Time Travel Made Easy

Well, it's sort of an annual tradition now, isn't it? I spent the whole day baking (carrot cake, pryaniki, strawberry galette) so this feels particularly appropriate, even if I didn't actually make braided bread. I meant to do other things, but doing things has been difficult lately, and baking is always a comfort.

Revised a little bit from last year, though not too noticeably.

( good friday )

Purgatory Is Nearer in November
by Josephine Jacobsen

November is beautiful as the word sounds, is gray, is bare,
Is compact of wind, of leaves blown and the thin, tall rain;
Brought back to our care are the dead in November,
and the air of these days is charged with their pain.

For these are not the free dead, not the remote, bright crowd
Of our picture-book, or our image of nebulous heaven:
These are caught, tangled in a web comfortless as a shroud--
These have not familiar place, nor flight, nor oblivion, even.

They have not escaped yet-they are close in the clouds massing together;
At the cold first drop you will stare on the dark ground and remember.
They are the accent of autumn, they are the source of the tone of this weather.
The heart is reached by the waiting dead, in their month, in November.
----

(This month always catches up to me in weird ways; everything is fine, but I'm very tired.)

(Still in a poetry sort of mood. My brain is very tired right now.)

The Wise Word, The Good Word
by April Bernard

Intolerable tumult in the corridor;
storm drains wad up with melon rinds while
heavy gritty drops hurl judgment
on the men who sit and sell trash.
Maple keys, reaped, are tossed to cement,
as if in Persian carpeting, while the bodega cats
adjust their own postures, so.
So the news of the rain's passing.

Many are the other places we own
yet somehow do not hold title to;
broad and cool are their polished stone floors.
Something said is snappy, something drained down the throat
cool and thin in its coursing.

Somewhere else the sky clears like an opened eye.
Color admits and then form, as ever, and a pleasing line.
It is not as if these places could not be taken by force.
Be we are contemplating a different way to speak
upon the ground that wounds so easily at the foot's passage:
Sweep, sweep the edge of your cape in the silver and green
of the unborn maple trees.

End of the month! I should have posted more, but eh.

These are both things that I have posted elsewhere, in various forms, but they are both things that are vital to me in some way or another.  Someday, I will get tattoos of these poems- the Mayakovsky in the original Russian, on my back, and the Pound on my ribcage, framing my right breast.

excerpt from "A Cloud in Trousers"
by Vladimir Mayakovsky

я знаю -
солнце померкло б, увидев
нашизх душ золотые россыпи!

I know-
the sun itself would dim, if it could see
the gold fields of our souls!
---

Notes from Canto CXX
by Ezra Pound

I have tried to write Paradise.

Do not move.
          Let the wind speak.
                   That is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
          have made

Let those I love try to forgive
          what I have made.

I'm doing that thing that I do where I look at my gmail tab in firefox and then very surreptitiously hide it under my thumb and pretend it isn't there. This is not productive in any way, except for the way that it gets fingerprints on my screen. >_< Going to try to rectify this and respond to email soon, but I figure a heads up is in order.

I also feel like it is time for some Chesterton. And so:

The Last Hero
by G.K. Chesterton

The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.

The chance of battle changes -- so may all battle be;
I stole my lady bride from them, they stole her back from me.
I rent her from her red-roofed hall, I rode and saw arise,
More lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes.
She never loved me, never bent, never was less divine;
The sunset never loved me, the wind was never mine.
Was it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse?
Silence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress.

( The wind blew out from Bergen to the dawning of the day )

First, because it's appropriate and Eliot will always be my favorite: East Coker by T.S. Eliot.

Second, because I'm in a mildly exhibitionist sort of mood:

(still more or less untitled)

( take this bread that once was dough )