TITHONOS AND EOS
This room in Eos house without windows,
The door tightly secured from the outside.
The food no longer shoved in through the trap in door,
For old Tithonos is immortal, not eating will not cause him to die.
When immortal Tithonos grew old and ugly,
Eos, a goddess eternally young, shut him from her sight.
Eos spends her time at the corner bar sipping Campari,
Waiting to find a young man as beautiful as the young Tithonos.
Tithonos is now 2,000 years. He is so old his wrinkled flesh
Has disappeared, even his aged bones have disappeared.
All that is left of Tithonos is his voice. With his voice he sings
A Lehar song from Paganini, "Girls are made to love and kiss."
Duane Locke
Dialgum
It has nothing to do with me
that there are no answers on that answering machine.
The cherry tree's cherries descry,
deplore, dispute disparity between
to be and to seem.
It doesn't matter to me:
I eat them.
that there are no answers on that answering machine.
The cherry tree's cherries descry,
deplore, dispute disparity between
to be and to seem.
It doesn't matter to me:
I eat them.
The pink tennis shoes chews
her gum which moves
her henna'd hair. Hers
is a dream of Else and Other
wise beyond their years.
She calls them a man.
Who hears that you want him to love and can
it mean what you think he fears--
et cetera.
Et cetera. That, alone,
I'm allowed to say,
dear.
Lis Waldner
Lines of Communication
Weight of a Mourning Dove shivers the wire
strung along a dusty roadside
above the wheat fields
between the lean of wooden poles.
strung along a dusty roadside
above the wheat fields
between the lean of wooden poles.
She sits inside the clapboard farmhouse
wonders how far the wires stretch before they break.
How many miles between these cities of signals?
How long before the bird flies?
Static on the line -
through broken slats, forlorn cries;
a vee of geese.
Weaver 29/10/07
Love Poem
I sit on the seawall in the midnight hour
to scan the sky for leftover stars.
Where am I going? she asked.
I am going where this night is the darkest,
where the only light is twinkling white freckles
from the cheek of the milky way,
condensed above my head.
Our privacy is stunning,
the August moon is the October sun.
She teases me in the midnight hour; she teases me always.
"The soul can be sifted into other vehicles."
Sacrificed is the love by which our circuitry is crafted
in this life; if you find yourself a flamingo,
ask yourself if you still love to sketch strangers in charcoal.
But you won't, because the parts of you that could
are sifted into the memories of other dead vehicles,
the prior hearts of other flamingos.
Crest, you will not be remembered.
The death of your subtle differences will not warrant any remorse;
you will be pulled back into your brothers and sisters,
and that's all that we can hope to be: a heaving circle.
Your eulogy will celebrate your height and your velocity,
the enthusiasm with which you sucked recycled shore,
but in the end, she makes me ask: Who Didn't?
Whose body isn't wrapped in a layer of elastic gossamer,
tethered to the past?
And where are we going? I asked.
In the midnight hour, I wish to know if I am malleable,
if I can save this breath as a proof of purchase,
if I can mail them away for some divine validation,
a certificate that says I am neither a folding wave
nor a bead in a kaleidoscope, however beautiful.
I wish to open my lungs on the seawall for this hope:
death will cancel out any suspicions about herself,
if those suspicions are false.
If she is absolute, we've got nothing to lose
but the ability to comprehend loss.
Where am I going? she asked.
She is shedding her black cloak,
she smells like my mother's strawberry shortcake.
She is starting to look more and more like home.
Where I can soak in the deepest pocket of air
left in my heart, reserved for her still.
It's just as well that I fall in love with ideas and not people,
for there is no lover like an existential crisis.
Her drive and her loyalty are no cotton candy love;
she won't melt in your mouth before you can taste her,
like any man limited to flesh and lies.
And I'll never have to miss her, lose her.
We'll exit the stage hand in hand,
a siamese marriage made in the stars.
We'll fall with everything to land with nothing,
fall for us and land with neither.
to scan the sky for leftover stars.
Where am I going? she asked.
I am going where this night is the darkest,
where the only light is twinkling white freckles
from the cheek of the milky way,
condensed above my head.
Our privacy is stunning,
the August moon is the October sun.
She teases me in the midnight hour; she teases me always.
"The soul can be sifted into other vehicles."
Sacrificed is the love by which our circuitry is crafted
in this life; if you find yourself a flamingo,
ask yourself if you still love to sketch strangers in charcoal.
But you won't, because the parts of you that could
are sifted into the memories of other dead vehicles,
the prior hearts of other flamingos.
Crest, you will not be remembered.
The death of your subtle differences will not warrant any remorse;
you will be pulled back into your brothers and sisters,
and that's all that we can hope to be: a heaving circle.
Your eulogy will celebrate your height and your velocity,
the enthusiasm with which you sucked recycled shore,
but in the end, she makes me ask: Who Didn't?
Whose body isn't wrapped in a layer of elastic gossamer,
tethered to the past?
And where are we going? I asked.
In the midnight hour, I wish to know if I am malleable,
if I can save this breath as a proof of purchase,
if I can mail them away for some divine validation,
a certificate that says I am neither a folding wave
nor a bead in a kaleidoscope, however beautiful.
