When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes—to a beach for two faithful children—to a musical house for our clear understanding—then I shall find you.
When there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury, then I am at your feet.
When I have realized all your memories, —when I am the girl who can tie your hands,—then I will stifle you.
When we are very strong, who draws back? or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us.
Dress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw love out of the window.
—Comrade of mine, beggar girl, monstrous child! How little you care about the wretched women, and the machinations and my embarrassment. Join us with your impossible voice, oh your voice! the one flatterer of this base despair.
* * *
A dark morning in July. The taste of ashes in the air, the smell of wood sweating in the hearth, steeped flowers, the devastation of paths, drizzle over the canals in the fields, why not already playthings and incense?
* * *
I stretched out ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
* * *
The high pond is constantly streaming. What witch will rise up against the white sunset? What purple flowers are going to descend?
* * *
While public funds disappear in brotherly celebrations, a bell of pink are rings in the clouds.
* * *
Arousing a pleasant taste of Chinese ink, a black powder gently rains on my night,—I lower the jets of the chandelier, throw myself on the bed, and turning toward the dark, I see you, O my daughters and queens!
Unlike the ashes that make their home with hot coals, snails prefer moist earth. Go on: they advance while gluing themselves to it with their entire bodies. They carry it, they eat it, they shit it. They go through it, it goes through them. It’s the best kind of interpenetration, as between tones, one passive and one active. The passive bathes and nourishes the active, which overturns the other while it eats.
(There is more to be said about snails. First of all their immaculate clamminess. Their sangfroid. Their stretchiness.)
One can scarcely conceive of a snail outside its shell and unmoving. The moment it rests it sinks down deep into itself. In fact, its modesty obliges it to move as soon as it has shown its nakedness and revealed its vulnerable shape. The moment it’s exposed, it moves on.
During periods of dryness they withdraw into ditches where it seems their bodies are enough to maintain their dampness. No doubt their neighbors there are toads and frogs and other ectothermic animals. But when they come out again they don’t move as quickly. You have to admire their willingness to go into the ditch, given how hard it is for them to come out again.
Note also that though snails like moist soil, they have no affection for places that are too wet such as marshes or ponds. Most assuredly they prefer firm earth, as long as it’s fertile and damp.
They are fond as well of moisture-rich vegetables and green leafy plants. They know how to feed on them leaving only the veins, cutting free the most tender leaves. They are hell on salads.
What are these beings from the depths of the ditches? Though snails love many of their trenches’ qualities they have every intention of leaving. They are in their element but they are also wanderers. And when they emerge into the daylight onto firm ground their shells will preserve their vagabond’s hauteur.
It must be a pain to have to haul that trailer around with them everywhere, but they never complain and in the end they are happy about it. How valuable, after all, to be able to go home any time, no matter where you may find yourself, eluding all intruders. It must be worth it.
I In a far country, and a distant age, Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth, A boy was born of humble parentage; The stars that shone upon his lonely birth Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame— Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.
II ’T is said that on the night when he was born, A beauteous shape swept slowly through the room; Its eyes broke on the infant like a morn, And his cheek brightened like a rose in bloom;
The street I walk along I often see As if I'd long since left the moving surface Of the world for the endless other side that disperses Us all some day without return but free
Of care. I apply myself so well to this fragile proceeding That very quickly my gaze ceases to be Part of the cloudy clump of hope and memory I'll have given my name to. But for this to succeed,
A feeling of absolute happiness has to make Itself felt, as if from outside me, so much That at that moment the very street has a hunch That it, the entire city, and its uncertain space
Let dainty wits cry on the sisters nine, That, bravely mask'd, their fancies may be told; Or, Pindar's apes, flaunt they in phrases fine, Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold. Or else let them in statelier glory shine, Ennobling newfound tropes with problems old; Or with strange similes enrich each line, Of herbs or beasts which Ind or Afric hold. For me, in sooth, no Muse but one I know; Phrases and problems from my reach do grow, And strange things cost too dear for my poor sprites. How then? even thus: in Stella's face I read What love and beauty be; then all my deed But copying is, what in her Nature writes.
Take a statement, the same as yesterday’s dictation: Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake. Creative despair and failure have made their patient. Anyway, I’m afraid I have nothing to say. Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper With against the grain ... Taste has turned away her face Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress At table, barely capable but very vague.
(After Dr. Haase gave them shots of morphine, Magda gave each child an ampule of potassium cyanide from a spoon.) This is the needle that we give Soldiers and children when they live
I could not pity your pain but I pitied the branches Losing what little the frost had left them to hold. I could not warm you with sorrow; I turned to the sparrows, Clustered like heavy brown blossoms puffed out by the cold.
They could not help me. I looked at my hands; they were helpless; Strange and detached, less related to me than the birds. Baffled, I called on the mind: it carried me, floundering, Lost among meaningless phrases, tossed in a welter of words.
I When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter," And proved it—'twas no matter what he said: They say his system 'tis in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it! I would shatter Gladly all matters down to stone or lead, Or adamant, to find the World a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
II What a sublime discovery 'twas to make the Universe universal egotism, That all's ideal—all ourselves: I'll stake the World (be it what you will) that that's no schism.
When I fall asleep, and even during sleep, I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial, Having no relation to my affairs.
Dear Mother, is any time left to us In which to be happy? My debts are immense. My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment. I know nothing. I cannot know anything.
Can we not force from widow'd poetry, Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust, Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust, Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flower Of fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour, Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day? Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense Through all our language, both the words and sense? 'Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain And sober Christian precepts still retain, Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses, frame, Grave homilies and lectures, but the flame Of thy brave soul (that shot such heat and light
During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnought, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou'-wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought. Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,— Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
I went back, as to my relatives. When I arrived, the elms had been shaved. But you were all the same. The buildings, the dry classrooms. I embraced your eyes, your avenues. You were fixed in the same expressions. Your flat voices, your dental work, like your lips, slipping over words already said.
Pardon us for uttering a handful of words in any language, so cut loose are we from homes, and from His name that is still nameless, blessed be He. We raised a prayer house—
that is, we broke new wood for one, but some tough burned it, snarling: “Carve only stones for the dead.” Damp ground, no fire, no psalm we all remember. But tall ships anchor here, and at low tide,
Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The harbingers are come. See, see their mark: White is their color, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? Must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred? Must dullness turn me to a clod? Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God.
Good men ye be, to leave me my best room, Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodgèd there: I pass not, I, what of the rest become, So Thou art still my God be out of fear. He will be pleasèd with that ditty: And if I please him, I write fine and witty.
It is not to be bought for a penny in the candy store, nor picked from the bushes in the park. It may be found, perhaps, in the ashes on the distant lots, among the rusting cans and Jimpson weeds. If you wish to eat fish freely, cucumbers and melons,
Such pejorative deformities of sound Without meaningful speech or musical equipoise, Annoyances none but hoi polloi enjoys, Through our winding whispering galleries resound Unwelcome, & like a tedious siege surround Us with that ubiquitous nuisance, noise, Which may take the shape of inflated reputation, Able neither to stun, astonish nor astound Those whom obscene publicity annoys, Who prefer the decent obscurity of publication.
&
Regardless of the weird world’s disregard, These works may be devoted to the wastebasket
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