RIP Alda Merini...

Winged woman, stop your rancor:
the life that you bear of mystery
smells bad above the cushion
and moribund passes away.
Just so every proud tree oozes
love, behind your dark manures
that you spread of seed and of lust,
and pays at least for the seduction
of violated souls. Even so cantata
of the devil, you are an enemy of God
and then sullenly your lust
coagulates over the souls of heroes,
and you are young. You harm
all who see the path
of your peace and no one penalizes
you for the altar of your greatness
which makes offers to gods. As if you
were a goddess dressed in lust,
you call the gold into your arms
as I call the sons of the night.


¤¤¤


I do not need money.
I have need of feelings
of words, words chosen wisely
of flowers called thoughts,
of roses called presences
of dreams inhabiting the trees,
of songs that make statues dance,
of stars that murmur to the ear of lovers.
I need poetry
this spell which burns the weight of words
that arouses emotions and gives new colors.

Love do not damn me to my fate
Hold me open all the seasons
let my great and warm decline
not fall asleep along drives
put in passive all the passions
sleep on the pillow tenderly
where grow provident ambitions
of love and universal passion
take my everything and do not hurt me.

Alda Merini

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin... book cover & poems...

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a symbolist poet, prose writer, and playwright. Openly gay, he wrote the first celebrations of
gay themes in Russian literature, and the first Russian coming-out novel, Wings (1907), in which a young man learns to accept his sexuality, which makes him feel as if he has grown wings. Kuzmin too was a poet who mined his own biography,incorporating its associations
and events in his poem-cycles.

Wings.Story in Three Parts(Krylya) cover by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov

~Poems~

Sun, Sun

Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!

The Sense Of Your Bidding

The sense of your bidding is unclear:
to pray, to curse, is it, to fight
you bid me, inscrutable genius?
The spring slackens, niggard, meager,
and Benozzo Gozzoli's courier
dozes in the drowsy thickets.

Hills are dark with honeyed cloud.
Look: I do not touch lithe strings.
Your gaze, prophetically flying,
is clenched, gushes no winged streams,
and beckons by no May road, trying
to outstrip Hermes in his flight.

Hobbled horses do not neigh,
Aging warriors sprawl in disarray...
Hold your palms open wide!
Risen spring is bright,
but groves of darkness are not given
to leap for joy having leapt from dreams.

The groom names not the hour,
be not guiled to tarry,
hark through ice the clarion voice,
your flax is drenched with chrism,
and, bidding goodbye to numb laze,
free, in love, you will rise.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful....

edward estlin cummings
(October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962)

"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."

self-portrait ee cummings

i am so glad and very

i am so glad and very
merely my fourth will cure
the laziest self of weary
the hugest sea of shore

so far your nearness reaches
a lucky fifth of you
turns people into eachs
and cowards into grow

our can'ts were born to happen
our mosts have died in more
our twentieth will open
wide a wide open door

we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i

i have found what you are like

i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss

2 little whos

2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)

*Guest Blog...

Maggie O'Sullivan

Maggie O'Sullivan was born in Lincolnshire to Irish parents. Poet, artist, editor, publisher, she has performed and published her work since the late 1970s.

Arshile Gorky, "Study for "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia"

"Elegy" (after Arshile Gorky)

You measured things by weight.

You loved the feel & shape of apricots

the wave & sway of fields of grain

the strength & pressure of waterfalls

the flow & shimmer of rivers

the luxuriance of orange, amber & terracotta

on naked paper

the drift & wing, flutter & rustle

of birds & leaves.

You loved the surreal

the song

the edible

and, above all,

bread.

Your palette unfurls a flirtation

of glow & shadow,

a tenderness of breasts,

a poignant sweet incense of lemons

figs olives honey &

cherry trees in blossom.

The sanctuary holds all.

The bitter-red roses,

the scarlet-red crest of the cock,

the shivering silver sickness of poplar leaves

and the pallid hands, distorted, flat

as icons. [...]

Malevich

Malevich, "White on White" (1918)

white on white

white square on white ground

white ground on white square

groundlight on white

white on light

white nothing

nothing within nothing

within nothing nakendess

white nothing

naked

nothing revealing

nothing reveals nothing

yielding nothing

nothing yields nothing

* with many thanks to R O'B

Books ...Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz....

Modernly known as In honorem sanctae crucis, this work on the holy cross by Rabanus Maurus (a.k.a. Hrabanus Maurus) was completed by 814 and through the manuscript and early printing era it was known under the title of De Laudibus sancte Crucis. The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History says that “with this work Hrabanus paved the way to fill the theoretical gap left open by the previous debates in the East and West about the legitimacy of visual images.”

