Stillness

Jason De Caires Taylor. Underwater sculpture.
Reblogged from Cosmic Machine. Click to view more.

Staccato II

 

‘We should be so anchored in that stillness of the ocean,

so much so that waves do not bother us.’

 

‘Avoid the bridge, he says.

We need all the poets.’

One last brilliant morning, and watch,

I become seagull.

 

Has poetry ever brought back a lover

except in dreams

Has it ever changed one heart

Have words ever mended

That is a job for Time.

 

My poems are songs for no-one, you see.

I sing them on a street corner

For the wind, for the rare passerby

There is no hat on the pavement,

You can keep your change.

 

Respectability will not keep you warm at night.

All these books, my house is made of them,

their wondrous stories

they are but paper and weight in the dark.

 

The sun kisses me and I fall asleep

in a room bathed in golden light

the sunsets are getting longer these days

- look at this cloudless sky, the heat of summer in January,

how can one not be happy?

That is not what I came for.

 

There are constellations on my skin

You will never see

Here is Ursa Major,

Orion’s belt.

 

Yours was the final, absolute silence

Of deep space -

I was tethered

 

Night stars are beautiful to look at

But, oh, they cannot warm you

Diamonds are heartless

and perfect.

 

In the dark,

He speaks  a tongue I do not understand.

During the day he absolves me.

He says

When Life gives, take.

She is a miserly landlady, sometimes

And this is not a kind Winter.

 

When the thick walls of the city are besieged,

they absorb the injury of cannons,

fiery arrows, climbing soldiers.

To a point.

A fortress, like a ship, like a dam,

is still made by human hands.

Lo, the smallest breach and the tiniest rivulet

Bring down civilizations.

 

 

San Diego, January 2013

 

 

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Poetry After the Fact

This is something that has been marinating for weeks in my mind.

Poetry and art exorcise life’s sorrows…they bring closure when/where there is none to be had.
Surrender is accepting that you will not know all the answers…it is making peace with not understanding- something that is incredibly arduous for someone who seeks clarity and communication in all things.

And yet, words deliver, they free and heal us. For poets, a sealed, completed poem makes sense of the arcane.
Poetry allows us to move unencumbered by the baggage of emotions (as these are now, at the same time, crystallized and released) , unrequited feelings, unanswered pleas.
Poetry is the answer, it is the peace we seek. The poet finds words, and like breadcrumbs, they guide through the forest. Poems are maps through the dark regions of the heart.

…


Poetry Came Instead
{Closures}

Tonight the sky is cold and clear
- trace filigree of stars.
The moon,  mother-of-pearl,
the constellations are aligned.
It is a night for leavening.

I was precipitating towards him
I could not resist him,
more than one resists gravity
(he had me at ‘epitome of inevitability’).

We first made love
on sheets of paper
I wrapped myself in his words

I sent him distress calls -
we were two ships in the night.
He told me I didn’t have to
explain myself when I unraveled,
he quoted my poems
-the only one who ever
kissed the tips of my fingers,
or my forehead every time i saw him.
How does one forget ?
A gaze that caresses,
the perfect first kiss.
How does one erase?
The only cure for love is more love.

I told him better later than never
he said never late
is better.
I called for him so many nights -
the days of forgetting were so long.
When I am upset I wash walls.

I said
we’ve been dancing around the fire for so long
he answered
it’s time to get burnt.
I was ready to,
Poetry came instead.

Nothing extinguishes the flame
of fickle lovers
as a yes.

My heart bled wasted ink,
a dumb moth continuosly scarred.
I will never know the hieroglyphs of his skin, or the sound of his singing-
the light of his eyes was not for me.
A beautiful vessel,
the essence deserted him
and eluded me.

As for the girl,
pepper and spice,
I can finally look back at her eyes
-those wells, the light that pulls everything towards her as an
undeniable whirlpool-and not sink.
The angles of her face
don’t bruise any more .
There is just love.
The careful letting go
of a butterfly.
Maybe next time, Luna
.

