a zinc tart with tarragon coffee

Steep crags of machines serrate the great outer curve of its spine—steppes of steel and silica crevassed into the back of the drifting leviathan.

Caption from the cartoon Geranium Lake Prophecies by Wm. Yost for May 22, 1994


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

Every fourth day at cockcrow, the same hard-eyed figure pierced with four spindles passes by the dropping tower.

Caption from the cartoon Geranium Lake Prophecies by Wm. Yost for June 8, 1997


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

In the iron bark garden, rotted winter earth has grown over again with fables made of cloud boxes, pendulum wheat and glued shadows.

Caption from the cartoon Geranium Lake Prophecies by Wm. Yost for Sept. 29, 1996


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

Since I am inclined towards short poetry, one stanza often makes a poem unforgettable for me. I bought a book despite its horrible title—Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Housden—because of this one stanza:

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

From the poem "Last Night as I was Sleeping" by Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly. I like this version with its short lines and the translation of "bendita ilusión" as "marvelous error" rather than the more exact "blessed illusion". I suspect this translation travels a little distance from Machado's intention, but I still love it.

My favorite four lines by Machado, a proverb, also translated by Mr. Bly:

Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea:
Rudder, anchor, oars
And the fear of going down.

XXIV. Lightened by one alone

In the gyre eclipsed of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

The congregated powers of heaven's antique empire,
Built on eldest faith, tainted by cruelty, stained by blood,
Will make garden cities into a lampless unpeopled world
Lightened by one alone, whose fierce reproach and reluctant prayer
Hurls up a tinge of gray in the void world.

Thirty witnesses will return, with thirty infants,
Nameless vagrant dwellers in houseless woods
Walled with witchcraft and flower-inwoven jasper,
Green to the very door of the long absence.

Seven common names of the unextinguished fire,
Stamped onto the frame of twelve windows in one form,
Usurp the codex vigilans of the unremembered throne.


XXV. Three silent virtues

In the itinerant gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

The clouded child marked with royal wounds and grievous wonder,
Born in subdued circumstances to a wedded pair of captains
During the ice-locked border-war between winter nations,
Will unshaken bear the assault of glorious engines,
Their rude throated noises become his summer lullabies.

When twelve years older, the boy will meet with much injustice;
All quality, pride and circumstance becomes counterfeit.
The narrow line of ambition fails with unlucky deeds;
Faith nailed down hard to a well-worn place can yet be lost.

In solitude, with tranquil mind, fate recovers the gentle skill
Of three silent virtues felt along the heart of the man,
Immortal richness greater than the tribute of all his tribe.


Copyright © Eirene Kuanyin Skadhi

      

Copyright © 2009 LCMT

I borrowed Tsitao-utna's pencil from EKS and drew a map. Ever since I was a child, I have always taken a certain delight in drawing maps. In my own personal mythology, I would have been a cartographer in a previous life. I particularly enjoy archipelagos.


( The Big Picture )


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

A new entry in the journal of Eirene Kuanyin Skadhi, for fans of the ecteiroglyphs:

http://lorwolm.dreamwidth.org/

I'm taking the new LiveJournal clone out for a spin.

Imagine a book with the title Annotated Cities, a traveler's guide to cities that appear only in the notes of books. Here is one entry:

The Walking Lexicons of Fantdellosta

From Turning the World Around: Ancient Turbines of the Holy Roman Empire by William Louis Bosk, 1953, vol. 2, pg. 82

The spinning catacombs of Fantdellosta in Segovitan are not only legendary, they are first and foremost a wobbling diameter of stony factuality. Disc-shaped and massive, the catacombs are buried in a ponderous cake of earth and brick turning as a small planet. The core of this city of the dead is a great machine obdurate in its mystery, the solution obstructed by taboo and paradox, maintained and shielded by a cult of oracular mechanics consecrated to its peculair miracle. The neighborhoods of Fantdellosta Above, also called Fantdellosta-Under-Sky, the portion of the living city of Segovitan built over the catacombs, do not turn with the graves, but their streets constantly rumble and shrug with palsied earthquakes. All streets of Fantdellosta Above end in rubble at the perimeter of Fantdellosta Below.

