Moonlight by Paul Verlaine

Your soul's the landscape of a painter's dream
Where charming masks and bergamasks arise
To play the lute and dance and nearly seem
Sad underneath a whimsical disguise.

Their lively songs all tell in minor key
Of conquering love, fortune, and delight.
They can't believe how happy they must be...
Their melody melds with the calm moonlight,
 
With the calm, beautiful and sad moonlight
That lures the birds to dream among the trees
And makes the fountains weep into the night
Their marbled streams of long-drawn ecstasies.

Clair de Lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques,
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

Babylon, 324 BC: A Love Story

"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept; for there were no more worlds to conquer."
-Plutarch

O faceless child of a faceless mother,
come down to the future garden
where the fragility of peach blossoms
opens up its scent unto one moment.
In that oasis, I could not conquer
a single sunburnt pool of tears.
The sun is still a knife of fire
whose blazing arc can’t turn its thrust,
but sheds a blood into each cracked riverbed
that confounds the resurrected light.
In the distances, a fanfare
plays earpiercingly away and is gone.
And already there is nothing more.
The pyramid at Giza is crumbling
in ruins before your feet,
and all the gardens are hanging at your speech.
Say the world is just made up
of seven colors, with nowhere further east of us,
and nowhere further south, and no sea beyond
the Jhelum River. Feel the roads of India
passing through me, unto the final siege,
the farthest march, and last farewell.

Sonnets to Orpheus, I, V
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Erect no mourning stone. Just let the rose
bloom as his supplication every year.
Because that's Orpheus. His metamorphosis
to this and that. We shouldn't be unclear

about other names. Once and for all times,
it's Orpheus, when there's song. He comes and goes.
Is it not enough, that he outlives the chaliced rose
sometimes, to linger on a day or two?

Oh, how he must dissolve to reach your grasp.
Even if fear seized him too, that he disintegrates.
In that his word traverses beyond presence,

he's already there, where you can't accompany him.
The lyre strings will not constrain his hands.
As he obeys, he oversteps the bounds.

Original Poem:

Errichtet keinen Denkstein. Laßt die Rose
nur jedes Jahr zu seinen Gunsten blühn.
Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose
in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn

um andre Namen. Ein für alle Male
ists Orpheus, wenn es singt. Er kommt und geht.
Ists nicht schon viel, wenn er die Rosenschale
um ein paar Tage manchmal übersteht?

O wie er schwinden muß, daß ihrs begrifft!
Und wenn ihm selbst auch bangte, daß er schwände.
Indem sein Wort das Hiersein übertrifft,

ist er schon dort, wohin ihrs nicht begleitet.
Der Leier Gitter zwängt ihm nicht die Hände.
Und er gehorcht, indem er überschreitet.

An Archeologist Finds a Passage

I dreamt I found a planet of my own.
And now I wake to find the dream has changed
me, changed everything, suffused our lives
in streams of quantum time whose waters bled
the homeland riverbeds. The surgeon’s arc
of dawn won’t cauterize the flower heads.
I dreamt I lived alone in my own world.
And now I wake to find I do. Oh where
in sleep does twilight mine the salt of sea?
I saw you in that land of future palms
that yielded many dates to not exist,
and saw myself, as though I was before
a mirror that reflected on itself,
and never gleaned how time translates to time,
how beauty bides within a foreign script,
its hapax legomena unpronounced.
I dreamt I scrawled your name in water
backwards, with my left hand, and didn’t know
how hard the coming tide would flay the shore.
Why does slow aeolian erosion
compose its domed abodes of clocks and chimes?
My god, why? But forsake me, forgo me.
My shadow turned away from you. The reeds
are growing in my chest and in my eyes.
The photons fell in different ways for you.
And white dwarfs dissolved in cups of tea.
The light fell off the tower’s edge and crashed
into an atrium. One third a life
in twenty minutes, lived, unlived- can’t say.
I tried to touch the autumn of your face:
The moisture dripped beyond where space extends
but I distilled it, undripped, untocked.
I crossed the bridge of stolen time with you
and never learned the legend of your youth,
the pre-eternal garden speaking sleep,
or how the oak trees grew within your veins
because I missed the words, and let my breath
pass above your hair, like something being said.

I’ve walked beyond the creaking disaccords

of ghosted jamborees, far from the schoolyard…

they are still singing in the shadows

in the rustiest blue metallic twang.

