(no subject)

[ex-gavotte646.livejournal.com]

Sonnet 43
{ William Shakespeare }

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee
And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep of sightless eyes doth stay!
   All days are nights to see till I see thee,
   And nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.

(no subject)

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

Retrograde: Echoes From A Previous Chapter


If only the third wish hadn't been squandered on more wine
for the village feast, or the second on scarlet plumes
for the black-eyed dray. Surely this life's tasks
meet a good end when the next life's begin.

Best wish, first wish: for a cold to crack the gallows
with a weight of ice. At rope's end, the corpse,
like a plucked goose, ticks by slow degrees toward dawn.

She watched the gibbet snap in a red rim of light. No
further grantings. Morning's too-lateness. Her pipe empty,
and no smoke to warn the villagers of her dreams' demise.

If only she could set back the hours, the days. Before
The Feast. Before Adam and Eve, before love and animals
and small green lands spit up by the sea.

Without one's wishes a dangling man reverts to plain
type. Pages flutter and whisk him away. In the chill
of his shadow came a wind and the pendulum's tick . . .
tick that word again. We scorn redundancy.

Nance Van Winckel
New Letters
Volume 69, Number 1
2002

To Lou Andreas Salome

[minervacat.livejournal.com]

I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,
into your sheltered heart.

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.

Memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being's floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.

For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Translated by A. Poulin