The corpses of Fantdellosta are wedged upright, each in a niche cleaved hard tight against wrapped bones. Skulls creak under the weight of slow, uncertain revolutions. Each body when alive belonged to a walking lexicon, a breathing monograph chosen by the Inevitability, a lottery held every year at the time of the bread festival. Buttons might be the subject of one, boxes might be another, or scissors, or toothpicks, or paper moons, or tin cats enameled with flowers and pasted with ribbons. After death, upright and moving with the wheel of the catacombs, the lexicon still walks, but the shrinking of flesh consumes all pages, a fire of dessication, unlit by the ghost-lights of rot.

A larger part of the library of the Aldelphinian princes was stored in the walking lexicons, a part estimated by scholars to be as much as eighty-five per cent. Lexicons about plumbing, gardens and philosophy were especially numerous, and lexicons about warfare and history were especially honored. A lexicon could be male or female, a member of the faithful or an infidel. Instructed by holy laws, at least one child of a walking lexicon became a monograph of the parent's subject in order to continue the work past a lexicon's death. Only infidels were forbidden to bequeath this inheritance.


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

I found some more resonance.

Transcription of David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

( The mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master. )

This is a much-shared poem; I have encountered it several times in my wanderings. Today I met it again and it struck with a particular resonance. If it strikes you today with a special meaning, we are echoing with sympathetic frequencies.

Elizabeth Bishop ©
__________________

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

LCMT
__________________

Sisters, Lessen Your Expectations of Husbands

He mislaid his string map,
which had steadily sustained
in a four-thread structure
the long unpredictable
roll of a green plum
and an uneasy
climb over
glassy
fish.


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

LCMT
__________________

Hey Congo High Congo

Hey, Congo!
Do you know the bluish chop
of the wind's narrow jaw?

High, Congo!

Hey, Congo!
Do you pause for
the blind jump moment
of the antelope's jumble?

Hah, Congo!

Hey, Congo!
Do you wash in tangerine lava
and ignite the pursuit
of the long-legged sun?

Hum, Congo!

Hey, Congo!
Do you believe in
the furnished tongue
of the cinnamon saint?

Who, Congo?

Hey, Congo!
Do you cascade between
the sharp-hunched village
and the floating stone of dread?

How, Congo?

Hey, Congo!
Do you spring early against
the green acid angle of time?

Hop, Congo!

Hey, Congo!
High, Congo!
Hah, Congo!
Hum, Congo!
Who, Congo?
How, Congo?
Hop, Congo!
Hey, Congo!


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

LCMT
__________________

At yesterday's book signing, my attempts at writing poetry with the public produced axiomatic results:

1. If you endanger a toothless landsman, don't yell "Salad!" in a crowded alley.

6. When the night is an orange, keep a tang of weather in the pocket of a mustard-colored heart.

13. Accidental painkillers will sharpern belief in the fearless enterprise of glaciers.

24. Receive the incandescent complaints of a sulfur child with a gold toothpick against a sideways ear.

29. A stack of pie tins will wrinkle and erase a sooty onion.

32. Furnish your garage with twin barrels of valor and calico.


From The Mislaid Proverbs of Dr. Jaw, by Nigul Mesikep, translated from the original Estonian by Ashtabula Littlehales


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

Saturday, May 9, I will be making one of my rare public appearances. I will be writing poetry and signing copies of The Agate Hinge and Other Poems at the Bookworm bookstore in Santa Maria. I don't know how many of the usual suspects are local right now and I lost my mailing list and we're doing this at very short notice and I don't even know if I will be able to offer you a cup of coffee—but come if you can, if you're in the vicinity, strangers and friends all hereby invited. We will start at 12 noon and probably finish at 3 pm. You can find the Bookworm at 230K East Betteravia, near Pier 1 Imports.



