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Julio 31, 2012
from Projection
by Lidija Dimkovska
But I know that you know how your palms itch when you're alone,
when the electricity goes off,
and the silence whirls in your stomach.
I know that you know how hard it is
to dress in white after wearing black,
to have your arms not merge into the day
but be signs by the road,
and to have nobody, Laurie, nobody travel
down your roads.
Posted by sarita at 10:18 PM
Old Boy
by A. Van Jordan
(Park Chan-Wook, 2003)
If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don't fall victim to the Hypnotist's
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories
pulse. Resist the taste for something still
alive for your first meal; resist the craving
for the touch of a hand from your past.
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There's
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out
in one's mind. When there's no more
space, we grow desperate. You'll ask
if practicing love for years in your mind,
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one's life
is the same as living? You'll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you've already released
your pain onto the world; don't believe
there's some joy in forgetting.
There's no joy in the struggle to forget.
And what appears as an endless verdant field,
only spreads across a building's rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field.
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you've forgotten this
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit
until, within a moment's glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting,
small acts of love or trauma
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one's mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.
Posted by sarita at 10:15 PM
Essay on Adam
There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.
The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,
nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these
is only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.
by Robert Bringhurst
Posted by sarita at 10:12 PM
Mars Poetica
Imagine you're on Mars, looking at earth,
a swirl of colors in the distance.
Tell us what you miss most, or least.
Let your feelings rise to the surface.
Skim that surface with a tiny net.
Now you're getting the hang of it.
Tell us your story slantwise,
streetwise, in the disguise
of an astronaut in his suit.
Tell us something we didn't know
before: how words mean things
we didn't know we knew.
by Wyn Cooper
Posted by sarita at 10:25 AM