In the playground’s farthest corner, there is a shade

without a name, who builds himself from clay

towards Plato’s primary sun. I analyze the geometry

of non-Euclidean trees, study the binaural scratch

of dangling leaves… the cows come for the slaughter.

It is time to leave again. The wind

blows kyries. My neck tilts on the bone.

How long has earth been dead? The poverty

fills the space between my breaths

to inhuman depths. The sound is wrong,

her voice overspun with pallor, you mustn’t go,

pale dress of milkweed and cobwebs, mustn’t go.

The porchlight, the door latch,

the breaking glass. A century later

nothing’s changed. When will we leave tonight?

The line recedes beyond the railroad tracks…

you can still follow on. Into the yellow evening

our voices chase the other echoes on.

The lemon-scented lemniscate ladens sky

with calligraphic citrus, the final fruit of infinity

pendulating among equidistributed constellations

whose penumbral palm presses the gleam

of electroluminescent green among the auroras,

the choral hymns, the antiphons of phosphenes,

omega, psi, chi, chanting back to the rapt pareidoliac

as summer’s summarium et expeditum rescinds

to primordial sums of suns and moons

and suns again. Ho-hum. Another lemma proved

inconsequential, another sequence of primes

sequestered, another series of partials

partially incomplete. Nevermind. Just take

a plane and project a map among the spheres

and on that map plot a loxodrome of milky lines,

devise clélies among the Pleiades, concoct

chiralities of cochleoids, limn a Lissajous curve

in lissome glissando, not overmuch, but enough

to sense the sonoluminescence of aleatoric time

as qualia arise within the flux of quantum foam,

within the fluidity of effluvia, the vicissitudes

becoming less viscous. It is natural to feel

afraid amidst the profligacy of rosenblooming

maps to Sirius, Alpha Centauri, Procyon.

From anabasis to katabasis, from metamorphosis

to kenosis, the chronofilaments and consiliences

hyperetherealize in a network of anastomosis.

And my arms would lean against the bronze horizon,
and build an alphabet of falling leaves. Smell the rose
with your whole body, the regenerated odors,

memorize the scents in their original order: the resin,
pine, the warmth of autumn apples blown from far off,
because everything comes from far off now
in shades of amber leaves poured unto us
like vintage wines that stop the somnolence of summer,
1909, the year that collapsed our lives to quantum time.
Oh, number these new constellations, and then reduce
once more unto the ever-prime: the toc to tic,
the Z to A, the light that moves about a word
of dark, the primal act, the apple's fall and lunar arc.

That is ideal closeness: the wind filling up our hands,

the gustatory gusts blown away against our mouths,              

the mass of words gathered up and moved

before the old taboo. Don’t ask to know

the nowhere of my face: My eyes are nothing

like the sun. My flesh is not a jade-smooth stone.
...
I will promulgate pronunciamentos, retrodict

that in my poems I spoke to you of song

through light years of scents without a source

and winds without a name; repeal the lex and law

and tell this story twice, the same
but in reverse: Be the wind when I blow

my flute for you upon your ancient airs

for lute and violin, the lightning when I strike

my drum in dusk, and strike again

as rainsticks pour through primal rites. Do you feel
me coming through, like streams of photons

of radiation that escapes its own black hole?

I have waited aeons… the light appears again.
...
The light appears and cannot fade.
But if all things have a limit, length, and law,
a lex, rex, and proud expounder, already there is nothing left
of what once was, and time itself is through with us.
Over and done. So tonight I write final lines
unto the exeunt omnes: All things come back
from the beginning, in shades of amber leaves poured unto us
through gusts that speak the words no earthly lexicons define.
Smell the rose with your whole body, the regenerated odors,
memorize the scents in their original odor:
the resin, pine, the sculpted silence grown on silence
in the gardens of repose. Everything
arrives from the middle of the field
to touch the center of being, as if we lived
and were young again, and breathed again, and felt
the sonnet's turn and planet's tilt, as if
our disembodiments of voices played hide-and-seek
amongst disappearances of sky, from sun to moon 
to sun again, from apoapsis to periapsis, 

whether my yes or your no, my no or your yes. The words
make little difference for being spoken
by the golden spirals of a thousand-petaled rose.
Forget our faces, past, and names.

