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Mimi Parent, Boîte alerte (1959)
After the Giant Anteater by André Breton (trans. by Mark Polizzotti)
Women's stockings sift the London light
The quays are stations black with crowds but white with vanished generations
And when I say London it's for poetic form
But the women's stockings are really clock hands
Beneath black mother-of-pearl garters
They belong to something I cannot name
For want of a creature who would be distinct enough from creation
And destruction to lower her own night over my thought spinning round
They have been carried into time by space
By female space very different from the other kind and that's all
Above the stockings is flesh and on either side of that flesh are bulldogs
Black and white as I said
And still higher the languid game that plays with a handkerchief
Everyone in a circle
And neither higher nor lower the enchanted telegraph wires
Scents confined in vague saucers
There is also a prison that brushes against the air of freedom
This contact engenders the somber flower of passion
That shatters everything in its wake with its fingers of glass
That absorbs the ambient air the breathable air bubble by bubble
And at that elevation perennial strawberries
Are harvested morning and night in the embers
That open onto pleasure in an agate star
The armor here shows so charming a flaw
Such old earth with its pink crust becomes desirable
That words leap over cliffs with all their roots shining
And seek the tenderest part of the ear
The electric grass has momentarily lain down
The light deflects even the ash of the eye
That remains open as if before the impossible
This flower that would be the morning-and-evening-glory
Strength and weakness drop their equipment nearby
And already the amazing feats begin
Then the dagger-colored dramas the comedies shaped like scarves
Rise by one note
And far away in the woods the future between two branches
Begins to quiver like the unappeasable absence of a leaf
Here the two pans of the scale the two sides of the hearth
Take turns submitting to the deprivation of evaluating and seeing
I think of the Great Bear but it is not she
I would minors to understand me
And ivy to heed what I'm saying
The abrupt line the treacherous gap of fire that uncovers its face
Will be but a call of the devil in the abstract city
Toward the unswearable reign of the crackling
Nameless woman
Who smashes the jewel of this day into a thousand shards
[20 May 1931]
Ansel Adams, The Tetons - Snake River (1942)
Midsummer Ice by Les Murray
Remember how I used
to carry ice in from the road
for the ice chest, half running,
the white rectangle clamped in bare hands
the utter cold
in all those summer paddocks?
How, swaying, I'd hurry it inside
en bloc and watering, with the butter
and the wrapped bread precarious on top of it?
"Poor Leslie," you would say,
"your hands are cold as charity--"
You made me take the barrow
but uphill it was heavy.
We'd no tongs, and a bag
would have soaked and bumped, off balance.
I loved to eat the ice,
chip it out with the butcher knife's grey steel.
It stopped good things rotting
and it had a strange comb at its heart,
a splintered horizon rife with zero pearls.
But you don't remember.
A doorstep of numbed creek water the colour of tears
but you don't remember.
I will have to die before you remember.
The Other Penelope by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (translated by Edmund and Mary Keeley)
Penelope emerges from the olive trees
her hair more or less tidy
her dress from the neighbourhood market
navy blue with white flowers.
She tells us it wasn't obsession
with the idea of 'Odysseus'
that pressed her to ket the suitors
wait for years in the forecourts
of her body's secret habits.
There in the island's palace --
with the fake horizons
of a saccharine love
and only the bird in the window
comprehending the infinite --
she had painted with nature's colors
the portrait of love.
Seated, one leg crossed over the other,
holding a cup of coffee
up early, a little grumpy, smiling a little
he emerges warm from the down of sleep.
His shadow on the wall:
trace of a piece of furniture just taken away
blood of an ancient murder
a lone performance of Karaghiozi
on the screen, pain always behind him.
Love and pain indivisible
like the pail and the child
on the sandy beach
the ah! and a crystal glass that slipped from one's hand
the green fly and the slaughtered animal
the soil and the shovel
the naked body and the single sheet in July.
And Penelope who now hears
the evocative music of fear
the cymbals of resignation
the sweet song of a quiet day
without sudden changes of weather and tone
the complex chords
of an infinite gratitude
for what did not happen, was not said, cannot be uttered
now signals no, no, no more loving
no more words and whispers
caresses and bites
small cries in the darkness
scent of flesh that burns in the light.
Pain was the most exquisite suitor
and she slammed the door on him.
John Bratby (1928-1992), Sunflowers (1975)
If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother's keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.
Mimi Parent, Boîte alerte (1959)
