Monday, December 24, 2018

hyena whisperer


    tr Herrera y Reissig: Crepusculo Espirita

Always you were martyrdoms' chaste rose!...
& just like virgin frost that earthward sifts
in vernal rigor, all-betraying death
should have jumped you picking lilies...
Wandering fireflies made for febrile candles
that lit you, & in the pallid herbs
you smiled, intact between the snowfall
& the roar of my funest deliriums.
Dumbly I dreamed, with lassitude inert,
to give you my single kiss: the one of death.
By tragical fruitions step by step,
I savored in your lips, deadly joy;
meanwhile, blatant to my prime caress
your inmost self was blushing in the West.

Monologue.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2018

hat with animal ears


(by nathalie ericson via sweetspider on tumblr)

The great equation.

Herrera y Reissig: Nocturno

Into the country we’ll go, like your breath
it perfumes the wind,
like your mouth the flower it is;
so that the earth will bloom, everything,
in order that a wedding
rejoice that the world is full of love!

As all the roses tremble, go;
the butterflies
seem shapes of white tulle,
& even the stars are like irises,
they seem candles
in some great sanctuary, azure temple!

See that nest on the branch?
It says: love!
And my arbor says: come!
And a single boat alone & oarless
says: we will go
in mere hours, all the way to Eden.

Full of jewels climbing you,
it’s even a banner
of some great feast, Barmecide’s;
it seems a wing on the wind afloat,
it is a ladder
& it makes my heart soar.

A treasure of stars of gold,
the camomiles
some virgin makes to germinate;
they are droplets of efflorescence
from some essence
the same sky loved sowing.

Let’s go to the country, go to the sky;
you are the flight,
I am that rose’s shade;
I am the bard of a rustic dream,
you the cerulean
aerial bed of nuptial luminescence.

Together the branches form a bow
& a green embrace
inside of the arbor vitae, cup of fragrance;
weakly the breeze, over there in the thicket,
imitates a kiss,
kiss made song for that it is only love.

Let’s hie to the country, cold all over, there,
if there is not a river
of rubicund phrases so I can make it burn;
if focus of secret light is missing, if there
is not a poet,
no caresses, & no woman there!

See the moon: it pours glorious
as a white foam rose,
sibling to the sea,
let’s go, fear not, for I am watching you
& in a sigh
I offer you a world that’s taking off!

In this vernal dusk
if someone were to see us
across the fields, both of us silent,
he would be moved, he would exclaim:
Poetry
wanders among flowers & it talks with God!

Let’s go at once, to the meadow we’ll go
& blind at your side
inspiriting you, ever will I run,
& till the birds burst out in furious song,
believing, when they see you,
some great dawn has descended.

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Saturday, October 27, 2018

pleas for continued breathing


Dr Caligari (1989) on Youtube.

"Lunatic Tertulia by Julio Herrera y Reissig

In a crypt of gold, a bit shot,

A cataleptic fakir
Quit mountaineering to break here
The unction of Nirvana, a bit shot...
Objectify an ill-wrought
Execution of thought,
And muffled rumor is begot
Like deaf remorse
From some extrorse
Diffusion of the music of a garrot.

Skies loosen their grimace, green,
And the disequilibrium
Of scorn’s satire hums,
Sick on absinthe, green...
Hypothetically, the sheen
In the moving horizon is spent,
And the pensive settlement,
They say is swarmed by a squall
As if, in the World’s thrall,
Everything were tenebrescent.

Already fireflies—witches
With jewels from Salambo—
Wink the 'marche aux flambeaux'
Of a Sabbath of witches...
The velvet cypresses
Suggest a Carthusian ardor
Which wafts from your collar
In fragrant confidences,
Interjections of absences
And ring-eyed ritornellos of langor.

It’s all posthumous and abstract
And the spirit ideologues
Intimate monologues
Of the Unknowable Abstract...
The stupefied forest is ablaze
In an ecstasy of malaise,
And they light up that hirsute
Labyrinth of the proscenium
With a struck match from
The dark genie of the Absolute.

It all provokes the ennui
Of some psychophysical country
At the metaphysical extremity
Of silence and of ennui...
A whiff of rancid duration
Chronicles the extreme unction
And protracts, before uncontrol-
Lable logics of extension,
The materialization
Of the planetary soul.

From the unsonorous interior
Of my obscure ruins,
Drones, punctuated with omens,
The Babylonian interior...
A Pythagoristic horoscoper
From the ultra-night,
Meanwhile writes an accusation
Of ecstatic expiations,
And hieratic mummies take flight
From the Escorial of the Night.

Fatuous fires of exorcism
Illuminate my double sight,
Like someone juggling, as she might,
The rutilation of exorcism...
The Subconscious of this same
Grand All gives me chilblain;
And in that somber assembly
From the darkness grand and aphonic
Ferments a cosmogonic
Trumpet of prophecy.

So in a gothic rapture of snow
The chapel hones itself and,
Above, its hypnotic needle can
Thread the stars of snow...
A shadowy forest spurs on
Fantastic misfortunes
And in macabre ponderosa
A pastor suddenly brandishes
His cane as a layman extinguishes
Gloomy candelabras.