Contents
__________________

Palmed 11
Palmed 12
The Memo Pilchard

Word

My Dream Home
Free Waves Mustering
Alchemy
Palmed 8
Palmed 3
Bob Dylan‘s Skimchalk Jazz
The Bamboo Cheer
Carpet Tacks (The Hardware Ballad)
The Fall of the White Elephant
Palmed 16
Eden Unforsaken

Season

Early Spring Roadside
Palmed 9
Rural Route 1, Box 54
Driving Poem #26
Moment
Groundswell
Delicious
Alien Season
Driving Poem #29
Grand Canyon
A Bottle of Migrant Sunlight
Passed a last summer
Rooftop Bounce
October
The Essential Dream Symphony

She

Song of the Goshawk’s Wife
Yasodhara
Holes
Two weeks before my father’s birthday
Palmed 14
A Little Dream of Me
More
Muse
Beneath
Empty land
Container
Treble Shout
What to Say to a Prince
Cleaving
Palmed 13

Church

Questions to Ask Your Ex-Lover or Former God
The Agate Hinge
God is a Metaphor
Fragment of the lost 18th Ecteiroglyph
Dal Porto Lane, Nov. 16,1983
Palmed 10
Strange but not false
Palmed 15
Nothing Infinite
Relaxing the Shadow of Rapture
Palmed 5
Nuestra Señora
Thicken
Standing before the face of the moon

Geranium Lake Prophecies

Jan. 26, 1987
Mar. 2, 1984
April 30, 1984
Oct. 4, 1989
Aug. 7, 1983
Dec. 28, 1986

Copyright © 2009 LCMT   

LCMT
__________________

Driving Poem #31

First three silver cars, then three red cars, then three red cars. What does it mean? Mind occupied, blind, I turn right through the crosswalk on a green. I, pedestrian, was once hit by a car turning right through a crosswalk on a red. I hear a car with a flat tire [drum] pull up behind me, the driver speaks Spanish. He drives away, I listen to the flat tire [drum]. Three short contrails streak the setting sky. What does it mean?

I murmur:

We all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
We all shine on
Everyone
On and on


Copyright © 2009 LCMT

XXII. Illuminating the lotus spirit

In the fortenth gyre of the Age of the Nascent Vaunthald:

The hooded frog, a great silver boss on its iron forehead,
Stands above the red cedar temple for seven hundred years,
Guarding the imperial headdress wrapped with silk wires.
Granite clouds coiled and dusky loom over balanced pools
Illuminating the lotus spirit before the perception of every eye.

A rough devouring entity with no rules or principles
Will live unknown and dominate the hollow crown;
According to true etiquette he had vowed his constancy
To an allegiance lost not in fire nor earth but in water.

Black rain sickness will lay siege swift as a shadow,
Livid outlines forming round the mark of measuring metal
Stamped in the reddened throat of the secret usurper.


XXIII: Books of a feather-robed sage

In the sixth gyre of the Age of Four Wandering Moons:

A new mood stirs under those yellow leafed boughs which shake
Within the impressed abstraction of scrolls from both 17th centuries.
A spring of words overflows the closest drawn goal in steel—
Poetry generated in a wide range of free-given street noise,
Raising delicate hopes for the strength of the resolved city.

The first two lines of the books of a feather-robed sage
Written on a thousand rolls of silk kept for all good:
Elusive time immediately experienced is frequently unfair.
Question or believe, but light travels slowly within the grave.

From the tale of the count who has not yet named a successor:
The countess arrays her daughter in her most resplendent robes
Clear-cut as laquered satin, gently shaped as the lining of a seashell.


Copyright © Eirene Kuanyin Skadhi

In the ladder gyre in the Age of the Bunin Kings:

Behold, in a field thick inlaid with yellow patines of summer roses,
The flower of men, a fatal child driven by the deep power of joy,
Indifferent to restless violence surrounding the pendant world,
Ignorant of the bright sunset gold of painted pomp and blind
To the glare of glass thrones charged with mystic change.

A long entwisted circle of allies bound by sympathy in blood
To this Queen, will stand in her proper greatness and hold out
Against great thousands, when monarchs play the tyrants
In the barren mile of the Mediterranean's common age.

The Kindly Race, never-resting, with gentle work and endless care,
Diffuse the false art of ancestral sermons wreathed in golden theaters,
Unloosing the chained foot of cold winged Oumesan.


Copyright © Eirene Kuanyin Skadhi

To saints, salamander meat resembles venison. To humans, autumn is the left side of weakness.

Caption from the cartoon Geranium Lake Prophecies by Wm. Yost for Oct. 7, 1991


Copyright © 2009 LCMT