Anne-Marie Albiach

 

The Hermitage Road (detail)

Parallel life of corporeal horizons already lived—the ties loosen along a trajectory, leaving to silence a dynamic of power or of destruction.

 

The contour of an outline constrains the masked face and the limbs, encloses wrists and wristlets, neck and neck band. Lewdness of earliest hours; light on lifting eyelids, distinct in color. Under the lace cap, silver-tinted hair ‘‘emerges in a flowering of unsuspected seasons.’’

Facing these accomplices in their preferred setting, soft skirts white and trimly belted, she verifies with both hands the precise point of the mask, where feminine and masculine become exacerbated. In the penumbra of the double, they look on with calm, a fragility in their frills of evanescent blue. An uncertain dream issues from her to them, a whiteness meanwhile irradiating our impulses.

How pierce this luminosity, which cancels the most ardent spectator. Two ardors, one white, the other scarlet, separated by the curtain of a distance fashioned as by time’s occlusions.

All that in an immediate memory.

Max Jacob

par Pablo Picasso                                

The beggar woman of naples

When I lived in Naples there was always a beggar woman at the gate of my palace, to whom I would toss some coins before climbing into my carriage. One day, surprised at never being thanked, I looked at the beggar woman. Now, as I looked at her, I saw that what I had taken for a beggar woman was a wooden case painted green which contained some red earth and a few half-rotten bananas …

***

Happy bananas!

Jose (Jose Angel Araguz)

Gilgamesh (c. 2150-1400 BCE)

from Gilgamesh's rejection of the goddess Ishtar 

in Tablet 6:

"Which of your husbands did you love forever?

Which could satisfy your endless desires?

Let me remind you of how they suffered,
how each one came to a bitter end.
Remember what happened to that beautiful boy
Tammuz: you loved him when you were both young,
then you changed, you sent him to the underworld
and doomed him to be wailed for, year after year.
You loved the bright-speckled roller bird,
then you changed, you attacked him and broke his wings,
and he sits in the woods crying Ow-ee! Ow-ee!
You loved the lion, matchless in strength,
then you changed, you dug seven pits for him,
and when he fell, you left him to die.

                                            --------tr. Stephen Miller 

Don Quixote

 

Julio Cortazar

 

 ‘Letter to a Young Lady in Paris’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn (First published in English in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon 1967; also in Bestiary, Vintage Classics, 2020. 

“Andrea, I didn’t want to come live in your apartment on Suipacha. Not so much because of the bunnies, but rather that it offends me to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel’s quartet.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Imaginary Biography

                                        Translated by Robert Bly

First Childhood, no limits, no renunciations,
no goals. Such unthinking joy.
Then abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries,
. . captivity,
and a plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance. The one crushed will be the crusher
. . now,
and he avenges his defeats, wrestles, wins, 
and overpowers others, slowly, act by act. 

And then all alone in space, in lightness, in cold.
But deep in the shape he has made to stand erect
he takes a breath, as if reaching for the First, 
. . Primitive....

Then God explodes from his hiding place.

Andre du Bouchet

 

Everything becomes words
earth
pebbles

in my mouth and under my feet

man given back
redeemed
in stones
in coins
of gold

currency of words and steps

what I say makes you laugh

nameless
gold that barters me
alive.