#Prague river

[illustratus]

The Charles Bridge at dawn, Prague, Czech Republic

[lizouri]

📍: Prague

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Only music from the Vltava River Valley is truly “Prague Rock,” similar music from elsewhere is merely “Sparkling Nerdcore.”

[wgm-beautiful-world]

P r a g u e

[autumnmylife]

Autumn in Europe,Prague,Czech Republic

[huariqueje]

The Charles Bridge   -    Oskar Laske , n/d.

Austrian, 1874–1951

Watercolour on paper , 45 x 40 cm. 17.71 x 15.74 in.

[half-a-life]

I just want someone to love me hardest when I least deserve it.

Javson Johnson, "Building"

Swan

Prague, Czech Republic 🇨🇿

[estcaligo]

Omg literally crying 😭

There's SEBESHKA RIVER😭💚💚💚💚

That settles it, we will spend our honeymoon there. Like imagine going to a place named just like your love union.

And the fact that it's river?? SEBEK'S IMMIDIATE REACTION, I SWEAR

Plus the fact that we're both Pisces ♓️ 😭💚💚

It's our element, so perfect🥺💚

[mothmiso]

Untitled (2) (3) (4) (5) by Sabina Tokadzhieva

[simajviews]

Prague, Czech Republic 🇨🇿

[amatorphotosstuff]

Prague, Czech Republic, February 2024

[londonhorizon]

Prague

[lizouri]

📍: Prague

[bakinochkame]

🌏 🛳 📸

[wgm-beautiful-world]

P R A G U E

[loneberry]

From “Poem Of The End” by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from Russian by Elaine Feinstein

*

Prague. When I think of Prague I see the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva separating from her lover Konstantin Rozdevitch on the Charles Bridge, her heart breaking, her body burning. Like an animal stabbed in the stomach, she begs for 1 inch of lead to the heart. Everywhere, she is an exile everywhere she goes. All poets are, for “life is the place where it’s forbidden to live.” (I had used that Tsvetaeva line as the title for the poem that opens my Sunflower book, the poem about being lost: "She is lost and I am lost but the difference is she is a novice at being lost, whereas I have always been without country.")

12 years ago I saw the bridge. I wrote:

Everything shrouded in a mystical slime. A crazed sleep-deprived flâneuse wandering through old European cities with a notebook full of somniloquent scribblings. The people walk around looking all processional and I swear to God, the tourists on the Charles Bridge in Prague were part of some kind of sublime funeral. It seemed like everyone was wearing black, walking past the blackened statues with their black gloves while the black birds soared across the sky. I break down teary-eyed on the train from Berlin to Prague...

*

Yesterday at dawn I went to the Charles Bridge to read sections 7 and 8 of Tsvetaeva's "Poem of the End" (see section 8 above). I used to go to the Brooklyn Bridge to read the "Atlantis" section of Hart Crane's The Bridge. I guess I feel that to understand something about the spiritual topography of my favorite poets, I should go to the places that inspired the poems and read them, to learn something about the architecture of memory, how we are emotionally branded by certain places of affective intensity.

It was cold and windy. Gulls and other birds were circling and cawing. Suddenly my phone battery went from 87% to 1%. After reading the poem I went into a cafe to charge my phone. A chill to my bone. A fatigue unlike anything I had felt before--beyond the typical jet lag. Went home and fell asleep. Dreamed of the phantoms of the heart, the ones that haunt the poets--everything gets mixed up there, in dreams. What are you chasing? "And when I wake she melts away into the sand." Did not want the dream to end, but I had a talk to deliver at the Academy of Fine Arts. After the talk we ate Neapolitan pizza and someone told me about her dreams of escaping death. She was in an elevator hurtling toward the ground. Death is coming. She resigned herself to it. Always, she accepts what is coming. But when the elevator crashed on the ground she was somehow unscathed. The door opened: desert. She was in the desert.

I like to think that everywhere I go, I am walking in the footsteps of a poet. What did she see, who did she become passing through this place? I see Tsvetaeva murdering her love, transforming, sensual and holy, from a lover into a poet. What is it that sinks like a ship, in the last line of the poem? She is letting go. Love is swallowed by the wave.

The Charles Bridge just before dawn.