( me / via )

"It was a place filled with plotless stories..."

"The Road to Thebes II. Interlude

After the intolerable weight of tyrant suns
(Caesars with masks of gold), wave after wave the early evening

Comes with the sound of sea and siren cave
To continents and cities after the long heat

And echoes in buried cities—the azoic azure
Calls to the sphinxes of the silence and the unburied sapphires
Staring across lion-breasted sands in the great deserts,

And to the azoic heart (where Time, that Medusa, reigns, turns all to stone)—
To the orange-flower, the oragious hair of youth that cool airs lift—the orb;
And the golden nodding nurse that we call Eve

And evening, sighed, 'The first and final Adam, he who is one with the immense Ceres
And all day broke the gold body of the giantess as in love,

And he who forsook her for that other giantess,
The city, the vast continent of stone,

Are homeward-going.'
    Soon night falls like fire, yet vine-dark.
                In the cities
The girls, with breasts like points of sun in the vine-dark night
And gowns the color of the thunders' reverberations
Among the forests, seek a love in which to sink like the sea.

What do the seraphs and sapphires of air among the branches
Hear as the voices pass? 'Your hair is ringed as the tendrils
Of the first plantations of the Vine after the Flood.'

'The vines of the Sun? Or the vines of Darkness and of all damnations
The vines of Medusa's serpents?' 'Ah, your kiss is the light of the planets, burning among the leaves!'
                'No, It was Lucifer,

Son of the Morning—then it changed to the Prince of the Air, the brightness
That rules in Hell! Grown cold! I am Medusa—and my other
Name is Time!

    Come to my lips—the long horizon—
Cold with the serpents' buried wisdom, that has known the azoic
Continents, the secrets and night-haunted jewels of the catafalques!

Come! I will seal your eyes that they no more shall weep,
No more behold another. Once, at your grief,
The unfraught sea would swell, and the unsought diamonds

Rise with your tears.
                Now you shall faithless be
To the flesh of orange-blossom and arbutus honey-hearted,
Seeing my lips, cold as the unburied sapphires in the desert air,
Approach your own:
The one horizon, the azoic continent of night and stone.' "

—Edith Sitwell, Gardeners and Astronomers (1953)

NOW i get it.

"TRANSFORMATIONS (Anagrammed Lines)

Transformations
first ran on atoms....

Transformations
form stars, anoint
arts, form nations
of man or transits
of storms... In an art
far torn into mass,
stir formats anon."

—Anthony Etherin

"Children are not afraid of their dolls coming to life—they may even want them to."