words without thoughts

poor v. that's sort of the gist of what i have to say on that subject--that to a certain extent, despite personal ineptitude and undeservingness (nice word, there, c), i've taken part in orphic riddling, that to orpheus, eurydice was no more than a means to his end, to a certain extent. if i were better with words and concepts, if my understanding were stronger and smarter than it is or ever will be, i could maybe hope to express what is almost assuredly my guilt in the matter of v...that it's not fair, not right, to subject a living, vital being with its own problems, its own thoughts and feelings, its own meat, a being i only fleetingly touched and that not for long, a being i was never honest with, one that barely knows me, and one that ought not to have been drawn so deep into myself, one to whom i am completely insignificant, a brief codicil at the end of a rather uninspiring chapter (possibly--i'm not sure what a codicil is), to the incomparably inane burden of being the augustinian signifier around--against--which my "poetry"...uh, revolves? mechanizes, maybe?

v, i manipulate a you that i have no right to claim even exists. and it's creepy. and i feel bad about it. but i keep doing it. so maybe i shouldn't even acknowledge my guilt in the first place, right? if my life were hamlet, i'd be claudius. guilty-ass claudius. i'm not sure what to do about it. so, heh, maybe i'm hamlet. and it's possible i see myself as protesting too much. so i might be gertrude. or i might just be crazy, and ophelia, or a dumbass, hence polonius, or, hell, all of these options sound accurate to some degree or another, so i guess if my life as v's manipulatress is hamlet, it's basically a one-woman show. the point is that for the pitifully small amount that it's worth, i acknowledge my guilt as regards you.

what a crappy point.

specificity

persephone redux redux

1.
what's not to love about the red cresting the hillsides--the way the poppies, those tonal glories, set each other off like bells clustered in a steeple, shivering from one shape to the next, residual as income, the distortion of a carefully healthy formality of sorts becoming pellucid, volatile?

2.
close the window against the sound of the wind, lupus-waldsworth. scythe through its meaning like a dark red reaper swinging.

3.
pressed into the stone, that sound: a shot hart's blood creates the location of the new steeple. vellum. things are living and dying in that wind: the sound of bells, the sound of bells cresting against the window like waves.

4.
shivering, residual
from one stone to the next: lime, slate, mica, ore, cedar.

like water to water,
red runs into red.

5.
a dark red god breathes rust into a soft red bowl.
six seeds between slow white teeth.
the poppies shake, pellucid, volatile.

first attempt.

persephone redux

1. still life

with a pre-raphaelite coloring, a sheath of copper-red hair
arrested mid-bound, smiling on her face like an ad for butter
weather flung around her with an over-arching deployment of sheer blue joy
those pink arched feet mid-bucaholism, poppy petals raining down
red as juice from where they'd been flung overhead by pillow-soft hands.

2. enciente

it ripped the canvas.

III. misfile

but there was no data.

4. reconciliation

facts rubbed against words like mint leaves under a pestle.
she could stand this.
watching granite creep closer.
dust rubbed into her shift.
and enraged dark.

5. every valley

six seeds stained her lips.

and/or void

st. exupery is something else. i was reading flight to arras in the hospital while my dad had heart surgery, which kind of screwed the pooch as far as appreciating it went, plus i was too freaking young, i think, but night flight's just blowing my mind. s-e flows from image to image in a manner that is like skin over muscle, or real skin over imaginary muscle. it's a little bit like dissonance, or richness, or richesse (which might not actually be a french word, but it's taken on a slightly separate meaning from "richness" in my head and so i'll use it, realities of the language be damned) in music, copeland or turandot being the examples i have in hand, where these harmonies just freaking become not lines but great piling swells (think "pines of rome" but less ganked from butterfly and with less freaking birds)--moments in which music gets the piles, that's what i'm talking about. and s-e does it with his writing, creates that feeling that your brain is swelling like a double-time melon and eventually will burst in sunset colors...creates that feeling that your heart's about to explode with the sensation of it.

that's a pretty awkward description. first of all, it may not be applicable to people who can actually experience emotion about their real lives (if such people exist). but more importantly, it just doesn't do its job (of, you know, describing). it's not a feeling of explosion, it's a feeling, maybe, of inward hum--an effect of resonance. yeah. all these things (notes, words) on top of each other create a...an arch, yeah, each object (stone) in tension with the other. something. the point is it's awesome.

