'The House'

"It grows larger
wall after wall
sliding
on some miraculous arrangement
of panels,
blond and weightless
as balsa, making space
for windows, alcoves,
more rooms, stairways
and passages, all
bathed
in light, with here
and there the green
flower of a tree,
vines, streams
casually
breaking through —
what a change
from the cramped
room at the centre
where I began, where I crouched
and was safe,
but could hardly
breathe! Day after day
I labour at it;
night after night
I keep going —
I'm clearing new ground,
I'm lugging boards,
I'm measuring,
I'm hanging sheets of glass,
I'm nailing down the hardwoods,
The thresholds —
I'm hinging the doors —
Once they are up they will lift
their easy latches, they will open
like wings."

"Solitude. Hailey's bare feet.And all her patience now assumes."

"A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought. He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels."

float

Sometimes the tide pulls me away for days.
Far, far out to the horizon

opposite the sun. The sea always spits me out
eventually. In the space of a month,

a week, a few nights, by the span of a
lifetime,

I resurface, hurl water from my lungs
my gut, my bones.

The taste of salt
and the most silent ocean bed

lingers for days.

Sheep in Fog

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells ----
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

 - Sylvia Plath

Boom. Boom. Boom.
Boom blast and ruin.
Trying to outsound the panic
in our hollow guts.

Pelafina

I don't think I'll be commenting on these scheduled posts anymore.

I just don't need constant reminders of the state I was in a year ago. I have enough reminders of the state I'm in currently. I suppose by now you must have realised that not all these posts were ones I scheduled.

An unrelated poem. It reminds me of someone's mother.

"Before you'd given death a name
Like bear or crocodile, death came
To take your mother out one night.
But when she'd said her last good night
You cried, "I don't want you to go",
So in her arms she took you too."

What one evening had to say to another

It's fortunate
     you spoke
because I would have lost
     my way.

I need to fucking sleep

Lord Byron, Don Juan; Charles Corbet, View of pond tree;  of Leaves; The Haunted in Contemporary Filmic and Literary Gothic Narratives of Trauma; of Leaves again-

That's all of them. The rest of this latest kipple is mine.

Years and years of sedimentary refuse, half-formed ruminations, scraps of charred paper slumped like carcasses in sickly towers

Ankles crossing ankles
under tables, anxiously
temporal -
diminished too soon.

About to sleep

Couldn't sleep and I checked the blog to find all these new scheduled posts.

They're kind of creeping me out. The Everlasting Whims & Everlasting Loss is of course a quote from Only Revolutions. Page 180, Sam's side. I actually prefer, having read and reread the book several times, Sam's writing. I feel like Danielewski wrote him first, but who knows. I'll have to try reading it in reverse order, see if it makes a difference. I just love some of his phrases moments.
"

Because I am too soon.
Because without You, I am only revolutions
Of ruin.

I'm the prophecy prophecies pass.
Why need dies at last.
How oceans dry. Islands drown.
And skies of salt crash to the ground.
I turn the powerful. Defy the weak.
Only Grass grows down abandoned streets.

 "
The August 14th post is [an]other quote(s) from The Fifty Year Sword, also by Mark Z Danielewski. I didn't read the rest. I'm sorry. My eyes just float over the words.


I think I'm getting worse again.

It was a sunny day, but it doesn't feel like summer. It hasn't ever felt like summer. A spring, followed by a premature fall into something morose and grey. Old cobbled streets, coated in dust. Never seen. I stayed in my room all day. Remember that dissertation I started way too early, or at least tried to? Well I actually need to work on it this year. Reasons burn need sometimes. I just feel hollow. Like an empty jug, with no handle, no clay, nothing, unsculpted.

Lost sensations still have my fingertips tingling. My throat aches. I don't know if I can continue. I don't know why I want to. Or if I want to.