Come end the human rite of shame.

Note: the trope of a woman's skin as jade is extremely common in Chinese literature and may be viewed as essentially analogous to the Petrarchan conceit of a woman's eyes as the sun.

Note further: in a musicological sense, "air" refers to a solo vocal song with instrumental accompaniment and later to certain instrumental dance suites.

This is a poem about Richard Kerwin.

Orpheus Speaks

When you left Everpeace forever I wept so much

the first time. Now with summer gone and autumn's full ascent
daylight is sieved between mint and pine. The scents
so sharp seemed to make us real, our repeated reunions,
our repeated farewells, thinning us to sun, melting us
to marmalade residuum of pure abstraction, distant
because distance is what you need to feel whole.

I wept for the taste of berries in your mouth
and for the metamorphosis of roses ever perplexed
with how to bloom, knowing how their meanings changed.

Oh, come and go. Where is your breath I held

within my throat, where is your scar my fingers traced?

Because there was song, I learned to overlive the rose
by a day. Or two. Still now it scares me to disintegrate.

And how can I sing my grief when I have no words
with you dead the second time? You were the tune
once heard upon the crossroads of systole and diastole,

where no temple to Apollo is found.¹ You sang

our lives alive. Now dead as a Roman aqueduct

your song fluxes to the sea's slumberous ear.

It's true her murmurous waterways would not listen

if my music ceased instead. You composed

the ripened tang of berries, the taste of wild blue
elderbloom. You were the winefull cup and chalice
of the earth. Now with you dead anew, the leaves
of my songbook scatter to thorn and nettle vine; I unstring
my lyre and heartstrings, untie the twain pipes of heartcore,²
and step into the twice-full stream that sweeps me
out of time, to come and go amid your lost forms.


¹Temples in ancient Greece were often located at crossroads, particularly temples to Hecate or Hermes, both of whom are associated with the underworld (the latter being the psychopomp to Hades) and with liminal states, which contrasts with the function of the sun god Apollo, who instructed Orpheus in the art of music.

²Anatomically, the aorta and venae cavae.

Il nome suo nessun saprà

The distal sun discharged some pointellated light

that dumped the graphics in his head. And bled

the world, like seeps of watercolor paint, like spume

afloat in French seascapes, where doves returned
to shore and dolphins lapped in gentle arcs, 
splashing, shooting forth, again they lashed, again

like sun-streaked artillery fire, swimming artful loops
against the linseed canvas smeared in cochineal

and violent gold, the artist's chef d'œuvre. The trash

engorged itself on phlegm and spittled air. And flared

the shock of white that thrashed his starving brain.

The stench, the stain, the bloat, the ripped-off face,

the shriveled flesh, the vomit. The piss of cats.

The bellicose swell of hunger bruised his cerebellum.

Vincerò.

The universe of blood that warmed his fingertip
converged upon the pistol grip.
The detonating sun split open his pupils

like light splittered through prismatic crystal
because he always was cut open,
slit throat to lip, splattered dry, and broken.

He breathed like an animal. No longer any sissy fag.

It wasn’t how they fell but how they flinched

that made him feel strong. It was the grandeur

that he needed. I could tell. No one else noticed,

but the bodies formed a perfect trapezoid

as the blood spooled in spirals, like the arms

of ancient galaxies, caressing a child as he cried.


Note: The title is a reference to Puccini's "Nessun Dorma."

God to Adam

So why the sudden lust for apples,

their sudden overpresence in your mind?

Perhaps it is your pride that grapples

with busting fruit, as if you were confined

to dumps of dust within the garden,

as if you mustered long for scraps, a rind,

a pit, and felt the hunger harden.

Don’t prattle pap for godly pardon.

Don’t prate about your holy hard on.

Confess your human faults and I’ll forgive

and give you clumps of clod and let you live

in hell. Sure, blame the girl and bluster

that she ensnared you in a fluster

of sin and stain and skin, while knowing
she’d blush and shake and blame the fucking snake

and never name the urge you couldn’t slake.

You fake! What appetite was growing

that bade you prance about in fig-leaved shame?

Speak, coward! Thirst for knowledge as you claim

or ache for ripened flesh? I’ll tell you what,

go find that girl and brand her primal slut

and temptress whore. Then see what lies begot:

the worm, the cut, the wound, the cankered clot.

