i came, poured in a rush of stars,
and with open mouth I swallowed.
we are all, on the inside,
composed of points of light
constructing monuments from memory,
which once complete
reveal the shape of our lives.
the realisation
that energy repetitive in it's manifestation
knows not how to stop.
the dead (if there were such a thing)
live in three places, so we honour,
gather, bless, glimpse the sacred,
lay stones in rings and speak through shapes.
we drink from bowls of baked earth and dream
of a safe passage to wider horizons.
and I was just thinking about outlines,
the world before us in sun and starlight,
the way we overlap.
as of now and always I dance
with you, my little god of transitions,
trace a finger along the heartline beneath the gaze
of winter kings gathering in the dark
conjuring storms with faces turned to imagined icons.
and ask you to remember,
every so often when the ground shakes it's me
who is you, shape shifting out of sheep's clothing
in our scorned cloak of silver linings.
2 comments:
pyramid tip down hovering above, a line of pyramids all the way to the winter sun. neptune, io, jupiter and ganymede, planets and frozen moons, barras and the old man forwarding books with letters, a quiet english heath remembering secret footsteps. your words scribbled on pieces of paper pinned on my walls, northern sun slowly painting the bedroom wall a summer morning
and so i told myself:
the only poets i care about
are those who carefully
with nervous hands
carry a bowl full of blood
where a drop of milk has fallen
or a bowl full of milk
where a drop of blood has fallen…
Now I have seen, now I want to see
the firm grip of a bowl filled to the brim
with spring water. (G.E. 1951)
much love
He saw his world as an arena where das Gleitende - a gliding, swirling - held sway, and he eventually constructed his art as one that tried not to fix but to blend, and he did so not by imposing law, but by revealing the hidden forms in which the parts of life are bound to each other. This harmony was, in Hofmannsthal's own words, "the ceremony of the whole."
~From the introduction to The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal
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