I do not forget the words you spoke to Patroklus

I remember that Nestor lives in Pylos by its epithet 'sandy'. Sandy Pylos, home of godly Nestor by the ocean. How brilliant that I find some echo of the same mnemonics that were originally found in the oral poetry to hypnotise the listeners, to help the bard recall the tale he or she murmured, a tale that warped in each telling - which is not to say was deformed, but rather mutated, like some rogue cell, the very point, essence of infinity that is to unravel from it in lush, diaphanous  fractals. As when "the universe was unfolded from its state of infinite destiny.*


*Typo: 'destiny' should read 'density.'"

'Though here's a song they might of sung'

"Mad woman on another tour;
Everything she is she spits on the floor,
An old man tells me she's sicker than the rest,
God I've never been afraid like this."

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"


-Sylvia Plath

How many of us have fallen for ghosts?

Sorry about the lack of updates. I've been having the worst dreams. Really tired right now, but let's look at the last few scheduled posts...

The 12th of June entry, like any mention of 'words caught in mouth' probably has the phantom of Sappho in it:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
     to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
     is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
     fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
     I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty . . .

(Fragment 31, trans. Anne Carson).

Though that doesn't mean I had it in mind. Maybe the world and the clouds held in in mind. Funnily enough, looking at the post now, "my gut grows sore" reminds me of another poem, also to do with that old Lyric:

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?

Before a face suddenly numinous,

her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate   

again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?   

It’s documented torrents are unloosed

by such events as recently produced

not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,   

one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.

My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,   

I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless

—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.   

Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,   

sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest

of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

(Marilyn Hacker, '[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]' in Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons)

Brilliantly visceral.

Come to think of it, there's a lot of Greek floating around in these few posts. And in my blog in general. It makes me think of a friend I knew a long time ago. Castillia, I think she was called. Back in primary school. I think around when we were eleven she moved to some island on the Mediterranean, near Athens. I don't know her anymore, and even if I managed to get back in touch, would I know her any more?

Oh right, Greek literature. So "The long unmeasured pulse of time moves ever[y] thing" is from Sophocles I think. He's mentioned a few lines later. Or maybe it was Aeschylus. An ancient tragedy writer, at any rate.

As for the image of the stairs, I tried searching by image for it on Google, but couldn't find a direct match. Just a hall of other dark grey and black images.

Bachelard's Introduction to The Poetics of Space. I can't figure out why these lines always felt so familiar.

"In any case, harmony in reading is inseperable from admiration. We can admire more or less, but a sincere impulse, a little impulse toward admiration, is always necessary if we are to receive the phenomenological benefit of a poetic image. The slightest critical consideration arrests this impulse by putting the mind in second position, destroying the primitivity of the imagination. In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost."

Sappho Fragment 23(?), currently trying to find the Carson translation

And their feet move
rhythmically, as tender
feet of Cretan girls
danced once around an

altar of love, crushing
a circle in the soft
smooth flowering grass.

Sappho Fragment 36, trans. Anne Carson

I can't sleep tonight. Or at least, I can't will myself into the bed. I don't know why.

 Eros Turannos 

 

 

She fears him, and will always ask

   What fated her to choose him;

She meets in his engaging mask                  

   All reasons to refuse him;

But what she meets and what she fears

Are less than are the downward years,

Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs

   Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity

   That once had power to sound him,

And Love, that will not let him be

   The Judas that she found him,

Her pride assuages her almost,

As if it were alone the cost.—

He sees that he will not be lost,

   And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees

   Envelops and allures him;

Tradition, touching all he sees

   Beguiles and reassures him;

And all her doubts of what he says

Are dimmed with what she knows of days— 

Till even prejudice delays 

   And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates

   The reign of her confusion;

The pounding wave reverberates

   The dirge of her illusion;

And home, where passion lived and died,

Becomes a place where she can hide, 

While all the town and harbor side

   Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been, 

   Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea 

   Where down the blind are driven.

 

 

- Edwin Arlington Robinson