These days,
I am surrounded by Beauty.
The spring i pursued
was but a mirage,
my thirst was quenched
by the sweetest sand.
There is drought,
but I am hearing thunder
a strong, kind rumble that displaces air–
has the rainy season finally come
or is it another summer shower?

He kissed me a suspended, light kiss
held my face
like one holds a vase
i was not sure if he was drawing me closer, or letting me go.

You were not a dream,
you were more like
a moment of clarity after
months of drowsiness.

I know precariousness
And things that don’t last.
I sleep with pen and books.
Do you know what it means to
spend the night writing?

Everything you do
can be a prayer.

I was lying next to you
like a big yes.
Unrealized dreams
are the only ones that last
forever.

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Staccato | Fragments

1.Time and Vessels:

“She had a way of moving that moved him as much as music, which was what moved him most of all.
Surely the spirit animating that peerless body must be unusual too?
Why would nature make a vessel like that, if not to contain something still more valuable?” ― J.K. Rowling

Love is always the same
-it is only the vessel that changes-
that’s what the poet meant,
it took me a year to understand.
Love moves from one heart to another, selfsame.
You can never lose Love.

2. Skins:

Listen to songs from around the beautiful Earth.
Angel, you can always find the seven notes therein, sleeping.
The same Love is asleep in the Other.
Until it is awake.
You can find the same warmth on skins
milk to dark chocolate,
sand dunes to ashes.
The same kind fire lights all eyes.
The same Sun and Moon no matter
where we are…or how far we are from each other.
All is Good.

3. Love:

I am full of Love for you.
The flower can’t keep from opening.
God is the Love in the lover.
The lotus-heart is hidden beneath layers.

4. Fire:

a. The main function of fires is to warm,
not to burn. My heart is singed, but tempered.
b. The unattended fire dies.

5. Words:

Your words kept me warm
on the long walk home.
Thoughts you had for me,
caresses on a winter day.
Now, try to imagine
a flooding river
forced through
an eyedropper.

6. Let Go:

There is nothing to go back to
there are no mistakes
nothing to miss, fix
or understand.
There is only driving.
I leave my cities of salt behind,
the Nothing,
I see the lonely Friday afternoons,
the hardest,
on the rearview mirror.

Live as though
you are soon moving to a new city.

7. The coldness of stars:

“But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know that they all were?” ― J.K. Rowling.

The further you look in space,
the further you look in the past.

8. Constellations

The sun is a benign star
made of fire
It burns as I burned for you
It is a star that colors my skin
- my body responds to it the way it responds to the moon.

Gypsy: You are both stars, don’t forget. And the stars exploded billions of years ago, to form everything that is this world. Everything we know, is stardust. So don’t forget, you are stardust.

A handful of stars in your hand.
A candle is meant to become just flame.
Do not render a perfect heart when you go.

9. Silence:

The silence of the Sphinx
protects me-
Ice in my veins, it slayed me.
He taught me
one does not learn
by speaking
and to do so only if what i had to say
was more beautiful than silence.

10. Poetry and Poets

Empty this bucket heart,
My poems are puzzle pieces
put together in the heart of the night.
Milk the night ravings – distill them as grapes with wine.
Stolen words feed our ravenous souls.

11. Life:

There are problems that can’t be solved
they can only be lived
-some say there are no problems.
Do not chain eagles or falcons.
If you don’ t believe in God
believe in Love, or another.
Peace is a religion, too.

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On Burning Patience

Enhanced still from 'Albert Nobbs'.

And, in the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.

Arthur Rimbaud

Only burning patience will allow us to conquer a splendid happiness.

Martha Medeiros

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Nefertiti and The Sphinx {postcard from Paris time}

Ink and lipgloss on hand. book paper. November 2012.

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Variations on a Saturday Night …and Gillian Welch

The set above was designed by Jenna Ann Mac Gillis for the performance
‘The Desperate Characters of Mercer County’ which took place at San Diego Space for Art on November 10, 2012. Read all the lurid details of this Americana story here.

…

Like a Gillian Welch Song

I can feel poetry
rise out of silence
like an undeniable tide,
a Polaroid floats to the surface.

