Saturday, November 2, 2013

hearing all bells at once instructs the final exhale





As promised, Chris Watson's Weather Report this weekend. I know I know one person (not counting me) and think I know more two people who might dig this. Hope you do. Back Monday (probably) barring kaboom (there are no Egoslavian Holy Days this weekend). Last week Bloggod tested me kaboom with Lou Reed, I'm hoping Bloggod takes the weekend off too.








READING STARLIGHT WITH ONE EYE LIKE CREELEY

Ca Conrad

hearing all bells at
                              once instructs the final exhale
                              Camelot in thimble of  the gods
                              Marilyn Monroe’s ambulance
lost on the way to the palace of  temperament
a branch of government for the magical arts
                              punch wall of forest for
                              an oaken
                              desk
                              another dream we
                              needed agitating the
               sentence as it rows across a
               newly destroyed heart folding
               following tormenting one another
                              we were all once young and
                              beautiful squandering everything
                              it’s what we came here to do
                              cut off engines to the child
                              registering disposition of the
                              cat in the dark as the
                              size of the darkness







DREAMS

Wisława Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—
can fly unfledged,
we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we’re swept away
by amorous yearnings for—
and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.



3 comments:

  1. http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/sir-lawrence-alma-tadema/a-dedication-to-bacchus-1889

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  2. Billy Collins is on a radio and tv publicity tour

    i like the following (although it not in his new book):

    Introduction To Poetry

    I ask them to take a poem
    and hold it up to the light
    like a color slide

    or press an ear against its hive.

    I say drop a mouse into a poem
    and watch him probe his way out,

    or walk inside the poem's room
    and feel the walls for a light switch.

    I want them to waterski
    across the surface of a poem
    waving at the author's name on the shore.

    But all they want to do
    is tie the poem to a chair with rope
    and torture a confession out of it.

    They begin beating it with a hose
    to find out what it really means.

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  3. footnotes to szymborska's poem

    i)the painting cited in my first comment here illustrates circus acrobats, conjurers, wizards

    ii) with regard to the writers of dream books, the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, the doctors with couches for analyses, i have very much enjoyed The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. , published in 1979 and still in print

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