"It was heaven sent so I spent it

The sky just slipped through my fingers"

That day his name became a prayer

I wish for one

gold rose morning

to illuminate the last of my longing.

In these five years, mourning

the violence of withheld touch,

I have forgotten nothing,

my own shame bound,

silent, to withering

blindness

Clarice Lispector

"I am alone in the world. I don't believe in anyone for they all tell lies, sometimes even when they're making love. I find that people don't really communicate with each other. The truth comes to me only when I am alone."

from The Hour of the Star

Who, now, is exquisite?

Who, now, is exquisite?

Even for such loveliness,
unsettling, I cannot emerge fully
out of troubled mind and languid slumber,
into the succulent ripe flesh of peach-plum sunrise,
the too-sweet liquor of the tangible, tactile world.

For I am one who thrives on bitterness,
empty, always afflicted by raven dispositions,
circus wishes, limber imaginings
and glittering elephantine dreams.

Each night I will myself incorporeal,
mad with longing for hollow bones
bowed by the way the West wind moves,
coy and audacious as a callous young man.

My cells shall transfigure into temperamental salt-sting,
cold constellations never to be burned
by any stray electric, wounding touch,
every new city a reflection of the last,
a continuous menagerie of unbearable lightness.

This is my religion.

Self Portrait with Magical Thinking

Half sick of shadows,

Winter white-night drifting

She understands the depravity

Of wishing to be seized

By a heavy hot current,

An inescapable hopeless longing

"... roads in autumn will continue to be carnal roads

Else I would be keeping still, living on & on"

Lucie Brock-Broido

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"

Young Nabokov

"...the ancient idea that trees connect the underworld, the human world and the heavens (root, trunk and twigs), which in many ancient tales allowed mortals to climb from the earthly plane to the realm of the gods."

Chris Lavers, The Natural History of Unicorns

Lisbeth Zwerger

The Rifle

Somewhere

on a bed of moss

the Erl King lies,

autumn hair

unmoving,

the forest floor

mourning

as the sky fills --

once plucked

sparrows and larks

rejoicing in freedom.

Autumn wind blows west and whispers truth.

Anais Nin

what a peculiar brand of madness;

your electric lips –

unspoken,

like a poem, perversed,

these exquisite, feral dreams

"Perhaps every single fair is no more than a dissociated fragment of one single, great, original fair which was inexplicably scattered long ago in a diaspora of the amazing."

Angela Carter, Fireworks

Last night the sky lit up; violent longing of the lonely gods.

"But I swear the nights the nights are too much

Nights when poems are made and unmade

Nights when she is too tempted

to leave the substance for the shadow"

Andre Breton, My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed

Angela

Repent now,

your collar bone winging;

don't need no chariot

to take you home

“You are the only beauty in this

Celestial torture that I will call my own.”

Lucie Brock-Broido

"Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed."

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

a long southern summer when I could conjure your touch

Lee Miller

Where's the witch hazel for my heart?

soot and shame

secrets and sin

likely, or not

Wallowing, a strange sadness,

shaking under a passed over

gaze of you.

“Tender butcher,”

I cried

for the closeness,

coming near to seeing

poetry in the curve of your jaw-line,

wild hair and tired eyes,

held still in soft flickering darkness.

Time folding backward like a closed fan,

I was foolish to pretend

a future all from one

slow burn.

altar of the marsh

composed,

save for his wild hair,

he leans

forward and back,

words rolling,

dredging up, somewhat shyly,

his recent regrets, while I,

unsure, in my southern summer dress,

traced with scarlet, curl

into the cushions,

wide awake and fluttering

child's smile electric smile smeared smile

sweet night, rushed and running,

full steam

through false faints and feigns of feeling

-- if not,

every move of unbalanced blood,

unconscious

flush, drags

down the horizon

a storm,

our own

long foreseen

desertion