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Evening Prayer (Oraison du Soir)

I live life like an angel in a barber’s chair, gripping the grooves on my fat mug of ale, a pipe between my teeth, beneath stale, foul air, bloated with smoke like a puffed-out sail.

Like warm shit smoldering in pigeon coops, a thousand dreams burn softly in my soul. My heart is as sad as a sap tree that stoops, bleeding its deep colors of yellow and gold.

And then, once I’ve swallowed my visions with care, some forty drinks in me, I proceed to get up and unleash the bitter need I no longer can bear:

And sweetly as Jesus when he drained his last cup, I piss toward the dark skies in an arc through the air, and as if to approve, morning flowers open up.”

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud 

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Recoleta Cemetary

Convinced of demise by many noble certainties of dust, we delay and sink our voice between the slow lines of pantheons, whose rhetoric of shadow and marble promise or prefigure the desirable dignity of having died. Beautiful are the sepulchers, the naked know-hows and the fatal doom dates, the conjunction of the marble and the flower and the fresh garden courts and the many yesterdays of history are today arrested and alone. We confound that peace with death and yearn for our end and await the dream and indifference. Vibrant in swords and passion and asleep in the ivy, life exists alone. Space and time are forms unto themselves, magical instruments of the soul, and when it is that they stop, so will the soul stop with space, time and death, as the cessation of light expires the simulacrum of mirrors that the evening was ending. Kind shadow of the trees, birded wind about the undulating branches, soul that spreads in other souls, The street lamp said, "Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, were a miracle that sometime stops being, incomprehensible miracle, although its imaginary repetition haunts our days with wicked horror. These things I thought in Recoleta Cemetary, at the site of my ash.

Jorge Luis Borges, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923)

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Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Twelve o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one, The street lamp sputtered, The street lamp muttered, The street lamp said, "Regard that woman Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. You see the border of her dress Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry A crowd of twisted things; A twisted branch upon the beach Eaten smooth, and polished As if the world gave up The secret of its skeleton, Stiff and white. A broken spring in a factory yard, Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two, The street lamp said, "Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out its tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter." So the hand of a child, automatic, Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. I could see nothing behind that child's eye. I have seen eyes in the street Trying to peer through lighted shutters, And a crab one afternoon in a pool, An old crab with barnacles on his back, Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three, The lamp sputtered, The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed: "Regard the moon, La lune ne garde aucune rancune, She winks a feeble eye, She smiles into corners. She smoothes the hair of the grass. The moon has lost her memory. A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, Her hand twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and old Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain." The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums And dust in crevices, Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars."

The lamp said, "Four o'clock, Here is the number on the door. Memory! You have the key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair, Mount. The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

T.S Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (1920)

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Perfections

Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves, As Souls only understand Souls.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

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Lying In Grass

“Is this everything now, the quick delusions of flowers, And the down colors of the bright summer meadow, The soft blue spread of heaven, the bees' song, Is this everything only a god's Groaning dream, The cry of unconscious powers for deliverance? The distant line of the mountain, That beautifully and courageously rests in the blue, Is this too only a convulsion, Only the wild strain of fermenting nature, Only grief, only agony, only meaningless fumbling, Never resting, never a blessed movement? No! Leave me alone, you impure dream Of the world in suffering! The dance of tiny insects cradles you in an evening radiance, The bird's cry cradles you, A breath of wind cools my forehead With consolation. Leave me alone, you unendurably old human grief! Let it all be pain. Let it all be suffering, let it be wretched- But not this one sweet hour in the summer, And not the fragrance of the red clover, And not the deep tender pleasure In my soul.” 

Hermann Hesse, Lying in Grass / Im Grase Liegend (1915)

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Not the Furniture Game

“ Not the Furniture Game “His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney and his eyes were boiled eggs with the tops hammered in and his blink was a cat flap and his teeth were bluestones or the Easter Island statues and his bite was a perfect horseshoe. His nostrils were both barrels of a shotgun, loaded. And his mouth was an oil exploration project gone bankrupt and his smile was a caesarean section and his tongue was an iguanodon and his whistle was a laser beam and his laugh was a bad case of kennel cough. He coughed, and it was malt whisky. And his headaches were Arson in Her Majesty's Dockyards and his arguments were outboard motors strangled with fishing line and his neck was a bandstand and his Adam's apple was a ball cock and his arms were milk running off from a broken bottle. His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears. And his wrists were ankles and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits and the palms of his hands were action paintings and both thumbs were blue touchpaper. And his shadow was an opencast mine. And his dog was a sentry box with no-one in it and his heart was a first world war grenade discovered by children and his nipples were timers for incendary devices and his shoulder blades were two butchers at the meat cleaving competition and his belly button was the Falkland Islands and his private parts were the Bermuda triangle and his backside was a priest hole and his stretchmarks were the tide going out. The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease. And his legs were depth charges and his knees were fossils waiting to be tapped open and his ligaments were rifles wrapped in oilcloth under the floorboards and his calves were the undercarriages of Shackletons. The balls of his feet were where meteorites had landed and his toes were a nest of mice under the lawn mower. And his footprints were Vietnam and his promises were hot air balloons floating off over the trees and his one-liners were footballs through other peoples' windows and his grin was the Great Wall of China as seen from the moon and the last time they talked, it was apartheid.She was a chair, tipped over backwards with his donkey jacket on her shoulders.They told him, and his face was a hole where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her.”

Simon Armitage,  Kid (1999)

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Labyrinth

“There’ll never be a door. You’re inside and the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse nor reverse nor circling wall nor secret center.

Hope not that the straitness of your path that stubbornly branches off in two, and stubbornly branches off in two, will have an end. Your fate is ironbound,

as if your judge. Forget the onslaught of the bull that is a man and whose strange and plural form haunts the tangle

of unending interwoven stone. He does not exist. In the black dusk hope not even for the savage beast.”

Jorge Luis Borges, In Praise of Shadows (1969)  

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Preludes

“I The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms.

III You tossed a blanket from the bed, You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet At four and five and six o’clock; And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assured of certain certainties, The conscience of a blackened street Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”

T.S Eliot, Selected Poems

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Beginners

“How they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals,) How dear and dreadful they are to the earth, How they inure to themselves as much as to any—what a paradox         appears their age, How people respond to them, yet know them not, How there is something relentless in their fate all times, How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward, And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same         great purchase.“

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)