smoke at least
Will not desert me
I gather brushwood and feed the flames
In this winter mountain home."
"...No cur
That sniffs the distant bear, and sneaks downcast
With craven tail and miscreant trepidation
To kennel and to collar, could slink home
With a more prone abasement."
--The Roman
Offer me something, 👽🔪🩸💘.
"I should have preferred to write in Elvish." --J R R Tolkien
sleeping wolf
tiptoe away
marble wharf
sleeping wolf
crying waif
riddle of why
sleeping wolf
tiptoe away
Friday, November 24, 2023
"The Path of Fog
In despair
l would eat the earth
Tomorrow
The big black dog
Darkens the lamp
Gone is the dark violet with flattened cheekbones
Gone is the idle star of the plains bloated with rain
The bee looks for the needle in the depths of my gaze
Noon
The pupil of my eye bursts on the riverbank
The rainbow of orgasm is reflected on the ceiling
Under your tucked knees my eye
Ossifies
In your oblique sleep
A tin greenery
Catches fire
And it's the entire orbit
That empties in my hand
Why would I not take a comma for a heart
The street is noth1ng more than the masturbation
Of women"
--Joyce Mansour
"...Yet a few days, my mother,
And thou shalt hear the shouting of the reapers,
And we who sharp the sickle shall ring out
The harvest-home."
--Sydney Yendys, The Roman
Have you watered your garden today?
"DEAF MUTE IN THE PEAR TREE
His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree
Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds
Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs
Sun ruddying tree's trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-knobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud
(Painting by Generalic. Primitive.)
I watch him prune with silent secateurs
Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall
Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box
Pear clippings fall
soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
soundlessly in the leaves
A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue
Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree's
quick springtime pulse
Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears
Pale sunlight's choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades
and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day
But when he sees his wife's foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him
then air is kisses, kisses
stone dissolves
his locked throat finds a little door
and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay"
--P K Page (via alliteration.net)
"So I betook me to the sounding sea;
And overheard its slumberous mutterings
Of a revenge on man; whereat almost
I gladdened, for I felt savage as the sea."
--Festus
Oral.
I've been interested in the Spasmodics ever since i found a 120-year-old copy of Philip James Bailey's Festus in my college library, & read (most of) it. Years later, i'd been having a recurring dream of a multi-storey bookstore, when i first ventured into one, now closed, in downtown Ft Worth. As i climbed the stairs there, i realized i'd been dreaming about this place, though i'd never before set foot in it. In the uppermost room i found not one but two copies of Festus. He has some great aphorisms sprinkled throughout, but you have to plow through acres of twaddle about angels & poetry & God & Love ktp to find them. Another Spasmodic, "Owen Meredith" (Bulwer Lytton's son), is well represented on the second hand market by his book-length poem Lucile*. (I found a webpage that attempts to catalog all the editions this book ran through...) It has its moments (i've already quoted from it, i think). And i recently acquired another of his book-length poems, Glenaveril... I'm still looking for a book of Dobell [not anymore: found a print-on-demand copy of Balder, not to mention a wonderfully illustrated vintage The Ballad of Keith of Ravelston]. Here's a good overview of the school. Their main characteristics were verbose subjectivity & exaggerated metaphor. I prefer to think of them as proto-Flarfists.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*footnote. I cannot resist repeating this anecdote, which i found while trying to google a decent bio of O. Meredith, poetaster & sometime Viceroy of India: "There is a legend that every lot or library of books that has turned up in the last eighty years was sure to have a copy of LUCILE in it. The book is, indeed, a drug on the market, and a story is told of how a prominent bookseller of fifty years ago did what he could do to relegate it to a comparatively decent obscurity. The bookseller, who made a trip to England every year, would gather all the copies of LUCILE from his own lots and those of other dealers before a voyage. When he was far out on the Atlantic he would ceremoniously dump them overboard with an oath and add, 'Here are so many copies of LUCILE that will never enter a book store again'."
PS my edition of Lucile appears to be H M Caldwell's "Exquisite" of 1896. (2003; i see there's now a new book out) --And: "Upstart poets continued to write as though inspired and had summarily to be grounded by the critical class."
more hours looking
at the sky than my fellow
humans · nor have i
learned to decipher cloud
runes · as their antics harrow
Thursday, November 23, 2023
what we know is not · what we know
as the flesh slides · from the bone
this saffron light caught · just where names
cease & this flame's releasing
chime somberly near
in the werewolf gulfcairn
wounded dernely runelord
attends returned bronzing
tunnels under the · hospital
"...Death does his work
In secret and in joy intense, untold,
As though an earthquake smacked its mumbling lips
O’er some thick peopled city."