I wish to open my lungs on the seawall for this hope:
death will cancel out any suspicions about herself,
if those suspicions are false.
If she is absolute, we've got nothing to lose
but the ability to comprehend loss.
Where am I going? she asked.
She is shedding her black cloak,
she smells like my mother's strawberry shortcake.
She is starting to look more and more like home.
Where I can soak in the deepest pocket of air
left in my heart, reserved for her still.
It's just as well that I fall in love with ideas and not people,
for there is no lover like an existential crisis.
Her drive and her loyalty are no cotton candy love;
she won't melt in your mouth before you can taste her,
like any man limited to flesh and lies.
And I'll never have to miss her, lose her.
We'll exit the stage hand in hand,
a siamese marriage made in the stars.
We'll fall with everything to land with nothing,
fall for us and land with neither.
SilaryHilary 26/08/07
CHOPIN: AN INVENTORY
Almost sixty mazurkas; about thirty etudes;
two dozen preludes; a score of nocturnes;
some fifteen waltzes; over a dozen polonaises;
scherzos, improvisations, ballades, four of each;
three sonatas for piano; and two concertos for piano and orchestra,
one berceuse, one barcalole, one fantasy, one tarantella, etc.,
besides some seventeen songs for voice and piano; a fatal case of tuberculosis;
a talent for concertizing; many mundane successes; an unhappy passion;
a celebrated liaison with a famous woman; other assorted liaisons;
a country without sure borders or definite independence;
the French Europe of Romanticism; several friendships with the eminent;
and scarcely thirty-nine years of lif. Others lived less, wrote more,
tasted more bitterly the classically bitter bread of exile, were ignored
or persecuted, died forsaken, didn’t linger in alcoves
or salons of glory, confined themselves less to the instrument they had mastered most,
and were exiled longer in suffering for a non-existent country.
Besides, almost all the others escaped the repugnant possibility
of becoming a melody for virgins, a rhythm for the castrated,
a sham, a languishing, a nostalgia of illiterates,
and other vulgar, mediocre, and ungenerous things – as he did not. Or of becoming
a piece de non-résistance for performers who play for those who believe
they like music but really don’t. And what’s more,
he was a parvenu, a pedant sure of an aristocracy he couldn’t claim,
a reactionary anguished over revolutions that would liberate, among others,
the oligarchies of Poland – poor things. And, finally,
one begins to suspect he was not even a romantic,
at least not in the sense he pretended or let others believe he was.
A knack for composing music as one writes a poem,
a power disguising itself in languor, an air of inspiration
concealing the structure, a harmonious melancholy above
an ironic melody (or the other way round), the magic of rhythms
used to hide thought – and hide it so well
that he still passes for an ass of a genius, this man who had thought in his fingers,
whose boldness put on the mask of feeling and free forms
to create a self. So able in the kitchen, that he can be served
lukewarm, in hours of longing and sorrow,
hot, at those great occasions of triumphant life,
or cold, when music alone expresses the empty despair of being
nothing more in the world than a piano.
two dozen preludes; a score of nocturnes;
some fifteen waltzes; over a dozen polonaises;
scherzos, improvisations, ballades, four of each;
three sonatas for piano; and two concertos for piano and orchestra,
one berceuse, one barcalole, one fantasy, one tarantella, etc.,
besides some seventeen songs for voice and piano; a fatal case of tuberculosis;
a talent for concertizing; many mundane successes; an unhappy passion;
a celebrated liaison with a famous woman; other assorted liaisons;
a country without sure borders or definite independence;
the French Europe of Romanticism; several friendships with the eminent;
and scarcely thirty-nine years of lif. Others lived less, wrote more,
tasted more bitterly the classically bitter bread of exile, were ignored
or persecuted, died forsaken, didn’t linger in alcoves
or salons of glory, confined themselves less to the instrument they had mastered most,
and were exiled longer in suffering for a non-existent country.
Besides, almost all the others escaped the repugnant possibility
of becoming a melody for virgins, a rhythm for the castrated,
a sham, a languishing, a nostalgia of illiterates,
and other vulgar, mediocre, and ungenerous things – as he did not. Or of becoming
a piece de non-résistance for performers who play for those who believe
they like music but really don’t. And what’s more,
he was a parvenu, a pedant sure of an aristocracy he couldn’t claim,
a reactionary anguished over revolutions that would liberate, among others,
the oligarchies of Poland – poor things. And, finally,
one begins to suspect he was not even a romantic,
at least not in the sense he pretended or let others believe he was.
A knack for composing music as one writes a poem,
a power disguising itself in languor, an air of inspiration
concealing the structure, a harmonious melancholy above
an ironic melody (or the other way round), the magic of rhythms
used to hide thought – and hide it so well
that he still passes for an ass of a genius, this man who had thought in his fingers,
whose boldness put on the mask of feeling and free forms
to create a self. So able in the kitchen, that he can be served
lukewarm, in hours of longing and sorrow,
hot, at those great occasions of triumphant life,
or cold, when music alone expresses the empty despair of being
nothing more in the world than a piano.
© 1968, Jorge de Sena
© Translation: 1988, Francisco Cota Fagundes, James Houlihan