and, hey, to bring it back to meam, the point is i don't know how to do it. and i should work on that. ashbery knows how to do it (i get the feeling that it's a different sensation for different people, hence the feeling created in me by the poets and authors and musicians and painters that i love gets created in other people by different poets, authors, musicians, and painters)--puccini always does it (to my mild shame)...then there are these things that do other things to me which aren't quite the same but are equally awesome. however i think i should stick with working on the first effect. now i've gone and confused myself, and should probably just quit while i'm only mildly behind (in self's comprehension of what self is writing, not in the comprehensibility of what self is writing, which i'm sure is pretty much nul).

it's a picture of a borgia

expense of x/

it must cry heigh-ho
for two, pellucid two.

/waste of y

it isn't really my fault, cuz hello last time i sang the body fuckin' electric you plugged your ears. bitch.

is x1 y1'd; and

bored to tears with thomas edison, rodney dangerfield ruled the dirty city.

something something

last name was fuckin' dangerfield, bitch.
nothing electrifies my body but you pellucid two.
tumty-tum

i'm livin' in an empty room with all the windows smashed, won't you pick the pieces up cuz it feels just like i'm-a walkin' on broken glass.

not actually all that creepy in 100% real life

swingers
how to resist

that tiny bruise

if they were making a movie of jane eyre, i'd be blanche ingram

sorolla y bastida: valencia, two children on the beach
richard diebenkorn: cityscape 1 (landscape no. 1)

sorolla y bastida: corner of garden

for some reason i once randomly picked up a print of walk on the beach, i think because it was on sale. i like sargent--why wouldn't i?--but for some reason sorolla y bastida appeals to me slightly more, kind of like the difference between loving, i don't know, renee fleming and leontyne price (here i go again). bearing in mind, as always, that i have not the slightest information regarding what the hell i'm talking about, what i think is later sargent, with the brushstrokes and the incomplete hands, is not only awesome, but kind of up-my-alley (ahrem) awesome (cuz what can i say, i love the brushstrokes); however the sorolla y bastida, whose brushwork and method i am comparing to sargent's (possibly INCREDIBLY INACCURATELY) seems to use the light he paints in a different way. it's like with sargent you get your gray light but the gray light is kind of a counterpoint, almost ironical, to the joyousness of the figures he paints (i mean, even when they're, like, sallow angry people, they're always somewhat flamboyant, you know? taking a scrooge-like glee in their own sallowness and anger?). whereas with sorolla y bastida the light, though significantly less dusty-blue-toned than sargent's, vergin', even, on the cassat palette (oh, i said it), expresses, to me, something sad, slightly grim, somewhat in pain... the light's an isolating force. but this is based on two years living with walk on the beach and five minutes of yahoo searchin'. looking at that valencia painting, i'm tempted to think that maybe the isolation i'm talking about is actually just his painting of wind. on the other hand, the look on the little girl's face is just very inward. you know?
hrrranyway.
something about corner of garden reminded me of the diebenkorn. it's probably nothing more than the colors. but it might be the structure--or maybe maybe maybe it's the brushwork?

still like

still


like a place with a name. uncontested

and habitable.

sans

form.

sans


medium, sans


divisor, a



hole. with a cat in it.

frankly ridiculous

agony, agony, dream, leaven and dream

I. and dog will have his day

concave, pale
with loss,
veins collapsed on themselves
like shells:
pellucid, cupped, emptied.

II. a vampire lover
telescoped in and out,
it became the sand on a
somewhat grotesque shore,
grainy, legionate and wary.

everything rolled into one oversimpled
gaze, becoming like silhouettes
(red over black [black
over red]) against a satin backdrop.

III. said v may not have existed// / / /

red like hair,
hair scattered, reddened
over redgold.

according to the diary of pembroke
yesterday's middle is
today's end. in dirt. it was a riddle

without an answer:
he was in a forest. there was green.
gold light fell, fell, fell to the ground.

IV. ([dream])

when it is dead,
bind its wrists in your hair,

about the skin
that held in tidal blood,

as if indivisible,
it commands,

at the wrists, infinite
at the wrists, in your black hair.

V. acrostic

AGONY there are never to be two in meat// / / /only one

AGONY meat bound

DREAM in your hair

LEAVEN x = 2 pellucid 2

DREAM 1 x'd against pavement. a fetid yellow streetlamp.