--Festus
My Dear Blue...
"Trump discovering semicolons is like velociraptors learning how to open doors." --@JeffSharlet
"The Lilacs
Those laden lilacs
at the lawn’s end
Came stark, spindly,
and in staggered file,
Like walking wounded
from the dead of winter.
We watched them waken
in the brusque weather
To rot and rootbreak,
to ripped branches,
And I saw them shiver
as the memory swept them
Of night and numbness
and the taste of nothing.
Out of present pain
and from past terror
Their bullet-shaped buds
came quick and bursting,
As if they aimed
to be open with us!
But the sun suddenly
settled about them,
And green and grateful
the lilacs grew,
Healed in that hush,
that hospital quiet.
These lacquered leaves
where the light paddles
And the big blooms
buzzing among them
Have kept their counsel,
conveying nothing
Of their mortal message,
unless one should measure
The depth and dumbness
of death’s kingdom
By the pure power
of this perfume."
--Richard Wilbur
"Moonrise, June 19, 1876
I woke in the midsummer not-to-call night
in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe
of a fingernail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit,
lovely in waning but lustreless
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow
of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp yet clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him
entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight,
unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me
eyelid and eyelid of slumber."
--Gerard Manley Hopkins
"...--Man, alas! alone,
The recreant spirit of the universe,
Contemns the operations of the light;
Loves surface-knowledge; calls the crimes of crowds
Virtue: adores the useful vices; licks
The gory dust from off the feet of war,
And swears it food for gods, though fit for fiends..."
--Festus
"Oh! I should love to die. What is to die?
I cannot hold the meaning more than can
An oak’s arms clasp the blast that blows on it."
--Festus
"isolation
another trade bead
slides into place"
--an'ya
Abandoned fishing boat, Scotland.
1.
the crazy rabies floods
in its season
banquet of turbid flerds
the crazy rabies floods
though we escaped through fields
& for awhile no scathe incision
the crazy rabies floods
in its season
2.
dying on the eve of a cease-fire
makes it alright
these bombs aren't real
they're already nothing
i watch a parade
of shiny new crutches
at the end of the parade
they give them all back
"Ye hate the truth as snails salt--it dissolves ye..." --Festus
"This is to be a mortal and immortal!
To live within a circle,--and to be
That dark point where the shades of all things around
Meet, mix and deepen."
--Festus
"I saw.
I lived.
I died.
I saw a side.
I died
A fog is all it.
I’ll, as I go, fade.
I died
I saw a side.
I did evil:
I was I."
--@MerlinaAcevedo
"Not far away for ages past had stood
An old inviolated sacred wood;
Whose gloomy boughs, thick interwoven, made
A chilly chearless everlasting shade:
There, nor the rustic gods, nor satyrs sport,
Nor fauns and sylvans with the nymphs resort:
But barbarous priests some dreadful power adore,
And lustrate every tree with human gore.
If mysteries in times of old receiv'd,
And pious ancientry be yet believ'd,
There not the feather'd songster builds her nest,
Nor lonely dens conceal the salvage beast:
There no tempestuous winds presume to fly,
Even lightnings glance aloof, and shoot obliquely by.
No wanton breezes toss the dancing leaves,
But shivering horror in the branches heaves.
Black springs with pitchy streams divide the ground,
And bubbling tumble with a sullen sound.
Old images of forms mishapen stand,
Rude and unknowing of the artist's hand;
With hoary filth begrim'd, each ghastly head
Strikes the astonish'd gazer's soul with dread.
No gods, who long in common shapes appear'd,
Were e'er with such religious awe rever'd:
But zealous crowds in ignorance adore,
And still the less they know, they fear the more."
--Rowe's Lucan, III.591-616
"The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three weeks. He had all the cares of the world on his head in three months. He conceived bitter senfiments against his parents or guardians in four; he was an old misanthrope, in five; envied Curtius that blessed refuge in the earth, in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world." --Dombey and Son
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
"Yet truth and falsehood meet in seeming, like
The falling leaf and shadow on the pool’s face."
--Festus
Trip.
“Cuil Cliffs
The wall of Cuil cliff is
crammed with gannets, jammed in
cracks or lodged on ledges,
wedged in wave-lashed caves. Flight,
and their slick vertical
stoop through the arcs and scoops
of deflected seas act
on imaginations
as tongue-tips do on spines—
may such ardent touchings
deluge and delight you.
The debt the gannet owes
to these seas implies each
possesses awareness.
No, they’re sapped and now-swept
as my sea-wolf’s love-cry.”
