October

René Char

Gerhard Richter
Iza Genzken

She


I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? --
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
She makes space lonely with a lovely song.
She lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.

We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
She cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;
She dances, and the ground bears her away.
She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.

I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.



Roethke

Come into the den, come into the den
You've got a glow
Climb into my arms with blood on your clothes
You've got a glow
And you're no one's but mine
And nobody knows
the lane where he's lying
No heat in his homes
No heart that was mine
No hand that I'd hold
And you've got a glow, you've got a glow
(And there's no escaping, the thing that is making its home in your radio)
You're light in a lie
You're lithe and you're strong
And you've wanted to do that my love for so long
My live and dead men
Come into the den
You've got a glow

Gerhard Richter

Clouds (Window)
Wolken (Fenster)

1970
200 cm X 400 cm
Oil on canvas




Funeral
Beerdigung

1988
200 cm X 320 cm
Oil on canvas





Lovers in the Forest
Liebespaar im Wald

1966
170 cm X 200 cm
Oil on canvas

"In this kind of a world," Peterson said, "absurd if you will, possibilities nevertheless proliferate and escalate all around us and there are opportunities for beginning again. I am a minor artist and my dealer won't even display my work if he can help it but minor is as minor does and lightning may strike even yet. Don't be reconciled. Turn off your television sets," Peterson said, "cash in your life insurance, indulge in a mindless optimism. Visit girls at dusk. Play the guitar. How can you be alienated without having first been connected? Think back and remember how it was."


Donald Barthelme, A Shower of Gold

The Truth the Dead Know



Gone, I say and walk from church
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye, and knucklebone.

The Kiss

My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby , you fool!
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see -- Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.



-Anne Sexton

The figures are placed at the grave of my bones.
All figures knowing it is the other death
they came for. Each figure standing alone.
The heart burst with love and lost its breath.

This little town, this little country is real
and thus it is so of the post and the cup
and thus of the violent heart. The zeal
of my house doth eat me up.

MARCH FIRST

+ I have a small poem here

My desktop is a weird collage of dystopian/science fiction/apocalyptic images and pretty ladies. Which is pretty much all that I'm interested in writing about right now.

CNN Concatenated (partial version) Omer Fast, 2002

sometimes on the street you imagine you've been given a gift of terrible power