It sleeps, the ear in wait,
Like a wolf in the underbrush
Hidden, a suspicious hush
At the precipice, in wait...
Fallow fields harvest hate
Even as the bubbling sluice
Dissolves and refuses
Eskimo soliloquies
Of crystal garglings
And euphorias of cornemuses.

Its saddle hung up, the somnambulistic
Windmill metaphorizes that
A Don Quixote comes to combat,
On horseback and somnambulistic...
The smoke is vexed by an equilibrist,
Guignol of Kaleidoscope,
And unto the night of dope
Savants tear open a lens
Of the eye of the conscience,
How deep! of a spectroscope.

On the watchtower, enigmatical,
The owl with eyes of brimstone
Suffers its morbid hoot-moan
Like a muezzin, enigmatical...
Before the omen—lunatic
Captious, spectral, denuded,
Velvety and muted—
It descends in stirless dress
Like a spider of death:
The immense night of the Buddha...

Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander in Bomb.


(via welovewaves on tumblr)

Elephant Steps in Time.

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Monday, October 15, 2018

the dharma of orientalism


Lumbermen.

red phrases in the warm rain
lungfish view out of rude wine

this dawn involves no raven
solace a smouldering lamp

Jean thrown sprawling in the dirt
for want of an upright word

New audio.

"For myself, this matter of the disproportion between the profit which the average man draws from science and the gratitude which he returns--or, rather, does not return--to it' this is much more terrifying." --Ortega y Gasset

"We were never going to live forever anyway."


(via noealzii on tumblr)

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Sunday, September 09, 2018

the first 50 billion zeta zeroes


"To Vesper, for a taper silver-clear" --Keats

Zebra Mystery Puzzlers.

   the Goblins' Bible dissolves
at once, after you have read it;
   days without sun, & we crowd
into coffeehouses, each one
completely unlike the others;
      choose up sides that way


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Tuesday, August 21, 2018

active ingredient


(via)

Herrera y Reissig: El Jardin de Platon

A hush fell over all. The crystal trill
of the belfry vanished &, in resume
of that single great sorrow, Light
dreamed in the still of the chief plinth.

With a sigh before the royal West,
we close the book of poetry;
& your silences have now woven in my mood
a divine bouquet.

In rapture your eyes of wells;
we watched eternal lamps
as at the touch of fleeting sparks

we join, encompassing a shout,
&, O candid wonder, in this hug
it showed us the embrace of the Infinite.

One slipstream list. Another slipstream list. Priest's list.

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Wednesday, July 18, 2018

intercepted chips


tr Herrera y Reissig: Ojos Grises

Unknown sullen regions
of crags & mountain peaks
creep into the disks
of your two Lappland eyes.

Boreal night... storm presage...
Kremlin of nacre... Sheepfold
of surly bears that roar
against all constellations...

Sweet Cleo, don't cry!
Love will command our sledge
for unending fancies

And we will begin our trek
to the gray, infirm, nebulous
realms in your eyes of spleen.

"Through technology, the image no longer stayed in the domain of ‘art’, but rather moved into the domain of ‘politics’."

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Thursday, July 12, 2018

donkey pong


" 'The sculptor,' recounts Parons, 'when he made his first cast of [Stevens'] models, he was getting ready to do the final Woofus and his studio burned to the ground. So the second Woofus was lost and what we have now is actually the third Woofus. I don't know if there's some kind of a curse there? Maybe.' "

Herrera y Reissig: Poemas Violetes

Ardent in your eyes
orison my hopes, & wholly
the calm of your illusions
fete their dulcet weddings.

One word, & in my vetust
anguish rises the moon:
a brace of nightingales
immediately cuts loose.

In my pallid vigil
I remember you come to me,
with an air of church incense
redolent of family.

Everything adores you…the hieratic
dream swan’s overjoyed…
ecstatic the twilight follows
your postures of a nun.

The dusk that anoints your life
& your chimeras gilds,
paused inside your eyecups
with a night’s sleep left.

An ancient aristocracy
files your hand of euphony
& attenuates your pupil
with a vague dust of grace.

Swans of black knots live
in the evening that expires,
the curls that adorn your nape
of changeable heliotropes.

A mystery, pain or reproach
is that tranquil wrinkle
which lays a little night
on your sibylline brow.

I was smiling, jocund…
on me your shadow fell
& in the form, alas, of a stabbing
slipped me a shiv in sleep.

When you cast your glances down
at me, Lohengrin sighs,
& they summon me from the garden
of ghosts askance.

No thoroughfares so hasty;
each step they check, & like
a carnation on my black pipe
your smile defoliates.

Well in your green April
would my dreary hours fit,
as a Beethoven sorrow
in a Schumann dream.

Enfold me, O mild cross!
By your charm, love will join me
with kisses, crying, blood,
as with nails of light.

And since Fate ordains it…
unpeeling the word “to love”
like Ophelia an orange,
we will enter into Death.

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