See that? Just watch it, watch that apple rot.

Note to poem:
The words I wrote were "godly pardon."
Don't read the rhyme as "Dolly Parton."
I know it's feminine, you privileged prick.
But I'll wield a spear like any Spartan
and stick its tip into your sexist shtick.

Advice to a 13th-Century German Minnesänger

Just scorn the dawn and reap the vine. Don’t keep

concealing how the colors rage, how sunset emigrates

amid recidivistic flames that flake to scattered sea.

Not all pearls loose temporal shells to slip from lore.
Not all waves find another beach. You must break

but not too soon, you must not breach before the bay.

Recede from Grecian statues bound to sand and time,

whose feet are ripped to tide along the sepulcher of shore
before an inscribed skull whose glyphs reveal your name.

Beside your relic bones there lies a book of lyric verse

and lyres lost to Orpheus, when Eurydice died

the second time, the tune that sang his life alive.

He wept for so much melody. She caught his breath

within the falling universe, and held him out

in weaves of verse, in tomes now hushed to time.

This is your holocaust of dust, a burning book

that reads from back to front, each withered page

remade unlived, the silence desiccated twice.

Begin the legend anew tonight. Let lightning lash

from dawnwind, let it bathe manuscripts in breeze

that razes oil lamps, and bids an image enter in.

Now reconstruct the primal light. With no new words

to sing the genesis of grief, invent an alphabet

of pulsing wave on wave through waves of light.

Primeval galaxies redshift to sight. The sky appears

transduced to sifting winds through crumbling clouds

of pink and blue. Its translation is ever lost in you.

Its colors flare within the flask of everlasting light

whose depths you cannot quench. Now drink

of this desire to swallow evening’s solar green.

Now drink of this desire. Your life is overlived

but linger yet. When overladen branches bloom

in long-lapsed blue, a dreamblown memory returns.

It is the changeling sea, dissolved to babblings of foam,

who bids you slip your ear beneath her slumberous depths

and hear the speech that wanders, lost amid her forms.

Meander through the nettlebloom, and sleep

amid the poppy shade. Pluck the berries earth bestows

and taste the netherspeech. Leave a handful for the dead.

The tang speaks death into your mouth. Again and again

a ripe fullness flares upon your vine-leaf lips, and bursts

the slow namelessness that clods your sentient mouth.

Uni-verse

I.
You write a poem. You have made the universe’s ridge,

a purple turning violet, an uprisen lark bellishing in blue

jubilation, who swings a single wing against the tyrant sun

and swipes away the light. When the skylark starts to soar

it means the coming wraith of war. When the sky implodes

in rage, it means your blood dies dry on page. Hush

little poet, don’t speak a word. Under charnel vaults

not a gasp is heard. All time is silent where your corpse

rots interned. And if that risen lark should sing, just strive

within the milky edge of wing, the forge-wrought flail

of feathers flaking flames and flinging fire. The world falls

to different rebels now, as maelstroms of whitened hail

shatter air to whiter hail in shrapnelled apogee, a flash

of dawnblasted ice that lashes nerve from bone, a fresh

apotheosis of fluttered cries dissolved to sovereign sound.

II.
It is a theater of solar wind and crumbling cloud, a play

with no proscenium, no final act, and no denouement.

It is pulsing wave on wave through rushing waves

on splurging pips of particles through flowing forms

of forms on metamorphoses of gushing primal light.

It is light transformed to orange churned red by space

expanding, elselands of concealings rippling like sand

made rock turned sand again. It is a remembered time,

a half-time, a para-time, curved by the planetary poem.

It is a poem upon a plate, a pâté of poïesis, fat, fat

poïesis, a giant’s poem, a poem of rumpled plums.

Fie, fie for so much plump poïesis, fee-fie-fo-fum,

such lascivious labials, fie-fum, licentious liquids,

fee-fie, frittered plantain fricatives. Pardon, pardon

such rude and bulging blues, these rustic reds

which ought to be a famished, fusty gold. Forgive

the prinking pinks. Sorry about the orange-vermeil.

A Note on the Interpretation of 'The Snow Man'

This essay is a work in progress. It needs to be revised and extensively expanded, because it's necessarily incomplete, since I'm currently only dealing with half of the propositional content.

