« March 2009 | Main | May 2009 »
Self-portrait, pasture, Neponset, Il, (July 2003) by Peter Haakon Thompson | Slideshow on TMN
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
—Mark Strand
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel. View larger image.
Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
—W. H. Auden
It did not surprise me
It did not surprise me—
So I said—or thought—
She will stir her pinions
And the nest forgot,
Traverse broader forests—
Build in gayer boughs,
Breathe in Ear more modern
God's old fashioned vows—
This was but a Birdling—
What and if it be
One within my bosom
Had departed me?
This was but a story—
What and if indeed
There were just such coffin
In the heart instead?
—Emily Dickinson
White Rabbit (2007) by Hannah Whitaker
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 in 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
Amanda Lepore as Andy Warhol's Marilyn (Red) by David LaChappelle
Amanda Lepore
I love you, dear lips like overripe watermelons blossoming
their crimson bellies. I love when you wear that window
of black and lace. I love you like hunting trophies
or collections of 70’s porn under the mattresses
of all my boyhood homes. I love you like a quickie
in the dressing room of Macy’s, or small, golden
whispers between girlfriends in verdant city parks.
Or your bombshell coif—all shellac and gloss.
Or your tiny waist, disappearing like the northern edge
of the Flatiron, or a polar glacier, or a dwarf star.
I love you and your sea otter sway—your skin,
your makeup, your laugh, your heels, your sex.
I love not knowing where you go in daytime.
Who zips you out of your dress, who writes
their name on your back’s kitten skin, their fingers
opening the mouth of every vowel as they write
you fan letters, hymns, summons, and requests.
I love you tonight in the glamour of unrequited
affections, catcalls and applause, in the colored gels
that make every face ripen like cold, green fruit.