The words appear
Oh honey, just take out your lighter,
they are written in lemon juice

Loving you was like
carrying a cardboard suitcase
in the rain

In the absence of

I collect mugs by my bedside
Ride in empty buses
-straw bale leggings-
and always get to the theather
after the movie ended

I walk among the Saturday night revelers huddled around a screen
-the miniskirts march in lockstep

It’s date night in San Diego
a cold one too
knights in shirt sleeves have donated their coats
and presents are opened inside cars.

I steal glances and compose poems
that don’t help anyone tonight.
The lines start to sound
like a Gillian Welch song.
If you have a mind like a diamond,
expect it to cut.

I was in love with the dream of you
And now I am shackled to a ghost.

Some kinds of pain never die;
they can only ease a little,
and not every day.

San Diego, November 2012

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Poem at 4.17

Poem at 4.17 AM

You left me with all the pieces of the engine laid on rags – garage floor

I sat there wearing my nightgown trying to make sense of the puzzle – there are no instructions and I’m not a mechanic

I sat there for a year.

On some nights I imagined them chess pieces, and played against
you, them, myself

On some other nights I wrote on walls with no ink or feather
about snake charmers
and wolves in sheep’s clothing

Narcissus was tired
The Prince’s treasure, under lock, turned out to be a room full of mirrors.

Mornings I thought

For a summer I made sculptures and looked at photos

That night in the warehouse, our distracted dance, our last

You drove away
with an engine-less car.

San Diego, November 2012

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One Month, the Moon: an Update

Another month rushed by, seemingly accelerating towards the end, as though sprinting to the finish line. The year’s end. Another year.

This past month brought also new beginnings and renewals. Just like accountants, professors measure years differently from the general public.

So this, other, new year that starts with the fall -the harvest- brought Spring in October : experimental mixed media and history courses, new energy, enthusiastic and curious students, expanded involvement, new projects and many welcome social occasions…and always, the company and camaraderie of my gentle and wise kin.
I love my job and feel so blessed. (I have just been given a Service Award for Five Years of outstanding contribution to the school, celebrate good times..)

I hosted my very first reception for my Graduate students’ work in the History of Architecture course this last week. The title of the exhibition was

‘ History of Architecture: Analysis and Synthesis through Visual Notes’.
My past students’ critical, and sometimes lyrical and poetic work –their beautifully rendered drawings, sketches and diagrams–have been gracing the halls of my school and received much acclaim. This body of work and research into this alternative method for teaching history is the topic of a forthcoming paper, which I will present in the Spring.

I am also launching a project called Builtculture, which I will be editing. This is something I have been working on for few months along with a stellar Graduate student of mine, Samar Sepehri. Builtculture is a repository for lectures and cultural events happening in San Diego and the So-Cal region, for the architecture and urban design discriminating aficionados. It exists in form of a facebook page for now, but will soon morph into a simple yet useful calendar site–as soon as I can catch my breath.

Planning to post photos of the Visual Notes Exhibit next week -need to scan few more examples and ‘teasers’- and to share Builtculture when it is ready too. I am thinking about adding an Academic section to my work site, Archistdesign, for such endeavors.

All of this to say, really, is that my full-time job and volunteering [ for community build and garden build projects , I have learned to build a deck and plaster, aka architecture for social purpose ... yes!] have taken ahold of my heart and days  lately, and my art has had to wait.
I also (also!) will have my poetry published. New poems have been brewing and blooming, maybe I will share one later tonight.

I know that there are few of you who follow these ramblings of mine , who gently coax me when I have not posted for a while, and wanted to reach out and declare that I do not want this to be a ‘ travel blog’ , a dalliance…but that I also have to make peace with the fact that I am nor cannot be a a full-time writer, poet or artist, (although I would embrace these lives and crafts in a heartbeat, teaching is my calling) and that I cannot post or work on my art everyday. Life itself needs to be explored, precious work completed, books need to be read, and body, soul, and spirit nurtured daily. Perhaps, I have been given too many passions for just one life. These are heavy gifts and Chet Baker sings ‘I fall in love too easily’…

Before biding my hopefully brief adieu, here is a poem that I recently found among old correspondence.
It is nice to be old enough to have that.. Speaking of correspondence, see ‘ Young Goethe in Love’. I died.

