Saturday, January 26, 2013

Hey, how come?



                            Why do these

Poor things long so to go back to the light up there?






                               The poor souls

How can they crave our daylight so?
















Dialogue of Aeneas and Anchises
Virgil
Aeneid, Book VI
19 BC 
op. post.


i    David Ferry
     Bewilderment: New Poems
       and Translations
     op. cit.
     

ii   Robert Fitzgerald
      Random House, 1983©



Thursday, January 24, 2013

Thermidor






     You are so beautiful and trusting
     lying there on the sky
                             ..
               you seem to be breathing softly
     you look slightly nude, as if the clouds had parted






     ..
     when the wind comes
                   you speak of an itch or a tickle
     you are very gentle
                I want to kiss you and I do
     and look slightly shaggy and perfectly carved.






















Frank O'Hara
The Collected Poems
  of Frank O'Hara
Donald Allen, editor
Weather Near St Bridget's Steeples
1961
op. cit.




Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Qu'est-ce qu'un cendrier iii: The President's assonant embrace







                  We can give a man his reason for
                  decency but we can not surrender
                  ours. If there is an exhaustion
                  in America with the spectacle of
                  sanctimony's cruelty, it has not
                  come from the spectacle of satir-
                  ic sexuality. It has come because
                  genocide was seen, and judged to
                  be too high a price for schaden-
                  freude. I know this and you know
                  this; and while we might delight
                  in the President's endearing sim-
                  iles and smile at simple recitals
                  from our history, no one can turn
                  a page of it with a greeting card
                  obliviousness, to those who fell
                  too near and too well to have lost.

                  But the President's negligent con-
                  descensions lost even this excuse
                  of flattery, in his grotesque mis-
                  constructions of the Equal Protec-
                  tion Clause. We are likely to have
                  to visit them, given the gravity
                  his enemies are only too glad to
                  heap upon a rhetorical spectacle
                  of advanced laziness.

                  For now, it is simply urgent to 
                  affirm that there would be no con-
                  stituency to be so lazily blessed, 
                  if the government of the United
                  States had not elected itself re-
                  peatedly on its unprecedented and
                  unequalled suffering.

          










ashtray in glass with poinsettia
  photography Laurent




Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Sunday, January 20, 2013

I thought I'd see "Le Cercle Rouge" this evening


   You and I might watch
   Montand, knocking over
   Mauboussin, in a cow-
   boy shot imagined by
   an outlaw we admire,
   once with the maquis, 
   whose hero gave us
   Queequeg and Typee.




               We might stay up
               'til dawn, stub-
               bing out a cigar-
               ette, good-bye;

               but you and I
               would know that
               we had seen a
               kind of kiss.





































Jean-Pierre Melville
1970

i   Gucci, 2013
       Balmain, 2013