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A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

-Adrienne Rich

In the effort to find one’s way among the contents of memory
(Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful—
“passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollectes autumn supposing one is trying to
recollect that season.”
Or supposing,
fair reader,
you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom
the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go—but what are the rules for this?
As he says,
folly may come into fashion.
Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room

to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed
his wife
walking
on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was—
so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water—
on her way to the courthouse
to file papers for divorce, a phrase like
how you tasted between your legs.
After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the “memory
of words and things,”
one recollects
freedom.
Is it I? cries the soul rushing up.
Little soul, poor vague animal:
beware this invention “always useful for learning and life”
as Aristotle say, Aristotle who
had no husband,
rarely mentions beauty
and was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying to
recollect wife.

-Anne Carson

Atlas

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

-U.A. Fanthorpe

philthy-art-logo-schmoo-size.jpgOh dear friends, thank you for continuing to come to NinaAlvarez.net even though after 9 months of posting every day, I took about 3 months off. I am ready to jump back in and happy to be back.

For those of you who are artists, check out Philthy Art, my other blog about art in Philadelphia, but also about my work doing internet marketing and writing for artspan.com and my new art community in St. Petersburg, FL. 

The Galloping Cat

Oh I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good
So
One day when I was
Galloping about doing good, I saw
A figure in the path; I said
Get off! (Be-
cause
I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good)
But he did not move, instead
He raised his hand as if
To land me a cuff
So I made to dodge so as to
Prevent him bringing it orf,
Un-for-tune-ately I slid
On a banana skin
Some Ass had left instead
Of putting in the bin. So
His hand caught me on the cheek
I tried
To lay his arm open from wrist to elbow
With my sharp teeth
Because I am
A cat that likes to gallop about doing good.
Would you believe it?
He wasn’t there
My teeth met nothing but air,
But a Voice said: Poor Cat,
(Meaning me) and a soft stroke
Came on me head
Since when
I have been bald.
I regard myself as
A martyr to doing good
Also I heard a swoosh
As of wings, and saw
A halo shining at the height of
Mrs Gubbins’s backyard fence,
So I thought: What’s the good
Of galloping about doing good
When angels stand in the path
And do not do as they should
Such as having an arm to be bitten off
All the same I
Intend to go on being
A cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good
So
Now with my bald head I go,
Chopping the untidy flowers down, to
and fro,
An’ scooping up the grass to show
Underneath
The cinder path of wrath
Ha ha ha ha, ho,
Angels aren’t the only ones who do
not know
What’s what and that
Galloping about doing good
Is a full time job
That needs
An experienced eye of earthly
Sharpness, worth I dare say
(if you’ll forgive a personal note)
A good deal more
Than all that skyey stuff
Of angels that make so bold as
To pity a cat like me that
Gallops about doing good.

-Stevie Smith

A Spirit Passed Before Me

From Job

A spirit passed before me: I beheld
The face of immortality unveiled—
Deep sleep came down on every eye save mine—
And there it stood,—all formless—but divine:
Along my bones the creeping flesh did quake;
And as my damp hair stiffened, thus it spake:

“Is man more just than God? Is man more pure
Than He who deems even Seraphs insecure?
Creatures of clay—vain dwellers in the dust!
The moth survives you, and are ye more just?
Things of a day! you wither ere the night,
Heedless and blind to Wisdom’s wasted light!”

-George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron

The purpose of this writing is to pluck the fruit. Les fruits. Des fruits. Fru-its.

Leave me alone, Nietzsche, your aphorisms telling me one way, then the next, your contradictory sentiments, your unphilosophical philosophy, your hardness, which I love too well. I gave my hardness to a bourgeois boy with a doctor wife. Do all rejected people secretly feel they are superior to the one rejecting them?

I came out here, six months ago, in bliss, to write by my parent’s poolside. There was a novel. It was happening.

Oh, good thing no one has married me. Wouldn’t I be the saddest wife? No one wants a sad wife.

My name would be nested at the middle of the table. My big fat father would hover in his muscle shirt. The legs of the tables would attach to my mother in law and sister in law and I would be sacrificed to the family, like a turkey.

I would come here, from across a far distance, to tell you something. I am the voiceless voice, the sin of sons, I am joy in your bosom.

In this time of psychic excesses, what else to do but siphon it into art?

I have heard the call of the miracle cure. It was coming down the long hall. It was effervescent, ever ready. It had a hard hat and hard timing of staying afloat. It couldn’t look at us. It did not have coordinates for directed movement. It was a mass of particles. We did not know where to put it or where to hide it. I was coming, unconsciously, down the corridor of images.

And progress wept. In me. The last of the long gods disappeared, following out a gray cloud to the West. I stood in a field of bodies and screamed my hollow hole to the last chroniclers. They were dancing the dance of Baccus, but had no joy. I felt how still the earth was, and forever would be from this moment.

I felt how good, how golden, I had planned to be. And how the gray skin seemed instead to say, “No one may be golden in a gray world.”

I have no eyes, save the eyes that see particles and parts.

Do you know how important you are to this world? How much they need you? You are not just some schmuck sitting in a suburb and contemplating death. You have the Grand Mission to them. The voice, the help, the responsibility. Sweet succor. Nietzsche said people needed to suffer more, not less.

Beware the handsome voice, the courteous voice, the nascent voice.

Beware the pleasant afternoon, the pleasant morning, the pleasant fuck.

Beware the dream that doesn’t awake you in cold steam, or with hate in your heart.

Beware the dogged doggerel of egolessness.

Beware technique. Beware trend. Beware answers.

The pretty small palms by the blue kidney shaped pool in Seminole, FL are not suburban trees, no suburban water, not suburban sky, but the same self-composed solar system of grandeur as the nebulae and must not be assumed to be pleasant.

The rest of the world cuts out for me.

I waver between jealousy and disdain of those happy actors who act their parts so well.

In cities, love is more intense, because the pain of daily living is nearly excruciating.

I don’t know where to go, or why life should be such a game of shifting floors.

-Nina Alvarez

A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

-Wallace Stevens

Thanks Paul, for this suggestion!

Far Company

At times now from some margin of the day
I can hear birds of another country
not the whole song but a brief phrase of it
out of a music that I may have heard
once in a moment I appear to have
forgotten for the most part that full day
no sight of which I can remember now
though it must have been where my eyes were then
that knew it as the present while I thought
of somewhere else without noticing that
singing when it was there and still went on
whether or not I noticed now it falls
silent when I listen and leaves the day
and flies before it to be heard again
somewhere ahead when I have forgotten

-W. S. Merwin