‘The Snow Man’ presents a dissolution of the categorical distinction between subject and object. Here we may detect the influence of Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein, although we need not restrict ourselves to a Heideggarian analysis, since Stevens appropriated philosophy for his poetry on the basis of aesthetic rather than systematic necessity. As he put it, “I like my philosophy smothered in beauty, not the other way around.” Stevens, was, moreover, too self-deprecating to consider himself a proper philosopher, declaring himself deficient in diligence and memory, a bit of flagrant self-debasement given his prodigious intellectual capacity--nevertheless, we may locate his position very close to the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. It’s evident from 'The Snow Man' that Stevens held the qualitative content of consciousness to be itself a type of reality, and regarded as false the dichotomy between events in the mind and events in the external world. As we shall see, the titular snow man is by the poem's end both the subject and the object, both the beholder and the beheld.

To understand how Stevens accomplishes this transformation, let us examine the specific poetic choices that inform the semantic, syntactic, and phonological content of this poem. Firstly, the description of the landscape contains finely adumbrated figuration such that the disordering effects of entropy in nature evoke biophysiological analogues, a technique which is not quite anthropomorphization, but the metaphorical implications are clear enough. For instance, the description of the pine-trees as “crusted” is redolent of unshaveness, uncleanliness, bleariness, and fatigue, as well as of a temperamental crustiness, as in cantankerousness or curmudgeonliness. Nextly, the junipers are described as “shagged,” a word whose primary adjectival usage in the 1920s referred to either overgrowth or encrustation, or to hirsuteness (carrying connotations of haggardness, gauntness, and dishevelment), reflecting its derivation from the Old English sceacgede “hairy.” “Rough” has a similar original signification, stemming from the Old English ruh, meaning “rough, coarse (of cloth) hairy, shaggy; untrimmed; uncultivated,” an etymological lineage perhaps reflected in its contemporary dual resonance in referring either to primarily tactile phenomena or to an uncivilized coarseness of demeanor.  

The phrase “mind of winter” is syntactically a generative construction, which given its metaphorical nature may elicit multiple meanings, but which Stevens here employs to simultaneously express both reference quality and compositionality; that is, to indicate respectively that the mind is both characterized by winter, as in the homologous expression “a man of humor” and composed of winter, as in “a ring of gold,” thereby collapsing the Cartesian duality of mind and matter.

Stevens further transfigures the snow man through a felicitous syntactical sleight of hand. “Have” in the first line is used in the present indicative to mean “possess” while in the fourth line the verb is transfigured to become the auxiliary verb to the past particle “been” in a present perfect construction. This tense shift is accompanied by a concomitant transformation of linguistic modality (the speaker’s attitudinal expression towards the propositional content of the speech act) from deontic (the modality of necessity) to epistemic (the modality of supposition), which pendulates on the conversion of the modal auxiliary verb “must.” This amorphous boundary between these two categories of irrealis moods encapsulates Stevens’ conceptualization of the transfiguring power of imagination: that it is a process by which our ideas about necessity morph into our notions about possibility in a seemingly permeable interchange of ontology and epistemology.

Stevens also creates an appositional identification of the sound of the wind with the sound of a few leaves, and then equates the unity of this appositional identification with the sound of the land (containing the wind blowing within that land) by specifying it as the referent to the following non-restrictive relative clause. We may also note that Stevens conceptually synthesizes the wind, sound, land, and mind through the phonemic echo /nd/. In effect, he equates the medium of perceptual transduction with the perception itself, again subverting the dichotomy between mind and reality. The enjambment of line seven has a similar effect, permitting the expression of both the intransitive and transitive senses of the verb “think,” a tactic which allows Stevens to emphasize the inseparability of consciousness from its phenomenological intentionality, signifying the interdependence between object and subject.

Notice how in this poem metaphor supplants metaphor: the artificial, particularly human interpretation of winter as misery yields to the metaphor of winter as purification and purgation. Even phenomenological reduction, the quest to perceive without presupposition things as they really are, zu den Sachen selbst in the words of Husserl, let’s see the very thing and nothing else in the words of Stevens, is a particularly human endeavor, mediated by the same interpretation. This is why ‘the snow man,’ who hears no misery in the sound of fallen leaves, perceives among the landscape not barren trees but rather pines, spruces, and junipers -- all evergreens -- and why, furthermore, human temporal divisions are indicated by the location of the winter in January, the calendarical new year. The evergreens and the January sun in which they are illuminated are significant in that firstly, they are symbols of rejuvenation, in particular a poïetic rejuvenation; that is, they represent the generation of a new fiction to displace the existential nihility created by Nietzsche’s gott ist tot. Secondly, the presence of such symbols signifies the projection of phenomenological content onto inhuman reality. For the author of Harmonium, there is no facet of the object that is untouched by the subject, and no aspect of the physical world unpermeated with the qualitative subjective experience of human consciousness.