--Ian Crockatt
Disk.
things that are neither teaching nor learning
shards given off
with the killing power of knives
these lessons linger
in gray
& in cerulean
flesh is gossamer
it is the cry that remains in silence
where heavier things have passed
"Would I, for all the beauty of my place,
Lift from the chaste chryselephantine floors
One leprous limb?"
--Balder
"Alexandrines
Knowing the weariness of dreams, and days, and nights,
The great and grievous vanity of joy and pain;
Frail loves that pass, where languors infinite remain,
Fervours and long despairs and desperate, brief delights;
Knowing how in the witless brains of them that were,
The drowsy, wiving worm hath prospered and hath died;
Knowing that, evermore, by moon and sun abide
The standing glooms made stagnant in the sepulchre;
Knowing the vacillant leaves that tremble, flame, and fall,
The sweetly-wasting rose, the dawns and stars that wane--
Knowing these things, the desolate heart and soul are fain
Of the one perfect sleep which filleth, foldeth all."
--Clark Ashton Smith
"It looks like what a nun who is also a widow would wear to the Y; who cares."
"In cities over-webbed with somber weed" --Clark Ashton Smith
Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov Probably Came from Double Red Dwarf Kruger 60.
"That midden of the stagnant nadir skies" --Clark Ashton Smith
My Friend in Nablus Had a Dream. (via @JoyelleMcS)
"dunning-kruger 60"
jackals swarming not · visibly
the iron drizzle · darks environ
i am cognizant · of bleak truths
soothsayings spiel · in realtime
the swarming jackals · my neighbors
glib in kayfabe · no mask fib
& blood thanksgiving · small diff'rence
pardon's skiffle & barred leave
"The Worms at Heaven's Gate
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour
Within our bellies—we her chariot.
Here is an eye; and here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,
And, finger after finger, here the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body, and the feet.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour."
--Wallace Stevens
Funeral Oration for a Mouse. (via @maryanncorbett)
"When asked why he wrote in a dead language, [Isaac Bashevis] Singer said he was wont to reply that he wrote mostly about ghosts, and that is what ghosts speak, a dead language." --Nuala NÃ Dhomhnaill in NYT Book R 1-8-95
What If AI Hands Are A Feature Not A Bug?
The only poem i have been able to find by a Dallas poet contemporaneous with the Kennedy Assassination:
"The Spell
You can almost see him, looking as if well,
Shedding it, shaking it off,
The least shadow on the shoulders
Marking the hurt--as if absorbed almost;
Then the face turning, alive--
Only hesitating momentarily--
Until you remember how the head
Was horribly shattered
And fell, with the lifted hair,
As from an ax in back--Oswald
Cutting a path for himself
In the midst of America, a wedge;
But was the thing as it sped,
Coppered, leaden, not stopped
Perhaps there in the invincible thick hair?
Where the woman with her skill
Could pick it away, in her lap,
Breaking the spell? in the cloth of her dress--
It was deeper than that;
Neither burr nor dune thistle,
Nor like the roses she held
Black as blood in the light, so dark red--
But a kind of blunt bud, splintered
Into flower, that could not be touched,
Having its own final force that spread throughout,
The blind dark overwhelming him."
--William Burford, A Beginning (1966)
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Clowns fighting each other in a department store, detailed oil painting, salvador dali.
"pain passes for sunlight at some depths" --Bill Knott
seldom naked fire
within the walls of death
i hear such manxome tide
as rinses away each road
purulent taiga
but dank makings of fire
"Dead Man's Dump
The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended--stopped and held.
What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul's sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?
None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.
What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.
The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
Those dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called `An end!'
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.
Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?
A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.
They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.
Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.
Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight.
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face."
--Isaac Rosenberg
"The night was cold and dark.
'Listen to the wind howling in the trees,' said Frog. 'What a fine time for a ghost story.'
Toad moved deeper into his chair." --@FrogandToadbot
The Sky is the Source of Life.
"Still looking at Twitter the same way I watch the Qatar World Cup: Done in secret once or twice a week, and with a sense of shame." --@MikeSpeaks
"DOMESTIC
Left to myself I might simply
fondle a platter of doorknobs,
as long as they are the mute ones—
I don't like the verbal ones.
If nobody bothers me I could
notice out the window how
each house but mine is best.
Maybe blow on my palms,
trying to mist over like glass
that place where the keys nest.
Or take another mouse out
of the trap and thumb its head,
thumb at it over and over
like a dud cigarette-lighter."
--Bill Knott
"But rarely
Did he visit-now
‘Tis all in the past, and
Since then in the garden
Every single trace has gone."
The Florentine Codex digitized. (via @colossal@mastodon.art)
"Man has always believed he remedied his ignorance of things, by inventing words to which he could never attach any true sense or meaning." --Baron d'Holbach