Love is a Parallax, Sylvia Plath

[triccie.livejournal.com]

'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
implacably from twelve to one.
( More )

from The Orchards of Syon; Geoffrey Hill

[everythingrises.livejournal.com]

II.

Something escapes committal; in my name
recalls itself to being. Mystic
durables are not the prime good, nor
lust the sole licenser. Shakespeare
clearly heard many voices. No secret:
voicing means hearing, at a price a gift,
affliction chiefly, whereas despair
clamps and is speechless. Donne in his time
also heard voices he preserved on wax
cylinders. Some of these I possess
and am possessed by. Persistence tells,
even when you are past speech, gurneyed
from Death's Duel. As for posterity,
whose lips are sealed, I do prefer
Polish to Czech | though, not speaking
either language, I am unable to say
why. Starting with these,
I wish I understood myself
more clearly or less well.
Go back to cast off several lives. Find
all have godlike elements
divided among them: such suffering,
you can imagine, driven, murderous,
albeit under notion of grace.

Four Poems by Vera Pavlova

[miss-osmosis.livejournal.com]

I think it will be winter when he comes.
From the unbearable whiteness of the road
a dot will emerge, so black that eyes will blur,
and it will be approaching for a long, long time,
making his absence commensurate with his coming,
and for a long, long time it will remain a dot.
A speck of dust? A burning in the eye? And snow,
there will be nothing else but snow,
and for a long, long while there will be nothing,
and he will pull away the snowy curtain,
he will acquire size and three dimensions,
he will keep coming closer, closer . . .
This is the limit, he cannot get closer. But he keeps approaching,
now too vast to measure . . .

——

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

——

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

——

We are rich: we have nothing to lose.
We are old: we have nowhere to rush.
We shall fluff the pillows of the past,
poke the embers of the days to come,
talk about what means the most,
as the indolent daylight fades.
We shall lay to rest our undying dead:
I shall bury you, you will bury me.


(Translated, from the Russian, by Steven Seymour)