but with a tearing flutter

if my thoughts could turn into ravens 

fly i would whisper fly


 

(it is not with a whisper, but with a tearing flutter
that they will settle, laying the night
upon your white body)

on the under side of things

A curse is written

On the under side of things

Behind the smiling mirror

And behind the smiling moon

Follow follow.

T.S. Eliot

..

another kind of sleep

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.
The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being.
Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.

In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.









from The Poetics of Reverie (Gaston Bachelard)



..

the bench that was

We remained in the station on a wooden bench. We spent the night, and I left before him. Even now I find it really astonishing and very moving. It was a kind of madness, idiocy, to travel from Munich to the Jura to pass a few hours of the night with me. It was utterly inhuman to sit next to a being whom you sense desires you so much and not even to have been touched. Above all, I thought, I must be very careful with everything I say to him because he understands things in quite an alarming way, in an absolute way.

Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia remembering Duchamp,
in Calvin Tomkins's Duchamp: A Biography

..

for the one in love

I am far, far beyond that island of days where once, it seems, I watched a flower grow, and counted the step of the sun, and fed, if my memory serves, the smiling animal at his appointed hour. I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.

How can i find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.

from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

by Elizabeth Smart



.
.

my tulips, gone mad

that kneeling woman
the hour of the wound rising in her
as the tide rises
through your thousand
unrevealed names

your face, darkening in the garden
my tulips, gone mad
bleeding, beheaded
their heads rolling down
my silvery back.

vanquished

and then the day came when I had to give up change and started to multiply instead. overpowered by the dazzling infinity of my face, you wept, vanquished and softly tired. the liquorice-scented air and many a broken god between us.

the red circle

the circle is broken
the circle you put on my ankle
when you decided
I should be born

das Dämonische hat mich getroffen

Shortly after meeting Hannah Arendt, Heidegger wrote: "The demonic has struck me. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. In the rainstorm on the way home, you were even more beautiful and impressive. I should have liked to wander with you for nights on end".


Das Dämonische hat mich getroffen. Nie noch ist mir so etwas geschehen. Im Regensturm auf dem Rückweg warst du noch schöner und größer. Und ich hätte mit Dir Nächte durchwandern können.