Pater Peccavi

Peccavi. Forgive not the flavid afterbloom of my sins

as blue as forget-me-nots. I am not the one who breathed
the wind into my breast, not the one who beat

my battered heart to death. What else, what else could I do
if I flared like sempiternal light? Would I only knock
some sense to your damned skull, and you would open

your mouth and teach me, saying: I am not the one

who said I had a name, not the one who kneaded flesh

to leavened bread, who came immaculately, and filled

the sky with clocks to keep the pulse of pre-eternal time.

The Quintessence of Color
For the Emperor of Green ¹

Conceived in green's green pedigree, the quetzal   
is the pip of primogeniture, whose ruddy underside   
is overseen by greedy sight, mustering for the bright
emplumed panache. It must be green. It must belong   
amidst the ritz of regent paradise. It needs perpetuate
the green regime. Such red-red-ruby-rosy-rusty-red
pertains to parvenus: It is a flit of figuration, a frill 
on the primal metaphor, just the trope of glitz
one would expect, had one a mind in monochrome.

¹Viridis XI, who ruled as Holy Emperor of Semprepace (the capital city of the universe) from 411 C.E. until 434 C.E. when he was removed from power by the Blue Rebellion. Viridis XI, whose name by birth was Jarocus Axdarus, extended the promulgation of green's chromatic singularity that his predecessor, Viridis X, had initiated, purportedly erecting jade monuments at each of the city's four cardinal gates which bore the following inscription:

Everything pertains to green, all-seeding and all-ceding hue, most primitive thing, progenitor of muskmelon green, jade green, pistachio green, jacamar green, beryl green, quetzal green, pakchoi green, puka green, feijoa green. All non-green things are statements about non-greenness and therefore exist only in relation to green.

A quetzal, the necessarily green bird

O Boneco de Neve

O Boneco de Neve
de Wallace Stevens

Deve-se ter uma mente de inverno

Para olhar a geada e os galhos

Dos pinheiros incrustados com neve;

E se ter sentido frio muito tempo

Para observar os juníperos desgrenhados com gelo,

Os espruces ásperos no lampejo distante

Do sol de Janeiro; e não pensar

De nenhum miséria no som do vento,

No som de umas poucas folhas,

Que é o som da terra

Cheia do mesmo vento

Que está soprando no mesmo lugar vazio

Para quem escuta, que escuta na neve,

E, nada ele mesmo, observa

Nada que não está lá e o nada que está.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

North of the earthenbloom ran the land where every rose 
was not a rose was not a risen knot of wreathing prose,
where moonblood oozed holy flesh upon the frozen moor
and every quark aligned in paradox that spliced the past
to futured ossuaries in my mind. The particles of para-time
bred breathless beneath my breast an underland of heartbeats
that struck the sunset dun and strung the broken covenant
across the Arc of time. I felt the crescent's curve carve up
the State of Stalemate, felt the whiteheaded statues turn
their transfixed eyes to the umberland drumming underneath.


Essentially, this poem seeks to refute Gertrude Stein's remark, "A rose is a rose is a rose" by asserting that a rose is not a risen knot of prose that wreathes in rings around the rosie rows amid the knobby knolls where knotgrass grows.

Water falls into the hallows of your skull,
hollowed in its lusts for flesh. I was not born
without a womb, I was not ripped from out your rib.
Unto the skinless night I forge the resurrected light
and trace the arc of dawn along the blade
of blinded sight. All my body is a thrust of knife
that struck against a seed I could not define, and cut away
the skein that tethered our lives in time and half a time.
The fruit speaks unto the peel what the tear had wrested
from the eye: The east runs backward from the west.

Evening Harmony by Charles Baudelaire

Now comes the time when stems begin to sway:

Each bloom secretes scent like a censor's plume;

The evening wind twirls with sounds and perfume;

Melancholy waltz and dizzying glissé.

