my dark rapunzel

Venezia, dark & slow

shake us, we, the palms of the wound

The leaves asleep under the wind

are the wounds’ ship,

and the ages collapsed on top of each other

are the wound’s glory,

and the trees rising out of our eyelashes

are the wound’s lake.
The wound is to be found on bridges

where the grave lengthens

and patience goes on to no end

between the shores of our love and death.

The wound is a sign,
and the wound is a crossing too.

If I had a harbor in the land
of dreams and mirrors, if I had a ship,
if I had the remains
of a city, if I had a city
in the land of children and weeping,
I would have written all this down for the wound’s sake,
a song like a spear
that penetrates trees, stone, and sky,
soft like water
unbridled, startling like conquest.

Rain down on our desert

O world adorned with dream and longing.

Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound,

tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound,

that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands.

World adorned with dream and longing

world that falls on my brow

like the lash of a wound,

don’t come close—the wound is closer—

don’t tempt me—the wound is more beautiful.

That magic that your eyes had flung

on the last kingdoms—

the wound has passed over it,

passed and did not leave a single sail

to tempt toward salvation, did not leave

a single island behind.

 

from Adonis, The Wound, tr. by Khaled Mattawa, 

with my thanks to the Black Sun for this discovery

(for e.)

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)

and the whitest of orchids

no matter how  - and the whitest of orchids is ashen cloud against my glow -
no matter how warm, how bright, how pure -
i have failed. one always fails. i have asked, just once, just this time, for a different law: that i might be allowed to cross the bridge. that the radiance of what i am, the entire constellation of what is called, i suppose, "myself", could reach you at the other end, fill you like a beam of light. you, shattered with recognition, my orchid thrusting its roots into you, growing out of your mouth. the only possible path for what is, and cannot be any other way.

no. the truth of a person cannot be lifted, as one would lift a piece of luggage before a hasty departure, cannot be transferred and placed into another, to grow there, quietly, like a seed. one flower, and only one, carried within, inscribed into itself, from the beginning. the truth of the seed cannot be broken, cannot be warped into anything else. yet no matter how i hurry to reach your arms, the one who looks at me from there, invented by you, grins back, her face an ugly, pitiful mask.

there is nothing more treacherous than bridges. they give one hope, one ardently takes one step after another only to find oneself, at some point, suspended above the abyss and the other waving welcome, just one more step and i will catch you, i will hold you, beloved, unaware that the defilement is already at work, in each word, in each gesture, that the fall into time has already begun.

...

more of cats and balls

Working on the last post, I thought I needed a photo which would mirror that last line, for some reason the image of that ball was very appealing to me. So I took my camera and went to my mother's, who was ready to mock me: "You don't really believe the dark one will comply?"

And indeed, the dark one didn't.

I took out all my mother's balls of yarn, I tossed them about, rolled them, dangled them in front of her, called her in all tongues and voices, threatened, begged. Unmoved in her otherworldly sovereignty, without even a look of mercy (disdain would have been sweeter), she kept ignoring me, bathed in her luxurious black languor like a haughty queen whom a writer of a different age would have called Salammbô.

And now I am forced to wonder, yet again, why it is that cats hold this strange power over us, such a mythical mix of fascination and fear. And I remember a certain poet obsessed with the dangerous perfume floating about her body, praying, Come, my fine cat, against my loving heart. Sheathe your sharp claws, and settle. I remember Bastet and also a certain Bysshe, the black cat whose owner, a somewhat demonic figure himself, had recently written to me how possessed he was by this dark love. And I remember Kuroneko, a classic Japanese horror film of the sixties, which shows, in scenes of breathtaking beauty and eroticism despite their inherent violence, two women returning, as evil spirits in the shape of black cats, to avenge their cruel death at the hands of samurai. Or Tanizaki's novel A Cat, a Man and Two Women, in which a man is so in love with his cat, Lily, that he ends up choosing her over the two women in his life, his former and new wife, both sickly jealous of the cat, more than of each other.

(Why is it that men are typically subjects of such depictions? What makes them frailer and more easily prey to feline fascination? Or is this just another myth?)

And as I couldn't find the thread leading out of this ball of tangled thoughts and memories, I decided to make a post about it and dedicate it to all the cat-lovers among the Bridge-lovers, some of whom I already know.

..

not even

Soit blessure, soit bonheur, il me prend parfois l'envie de m'abîmer...
c'est qu'il n'y a plus de place pour moi nulle part, même pas dans la mort.

Roland Barthes
(Fragments d'un discours amoureux)

Be it wound or happiness, sometimes i long to sink into an abyss...
It is because there is no longer any place for me anywhere, not even in death.

Barthes (Fragments of a Lover's Discourse)

those words

As I work to sharpen my knife,
kindly stop fidgeting and listen to
how much you'll enjoy being carved up.

You'll also rejoice in the knowledge
of the house your bones will make sturdy
and the bountiful lush garden
we'll be able to grow with your blood.

I know, you cannot picture it now,
but I've helped colleagues who have done it
and I'm pretty sure you can trust me
to get it right from the very first try.

I've observed and carefully noted
how we must start with the tongue -
we wouldn't want those words you don't mean
to hang about the house like mad rats.


Lecture, by Manuela

start painting (old style, absolutely!)

start painting your shadow
you said quietly
the same one, all over again
until your fingers bleed
it's the only way you'll learn to give up
this fastidious attachment to being

how - i asked shyly
(i knew you were tired of my questions
why is it i always have to learn painfully
what the others appear to master
with such ease and grace:
how to put one foot before another
how to breathe without unleashing a cloud
how to dwell in the falling of leaves
as peacefully as you in the shaded
house of the vague)
so i didn't want to upset you
even though it seemed impossible to upset
the clear water in a bowl of light.

i am still struggling,
my razor blunt, my charcoal burnt.
i am so tired, if only you knew.
carnations fill my ripe mouth,
a wave of darkness crushing within.
come, stop the bleeding.

only then will i fall away from myself
and become your silence.