And visual this work certainly is: It contains 30 carmina figurata (2 unnumbered and 28 numbered) glorifying the holy cross and two xylographic illustrations. The cataloguer at the Pierpont Morgan Library writes that the “Illustrations (pattern or figure poems) are in red and black, sometimes complete woodcuts, sometimes woodcut with letterpress. Various poetic texts can be derived from the resulting configurations. Explanatory text and a transcript of the poem complements each illustration.” The archbishop's work ranks among the earliest examples of printed concrete poetry. And, because his poems are encrypted in a grid of 36 lines each containing 36 letters, this also is an early work in the field of cryptology.

Edith Stein... poem...

And I Remain With You

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me
And illumines the darkness of my heart?
You lead me like a mother's hand,
And should you let go of me,

I would not know how to take another step.
You are the space
That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.
Away from you it sinks into the abyss
Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.
You, nearer to me than I to myself
And more interior than my most interior
And still impalpable and intangible
And beyond any name...

Louise Bogan... poems

Words for Departure

Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.

Hand clasped hand
Forehead still bowed to forehead--
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed
There was no gift nor denial.

2
I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

3
You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd--strike the thing short off;
Be mad--only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)




Betrothed

You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,

My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, "You do not love me,
You do not want me,
You will go away."

In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon
In air traversed of birds.

What have I thought of love?
I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."
I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor
As a wind out of old time . . .

But there is only the evening here,
And the sound of willows
Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.

from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)



Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,--

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.

from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)

Paul Holman...Tara Morgana IV

Tara Morgana IV

1

The memory of a bewildering romance:
her tongue had turned white, the
ugly flight jacket bought the day
before had suffered a three cornered
tear. Her eye imposed the spectre
of a building upon a gap
in the city, but I found
nothing better to do than sketch
the map of mountains, fissures and
interconnected lakes which the action of
heat and sudden rain had developed
upon the path.

2

She gazed into the mirror treated
with seven excretions: ophidian skin, mottled
breasts and shoulders. The fumes settled
into the handsome animal mask of
my father, not as he was
in life, but as it had
proved convenient for me to represent
him to myself. By this time,
she was delusional, ransacking the house
in search of the one object
that caused her damage. I marked
a cross upon the tablecloth, then
added four dots at the intercardinal
points, connecting them with the looping
walls of that labyrinth through which
I follow him now.

3

She vanished among men of unguessable
temper, always older, who made no
remark about the tremble of the
skeleton at the foot of her
mattress.


From V

The transmission I failed to
summon again, as if it could
be recovered by walking in a
stupor beside that same river,
stinking of beer and mud,
above which I had glimpsed a
moth patterned city, my hand
upon the waist of the first
girl I tricked into performing
an action significant to me
(game to accept the hazard of
my company, the boredom).

María Sabina: Mujer Espíritu

Ah, Jesu Kri
I am a woman who shouts
I am a woman who whistles
I am a woman who lightnings, says
...
Woman who resounds
Woman torn up out of the ground
Woman who resounds
Woman torn up out of the ground
Woman of the principal berries, says
Woman of the sacred berries, says
...
Book woman
Book woman
Morning Star woman
Cross Star woman
God Star woman
...
Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum

I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says

Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin...


My space for Maria Sabina >>
www.myspace.com/mariasabinaamor

Henriette Hardenberg ...

from the German poet Henriette Hardenberg (Margarete Rosenberg) 1894-1993






 An image of fear     


Evil pond surrounded by full lips
Angry ruby glass bursting off the bottom.
Secret tiger paths, sandy,
Drawn around golden almond flowers,
Labyrinth passages.
And hot rain pouring down
Among a spark dance of bodies.
Mangling through and through,
Sound from the top of the tower of need.



Spring

Birch-white leg,
Love landscape,
Hips,
Her flower balcony,
Tender and gone to seed,
Full fragrance of narcissus,
You, man
I love!


Hands

Like rare animals they move up and down
And lie deep at the bottom of the sea;
Moon-colored is the stone, like a wound
Set in flowering plumage.

I fear this hidden motion,
Like wind held up in branches;
So few fingers, in figures,
Will excite thoughts in me.

The sea divides so that I can reach it -
In swaying underbrush of crystal night -
This hand, extended flat yet softly sunk,
There before my pallid face.

I don't know whether the little bones,
Rinsed by the sea, will drift and mingle,
Or if, wrapped in clouds,
They will reach up for music and dance.

I know that dreams without fragrance,
Like dead fingers rigid in the joints,
Do not give shrouded magic
For which the living call in sleep.



White and red

Clouds tumble from the skies,
Impenetrable hedges of white roses grow,
The heart, of marble, lies slain.
Snow stars float
In whitewashed time space.

A human being, resurrected, screams,
Blood sprays from the fountains of the heart,
Roses burn in arms,
Dusk shed by a lamp brightens the tears.


Longing

The houses wished for the moon;
unable to stand the edges, the hardness any longer,
they had to bend.
I lay in my room and felt
how they were shaking with longing,
how sick they were, how they swayed.
And the moon came,
and my heart grew along with it,
and its loneliness grew.
The houses held on to each other tight that night.
I kissed the moon and cried.