Friday, December 6, 2013

emptying themselves in slow spasms into shallow hedgerows





Thomas played The Gordons this past Sunday morning on WFMU, I didn't get chance to listen to his show until Thursday morning. I've posted a couple of songs before, but nowhere near as many as I have Bailter Space, the band after The Gordons.

There was a drive-by Thursday night pints. Conversation was divided between our mutual employer, which isn't going to be dialogued here, and our projects, including my projects, which includes this shitty blog and what I can and can't, do and don't write about here, which might be discussed here but not, Son of Duras, today. You only think I think a lot about what I'm doing here. I'm negotiating with K to let me post some of her photography though there was not enough time last night to prime her with enough ridiculously priced amber Nyquil to make it happen this week.

We're off to a family wedding tomorrow so don't know what will appear here over the weekend. I no doubt will post something, I'm incapable of not. Sunday is the 33rd anniversary of an assassination, I either will or won't post songs and the standard I remember exactly where I was line I always do. The drive is down 95 to 295 to 64 to Norfolk, boring as any drive can be, so I don't know if Earthgirl will be taking photos or if she does whether there will be a slideshow and soundtrack. I do know there will not be a review of the wedding or the reception afterward. We're both dreading it, though I shouldn't write about that dread here either, should I.












TOUCH GALLERY: JOAN OF ARC

Mary Szybist

The sculptures in this gallery have been                        

carefully treated with a protective wax                         


so that visitors may touch them.                                     
exhibitions, the art institute
of chicago
Stone soldier, it's okay now.
I've removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.

I'm allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.

Nothing peels from you.

Your skin gleams like the silver earrings
you do not wear.

Above you, museum windows gleam October.
Above you, high gold leaves flinch in the garden,

but the flat immovable leaves entwined in your hair to crown you
go through what my fingers can't.
I want you to have a mind I can turn in my hands.

You have a smooth and upturned chin,
cold cheeks, unbruisable eyes,
and hair as grooved as fig skin.

It's October, but it's not October
behind your ears, which don't hint
of dark birds moving overhead,
or of the blush and canary leaves

emptying themselves
in slow spasms
into shallow hedgerows.

Still bride of your own armor,
bride of your own blind eyes,
this isn't an appeal.

If I could I would let your hair down
and make your ears disappear.

Your head at my shoulder, my fingers on your lips—

as if the cool of your stone curls were the cool
               of an evening—
as if you were about to eat salt from my hand.



1 comment:

  1. the poem reminds me of a book i have formed an intention to read - Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte, who is identified further as Joan's page and secretary. The fictional work is presented as a translation from a manuscript by Jean Francois Alden, or, in the words of the published book, "Freely Translated out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France".

    Originally, Mark Twain's novel was published as a serialization in Harper's Magazine beginning in 1895 and it was published in book form in 1896. At Twain’s request, the magazine published it anonymously to avoid expectations for it to be humorous.

    "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none."

    — Mark Twain


    The author had a personal fascination with Joan of Arc. The work has a very different feel and flow from Twain's other works. There is a distinct lack of humor, so prevalent in his other works. This is a mature Twain, writing about a subject of personal interest to him. He was first attracted to Joan of Arc in the early 1850s when he found a leaf from a biography of her and asked his brother Henry whether she was real. In addition, Twain arguably worked harder on this book than any other. In a letter to H.H. Rogers he stated, “I have never done any work before that cost so much thinking and weighing and measuring and planning and cramming … on this last third I have constantly used five French sources and five English ones, and I think no telling historical nugget in any of them has escaped me.”

    Reception

    Twain considered this, his last finished novel, to be his best and most important work, a view not shared by critics then or since. Iconoclastic author George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his own play, Saint Joan, accuses Twain of being "infatuated" with Joan of Arc. Shaw says that Twain "romanticizes" the story of Joan, reproducing a legend that the English conducted a trial deliberately rigged to find Joan guilty of witchcraft and heresy. Recent scholarship of the trial transcripts, however, suggests that Twain's belief may have been closer to the truth than Shaw was willing to accept.

    [the above quoted from Wikipedia]

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