Demeter

 The mysteries remain,

I keep the same

cycle of seed-time

and of sun and rain;

Demeter in the grass,

I multiply,

renew and bless

Bacchus in the vine;

I hold the law,

I keep the mysteries true,

the first of these

to name the living, dead;

I am the wine and bread.

I keep the law,

I hold the mysteries true,

I am the vine,

the branches, you

and you.

Hilda Doolittle

of course

of course, the way of the blue flower is totally different

(and yet, the same)

there is a way out

speech is blasphemy, silence a lie. above speech and silence there is a way out - said Chan master I-Tuan, roughly twelve centuries ago. 

on this mid-autumn day, no different than other mid-autumn days, than the ones I-Tuan  himself must have known, this way out is the way of the yellow flower.

the frog and the lotus

there is a world where the frog and the lotus are a prince under a curse and a captive princess. later on, when everybody has ceased to believe in magic, the frog and the lotus still mean a multitude of things, like metamorphosis and purity, fertility and self-awareness and so on. this is unavoidable, it would seem.

there is also a world where the frog and the lotus mean nothing else than "frog" and "lotus",  yet just by existing the words themselves place the frog and the lotus under a different kind of curse. together with us, of course. this is unavoidable, it would seem.

how is the world, then, when there is nobody to look at it? there is no such world, it would seem, and this is also unavoidable.

chinese pond, dreaming

twenty years after

i have always hated the imposture of such titles, i found them unsettling even when i would read the books with delight, in those early years (those early years - saying this loud, with different accents, yields different meanings, none of them right, though). it is not in front of god that the soul is groundless, it is in front of memory.  

(and still no lover's lips pressed upon hers taste as excruciatingly bittersweet as those crushed petals, that day)

last summer day

.

for you do not describe the past...

Nacre upon nacre upon nacre, bluish upon bluish upon bluish, each age and each house in which I have dwelled (if it was not all a hallucination of nothingness) is a filter deforming the previous one, blending itself with them, making them narrower and more heterogenous bands. For you do not describe the past by writing about old things, but the misty air between you and it.

Thinking about myself at different ages, as so many consumed previous lives, it is as though I spoke about a long, uninterrupted chain of corpses, a tunnel of bodies dying one within the other. A moment ago, the one who, reflected by the dark lacquer of the coffee cup, had written here the words “dying one within the other” collapsed off the stool, his skin cracked, the bones of his face became visible, his eyes leaked out oozing black blood. In a moment, the one who will write “the one who will write” will also collapse down upon the other’s dust. How could you penetrate this ossuary? And why would you do so? And what gauze mask, what surgical gloves would protect you from the infection emanated by memory?

from Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Orbitor, translated into English as  Glaring (vol. 1)

.

forget the world

.

window dissolution 1

.

window dissolution in pastel mode (2)

.

july the 7th: Tanabata

He is coming, my long-desired lord, 

whom I have been waiting to meet here, 

on the banks of the River of Heaven.... 

The moment of loosening my girdle is nigh!

On the River of Heaven

the sound of the water has become loud: 

perhaps my long-awaited lord 

will soon be coming in his boat

The love-longing of one whole year 
having ended tonight, 
every day from tomorrow 
I must again pine for him as before!

When autumn comes, 
and the river-mists spread over the Heavenly Stream, 
I turn toward the river, and long
 and the nights of my longing are many!

*poems about Tanabata from the Manyoshu , tr. by Lafcadio Hearn

.

july 2: the proof

that she hasn't been eaten by the hat :-)



.

july

 

.

before the names

I dream of the silence

the day before Adam came

to name the animals,

The gold skins newly dropped

from God's bright fingers, still

implicit with the light.

A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,

as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms

we might have known
before the names,
 beyond the gloss of things.


John Burnside 

.

across the yellow fields of summer

.

just by looking

just by looking at the moon

the real ceases to be the real

just by looking at the lily

the real ceases to be the real

just by looking at the crack

the real ceases to be the real