George Eliot, as quoted by my mother
George Eliot, as quoted by my mother
he was my first savior jack of clubs
though one's divided between
if he tells you or you tell yourself -
you know what I mean? -
what's true.
Waiting in rooms full of girls.
An older man does the trick
Not as dumb as a younger one, but
they fuck without compunction at
first then they get some because
you're too dumb.
He was tall greeneyed person
pale with features disappearing
into that paleness apartment on Hudson St.
the rest is a secret no it isn't
Why no secrets? Oh,
who reads poetry anyway!
I can almost see green sweater
a peculiarly vegetative
moss or heatherish green
gets unbuttoned, bare bulb light.
He's too dumb to think I'm innocent
what kind of stupidity's operative
this man's a doctor I
scream he's surprised a hymen bleeds.
After that I'm a lump of naiveté
to him in every respect and so
discarded I now have experience.
I think this kind of tale is
as important as a pompously cited
Phoenician myth, to poetry
in Phoenix I drink with my father
"You don't bruise the bourbon," he says.
Back in New York, uptown at night
a warehouse city no street life
Rooms full of girls I'll always dream about
Women won't let me go Or is it men
A sex isn't very deep but its
surface is armor ironmasked
like certain poetries I can't use
how be what you are what's experience but
a becoming acceptable to the keepers
of surfaces say this University
So glad I don't have to write
in the styles of the poetries I was taught
they were beautiful and unlike me
positing a formal, stylized woman.
But I am the poet, without doubt.
Experience is a hoax.
Alice Notley, "Experience"
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy -
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed -
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.
Robert Hass, "Privilege of Being"
The optimist is learning Russian; the pessimist is learning Chinese.
Italo Calvino, "Hermit in Paris"
On board ship, 3 Nov. '59
For me, boredom has now taken the image of this transatlantic liner. Why did I ever decide not to take the plane? I would have arrived in America buzzing with the rhythm of the world of big business and high politics, instead I will arrive weighed down by an already heavy dose of American boredom, American old age, American lack of vital resources. Thankfully I only have one more evening to spend on the steamer, after four evenings of desperate tedium. The 'belle epoque' flavour of liners no longer manages to conjure up a single image. That hint of a memory of past times that you can get from Monte Carlo or the spa at San Pellegrino Terme does not happen here, because a liner is modern: it may be something 'old-world' in concept but they are built pretentiously now, and populated by people that are antiquated, old and ugly. The only thing that you can glean from it is a definition of boredom as being somehow out of phase with history, a feeling of being cut off but with the consciousness that everything else is still going on: the boredom of Leopardi's Recanati, just like that of The Three Sisters, is no different from the boredom of a journey in a transatlantic liner.
Long live Socialism.
Long live Aviation.
Italo Calvino, "Hermit in Paris"
The Pit of Babel
-
Es muß ein Fortschritt geschehen...
Wir graben den Schacht von Babel.
Some progress must be made...
We are digging the pit of Babel.
(Franz Kafka)
-
I am Katie Sharrow-Reabe and I am interested in structural and social architecture. Linguistic and cultural translation. Progress through retrospection. Subliminal and subterranean connections. And I would like you to help me put these fragments into a hole.