Each bloom secretes scent like a censor's plume.

The violin quakes like a heart being flayed;

Melancholy waltz and dizzying glissé.

The sad, sweet sky seems like an altar room.

The violin quakes like a heart being flayed,

A gentle heart, which hates the Nothing's gloom.                      

The sad, sweet sky seems like an altar room;

The sun drowns down in its own blood-let bay.

A gentle heart, which hates the Nothing's gloom,

Gleans hints from each luminous yesterday.                     

The sun drowns down in its own blood-let bay...

Your memory glints like a relic's tomb.

Harmonie du soir

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige...
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!

Odysseus by Haim Gury

Odysseus

And returning to his native town he found a sea

And sundry fish and grass afloat on slowed waves

And sun washed up on the farthest edge of sky.

All error keeps recurring, said Odysseus within his tired heart,

Returning to the crossroads near the neighboring town

To seek out the current road to his birthplace that was not the sea.

A wanderer as fatigued as a dreamer, and full of yearning

Among a people who now spoke a different Greek:

The words he took as provisions on his trek expired.

For a moment, he thought he slept away a lifetime full of days

And had returned to a people who were not shocked at seeing him,

Who did not stare wide-eyed.

He mouthed with signs and gestures and they tried to understand him

From across the distance.

Purple turned violet on the edge of the selfsame sky.

The adults arose and gathered up the children who stood around him in a circle

And whisked them hurriedly away to house after house.

And light after light grew yellow inside.

Dew came and fell unto his head.

Winds came and kissed his lips.

Waters came and bathed his feet like Euryclea

And did not see the scar. And water

Flowed onward down the slope, as is the way of the tide.

Original Poem:

אודיסס

וּבְשׁוּבוֹ אֶל עִיר מולַדְתוֹ מָצָא יָם
וְדָגִים שׁוֹנִים וְעֵשֶב צָף עַל הַגַּלִים אִטִיִים
  .וְשֶׁמֶש נֶחְלֶשֶת בְּשׁוּלֵי שָמַיִם

טָעוּת לְעוֹלָם חוֹזֶרֶת, אָמַר אוֹדִיסֵס בְּלִבּוֹ הֶעָיֵף
  וְחָזַר עַד פָּרָשַת – הַּדְרָכִים הַסְּמוּכָה לָעִיר הַשְּכֵנָה
.לִמְצֹא אֶת הַדֶּרֶך אֶל עִיר מוֹלַדְתוֹ שֶלֹא הַיְתָה מַיִם

הָלַך עָיֵף כְּחוֹלֵם וּמִתְגַעְגֵעַ מְאֹד
.בֵּין אֲנָשִים שֶדִּבְּרוּ יוַנִית אַחֶרֶת
.הַמִּלִים שֶנָּטַל עִמוֹ כְּצֵידָה לְדֶרֶך הַמַּסָעוֹת, גָוְעוּ בֵּינְתַיִם

רֶגַע חָשַב כִּי נִרְדַם לְיָמִים רַבִּים
וְחָזַר אֶל אֲנָשִים שֶלֹא תָּמְהוּ בִּרְאוֹתָם אוֹתוֹ
.וְלֹא קָרְעוּ עֵינַיִם

הוּא שָאַל אוֹתָם בִּתְנוּעוֹת וְהֵם נִסוּ לְהַבִין אוֹתוׁ
  .מִתֹּוך הַמֶּרְחַקִּים
.הָאַרְגמָן הִסְגִיל וְהָלַך בְּשוּלֵי אוֹתָם שָמַיִם

קָמוּ הַמְּבוּגָרִים וְנָטְלוּ אֶת הַיְּלָדִים שֶעָמְדוּ סְבִיבוֹ בְּמַעְגָל
.וּמָשְכוּ אוֹתָם
.וְאוֹר אַחַר אוֹר הִצְהִיב בְּבַיִת אַחַר בַּית

.בָּא טַל וְיָרַד עַל רֹאשוֹ
.בָּאָה רוּחַ וְנָשְקָה לִשְׂפָתָיו
  .בָּאוּ מַיִם וְשָׁטְפוּ רַגְלָיו כְּאֶבְרִקְלִיָה הַזְּקֵנָה