A White House

A luminous presence hovers
in the bright sunlight
Where are all the people gone?
I agitate in silence
over the absence of all content.
The house stands like an answer I do not want to read.
I am enslaved to the memories of the houses;
houses that stand in a shadow perpetually,
or those which stand in the light eternally
defying shadows, forbidding entry
to life in its ceaseless traffic.
The white house stands alone in shadows,
a strange kind of peace
of someone whose understanding of Time
has blurred the line between here and now.

The white house stands alone in shadows,
a strange kind of peace
of someone whose understanding of Time
has blurred the line between here and now.

The white house 

A WITCH SHE WAS

A WITCH SHE WAS

A witch she was
only the magic potion from the sealed vial in my hand
could let you talk to her and catch her words in half of their length.
Now she is lost,
lost to sea and submerged under the waves.
I do not know how to break the seal;
I do not know if she abides still
in the tiny space inside this vial.
Be content now to admire the exquisite workmanship
of this delicate, fragile vial in my hand.
Letting her out, even if I can, may spell a havoc
I cannot measure as of now.
What storms raged
over the sea and the land,
how the oceans were ravaged by mad hurricanes!
Who can tell how it was in the wind and the storm and the rain?
Let her remain caught in the vial
and let the mouth remain sealed,
and let me too
lie asleep
at the bottom of the ocean's floor.

Image credit: Tanya Dimitrova

A Method of Perception

A Method of Perception

Colour and clutter,
and the palette holds
patterns of life in between.
Outlines remain
with space empty inside the lines,
freedom awaiting in that space
to be painted in any tint you wish.
On the margins of memory,
leaves of a diary are strewn,
with a smell of ink,
and pages turned to a sepia hue,
and piles of proofs that have no links now
with the truth which I extracted from life.

The Peals of Laughter Heard from Afar

To know the fragility of the unicorn and yet be able to laugh!
Isn't that the secret of life?
Very necessary to know,
difficult though!
And the practice of it, the effort at it
is the whole of life.
And our whole life is a continuous effort.

And I am dancing barefoot
heading for a spin,
some strange music draws me in.

From the heart of darkness
to such light,
timeless behind the veil of Maya,
behind the silence
is the everlasting YES,
the affirmation that
I AM,
a stream of playful consciousness,
the fumes from the Delphic oracle,
all agree that I AM

Thanks, Anna Del Valle Marti for the image

Originally shared by Anna del Valle Martí

"Reverberation"
retentissement / reverberation

1. What echoes in me is what I learn with my body: something sharp and tenuous suddenly wakens this body, which, meanwhile, had languished in the rational knowledge of a general situation: the word, the image, the thought function like a whiplash. My inward body begins vibrating as though shaken by trumpets answering each other, drowning each other out: the incitation leaves its trace, the trace widens and everything is (more or less rapidly) ravaged. In the lover's Image-repertoire, nothing distinguishes the most trivial provocation from an authentically consequent phenomenon; time is jerked forward (catastrophic predictions flood to my mind) and back (I remember certain "precedents" with terror): starting from a negligible trifle, a whole discourse of memory and death rises up and sweeps me away: this is the kingdom of memory, weapon of reverberation—of what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

(Reverberation comes from Diderot's "unforessen incident which...suddenly alters the state of the characters": it is a coup de théâtre, the "favorable moment" of a painting: pathetic scene of the ravaged, prostrated subject.)

Roland Barthes. Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 1977.

Image: Annie Fargue de profil by Robert Doisneau, 1958.

#literarytheory #barthes #dictionary #photography #doisneau

THE TONE OF THE PACIFIC MOON

THE TONE OF THE PACIFIC MOON

A willow stooped over the waters
and on the branch sang a swallow
a song for the pacific moon.
The morning brought me a boat
and as the eagle watched we sailed from dawn to dusk and the fisherman toiled,
the housewife spread her washing to dry;
birds sought spaces
on dry branches with dried up  twigs.

Far away on another shore
a lone man dropped his fishing rod and stared
vacantly at the ripples.
Herons gathered and gave us a cheering note and I thought I almost saw on
the rippling dome of sky
 you gliding with butterfly wings,
 your parasol held like an air-balloon.

A temple dome rose in view in the sky
and we sailed under the shadow
between the cleft hills.
The craggy hills, scared and scarred with their barrenness
and the bird said it's ok; the way is clear and ahead is a brightness.
On the way back the pacific moon touched the sky, touched the waters, touched the minds,
a gentle tone , a simple word,
the day is done;
 it's night again.

DIVING DEEP

Diving deep
to reach
the reflections of stars,
the moon took quite a leap.
I stand here, staggering on the shore,
anxious to see her out again,
From here back to her spot in the sky
is the longest journey for me to behold.
so I stand here and wish her well,
the moon shivering in cold.