anamneticprescience
Anamnetic Prescience
queer polyamorous appalachian // he/him (34) // i write and read poetry // do i dare disturb the universe?
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A Dream, Late September
In the city, I walked without a name.
In the city, the bone-white towering fronts
Of buildings jutting without clear design
Segmented the horizon, and I thought,
“Which one is my home? Which one is my home?”
I knew the street, knew how I must have looked
From twenty stories high, through frosted glass –
Not frosted, no, distorted was the word,
Uneven, poorly tempered, thick as ice
Dropped careless in a dram of scotch – which one
Is mine? Which one am I? Which square of sky
Does my small purpose frame, my respite flank?
No vertigo, no sense of being lost
Accompanied this thought (for what is lost
Removed from destination?) yet the chill,
Which harbored not a single wisp of breath,
Grew deeper as the sidewalk filled with steps –
With people, I should say, the ones who step –
And warmth and solitude seemed what was best,
As, huddled in that shivering crowd, I felt
A sudden numbing panic in my spine
That each and every downcast face was mine.
You know me
Said the rain (how speaks the rain?)
You know me
Said the Rain, now follow me
Beyond
This ossuary, through the fog
In which you
Will recall your fingers laced
In mine,
As Sycorax once laced her roots
Throughout my ribs.
You will recall. You will
Recall
My forms and in my forms my face.
(I cannot see, I cannot walk by sight.)
For I
Was Galatea’s marble heart
(recall)
That made a fire of your blood
And I
(recall) held my own sainted head
Within my hands
To raise it to your kiss
(the cold fog sharp with frankincense)
And I,
Apollo’s reunited Gemini,
Once looked you in the eye,
And in the eye,
And you
(recall)
And I
(recall)
The sea,
Enfolding like a white-hemmed, billowing cloak
Came suddenly in view beneath the rain,
And there, among the cliffs, I spoke my name.
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Ersatzism
Contour molds a corpuscular hollow,
fringes kissed by trifled tin instruments;
expiry of ego bloats evident
in a fermented seafoam confetto
of sawdust, chalk, hair, and plaster; flyblow
gluts vacant, wriggling in the spumescent
raw lugubriousness it represents.
Identity presumes no form. Although
rotted adulterants stuff the vessel,
its footing’s entrenched to repudiate
crust-baked grey flame-tongues of Saint Anthony:
The body pleads itself broken, full well
aware feeding others won’t abjurate
its turmoil of inner edacity.
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When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
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"In poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."
- Matthew Arnold on Percy Bysshe Shelley
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I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
#in memory of margaret mary clifford#i do not approve#i am not resigned#poetry#poetry reading#edna st. vincent millay
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-
You ate first of my lips. Beloved, could
You taste on them the breathless reverence
With which I speak your name? And as I stood
Before you, scarlet glistening on the tense
And pulsing muscles of my neck, my tongue
Sucked gently into ecstatic silence,
Could you then hear the poems my mouth has sung
Into the breathing flame of my desire?
Beloved, as your opal kisses stung
The plum-flesh of my cheeks and, moving higher,
The wine grapes of my eyes, could you then see
Yourself embodied in that living fire?
Between us burns a bright divinity –
You felt it as you ate the heart of me.
#the second heart-eating poem i've written recently#i like this one much better#struggling to think of a title#terza rima#cannibalism
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A dear, dear friend of mine passed away today after a long illness that she unsurprisingly kept quiet.
She was my friend, my mentor, my confidant, my intellectual and literary sparring partner, my tutor in poetry, my guide through Irish madness, my Ozymandias, and the one and only Grace of the local art scene.
She introduced me to Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, and John Jameson and Sons.
She had more of an impact on my life in the fifteen years I knew her than I could ever, ever express. There are no words for how much I'm going to miss her.
***
"Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice..."
***
"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
***
"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments."
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Suffering from that sense of not-quite-reality that exists in a dark room while half-tucked under warm covers when the snow is a foot deep outside.
A few moments ago I was watching an old video that I did not realize captured a voice from the past. The speaker is dead, has been for seven years next month. My god, how is that possible? It's almost impossible to type. Six months after he died, I realized that the moment in which I then stood was both the longest I had ever been without him and the closest I would ever be to his memory. That paradigm has also been true of every moment since.
Sometimes it feels like a luxury to quote the beauty of others, or to let a feeling hurt me into poetry. It certainly feels that way now. Sometimes pain is artless. Grief in winter is as heavy and cold as the gasoline-reeking frozen grey slurry that fills miles and miles of roadside ditches.
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Please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. I’ll be cross-posting my poetry readings there. Thanks!
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the hungers of hadewijch and eckhart, donald f. duclow // stigmata: escaping texts, hélène cixous // you are in a hotel room, joan tierney // the notebooks of malte laurids brigge, rainer maria rilke // great expectations, kathy acker // hot-hand fallacy, jasmine gibson // erotism: death and sensuality, georges bataille // cain, josé saramago // love in the time of monsters, emily palermo // a curious night for a double eclipse, j. karl bogartte.
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The masculine urge to squeeze the universe into a ball and roll it towards some overwhelming question.
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Vladimir Nabokov, from an interview for “BBC-2 (1969)”, Strong Opinions (1973)
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Love Sonnet XI
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
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Church Going
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
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The Candle Indoors
Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by.
I muse at how its being puts blissful back
With yellowy moisture mild night’s blear-all black,
Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.
By that window what task what fingers ply,
I plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack
Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack
There God to aggrándise, God to glorify.—
Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire
Mend first and vital candle in close heart’s vault:
You there are master, do your own desire;
What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault
In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar
And, cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?
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Меланхолия: Первая Часть
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has [his] sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.
-John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
A pupa frozen in a steel cocoon;
Eclosion finds him wriggling, barely thawed.
Unsteady nymph, how fearfully and soon
He learns this hecatombic world is God
In utter absence – poisoned, burning, dread,
As atrophied as he. What little trace
Remains of human virtue pales beside
The better Angels of machines; instead
Of striving to achieve their measured grace,
He strives at any cost to quiet his mind.
Security is survival’s ecdysis;
Regret and fear are stark exuviae
Reminding him that callow cowardice
Will never molt to moral arête.
The ethic of the insect comes to him
In epiphanic chemical taboo:
Entomophages must desist or die,
For, in his nascent seity, these grim,
Apocalyptic barrens seem renewed –
A place to spread venated wings and fly.
And fly he does, though slowly, from the haze
Of two lost centuries; from the ebon flame
Of toska; from the soporific daze
Of poppy tears; from the lingering shame
Of torch-songs sung on phantom tymbals,
Toward a wasteland occupied by friends
And feral lovers, rife with mystery.
Before he lands, he must first comprehend
His waking dreams and their erstwhile symbols.
No instar may precede its history.
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