We sit on a rock
to allow our souls
to catch up with us.
We have been traveling
a long time.
Behind us are forests of books
with pages green as leaves.
A blood sun stares
over the horizon.
Our souls are slow.
They walk miles behind
our long shadows.
They do not dance.
They need all their strength
merely to follow us.
Sometimes we run too fast
or trip climbing
the rotten rungs
in fame’s ladder.
Our souls know
it leads nowhere.
They are not afraid
of losing us.
Erica Jong
Man, two big reveals in as many weeks! Hearkening all the way back to, hey, page 3. (Apologies for making you look at things I drew in 2006; I take comfort knowing it’s not nearly as painful for you as it is for me.)
Technically there’s one big reveal and one obscure tip-off. But let’s not get greedy about it.
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COMMERCE: I’ve finally acquired the last of the stock items (spoons, some of the Lady Parts prints) that were holding back some very late orders on books and prints, especially international orders! So if you have been patiently sitting on your hands over in the UK or Canada, don’t fear, I haven’t forgotten you.
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NEW STUFF: I’ve got a new poetry chapbook out. It’s called Private Island, and it’s for sale in my store at the LOW LOW price of $2.00, which is a mere ten cents for each page of action-packed verse, most of which has never seen the light of the internet before!
There are many flavors in this one, and it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever made at a copy shop, so snag one at will.
Some day, if I should ever lose you,
will you be able then to go to sleep
without me softly whispering above you
like night air stirring in the linden tree?
Without my waking here and watching
and saying words as tender as eyelids
that come to rest weightlessly upon your breast,
upon your sleeping limbs, upon your lips?
Without my touching you and leaving you
alone with what is yours, like a summer garden
that is overflowing with masses
of melissa and star-anise?
Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Albert Ernest Flemming
A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Dylan Thomas
Fever 103 deg.
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern–
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise–
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)–
To Paradise.
Sylvia Plath