The Undertaking

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime .

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime .

There you are — cased in clean bark you drift through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.

You are free.

The river films with lilies, shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm.

And now all fear gives way: the light looks after you, you feel the waves’ goodwill as arms widen over the water;

Love, the key is turned.

Extend yourself —it is the Nile, the sun is shining, everywhere you turn is luck.

Louise Glück

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Lift Now

 
Lift now the lid of the jar of heaven,

Pour, cupbearer, the wine of the invisible,

The name and sign of what has no sign.

Pour it abundantly.

It is you who enrich the soul–

Make the soul drunk and give it wings.

Come again always, rich one,

and teach all our cupbearers their sacred art.

Be a spring jetting from a heart of stone;

Break the pitcher of soul and body–

Make joyful all lovers of wine.

Ferment a restlessness in the heart

of the one who thinks only of bread–

Bread is a mason of the body’s prison;

Wine, a rain for the garden of the soul.

I’ve tied the ends of the earth together.

Lift now the lid of the jar of heaven

Close those eyes that see only faults

Contemplate those that only see the invisible

so no mosques or temples or idols remain

So this or that is drowned in his fire.

Rumi

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Wrapped in Words

Paragraphs of books become a pattern for a one-of-a-kind infinity scarf.
Be still, my heart.

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The Persistence of You II

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The Eternal Life of Objects, the Persistence of You

The Eternal Life of Objects, the Persistence of You

You skate
On the membrane of my dreams
We are divided by a thin layer of ice
The surface breaks
And there it is
All of our love
All of my sorrow
Flooding and resurfacing
Precarious degrees
Separating water
From water.

We spill over fields and rice paddies
-This is how we will come back-
All of our impossible futures,
The ache of forking paths
We will be streams, and rivers
Timeless and steady arteries.

I visit you in images
Stitched together between awakenings.
I take your things, put them away
The inevitability of your arms
As i come to.

You lie just beneath
the gossamer veil of thoughts
- forgive as the sea forgives,
as it heals, as it forgets,
Forgive as children are forgiven-
Their eyes are not windows yet
But mirrors.

Calabria, September 2012

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At Work

This photo was taken by my dear friend and photographer/artist extraordinaire Maha Comianos.

She is currently exploring the creative side of architects in her Archi * Artist Series, among many other artistic endeavors.

Check out her inspired work at:
http://www.studiomaha.com

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One Night in San Diego

Ink drawing of The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breuteuil, Marquise de Châtelet, 2008 by Yinka Shonibare, MBE

There are particular nights, small time frames, where everything you want, and, yes -everything you need- is given to you.

You watch your life unfolding perfectly, like a well-written screenplay of a comedy of errors, where the characters, after a series of ‘harrowing events’ and near misses, find each other at last. These nights you believe in signs, and that there are no coincidences.

I am not saying that life or love have a happy ending, but some days do.

Last Friday, the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park hosted an extraordinary event, part of their Summer Salon Series (inspired by the tradition of French literary and cultural salons). This event was a 36 Hour ‘continued’ Salon taking place in the museum’s galleries (open consecutively for 36 hours…I will never forget contemplating Egon Schiele at 2 in the morning), auditorium, and outdoors in the sculpture garden.

Needless to say, the collection of happenings taking place ranged from the superb to the surreal. Wandering in the museum galleries in the wee hours of night with other artists, revellers and cool types felt very subversive and….Big City.

A Yes Men lecture, an avant-garde play on self-loop for four hours, museum tours, German Expressionist Cinema, ambient music with obligatory trippy visualizations, live bands, a napping station plen air, stargazing on the lawn of the sculpture garden, drawing dreams and nightmares and, my favorite, a marching band in which us, the audience, were given a makeshift instrument and played (and marched) directed by the one-man band’s crazy frontman.

The general feeling of anarchy, and being caught between confusion/freedom/disbelief/engagement made this event very Dada, or something the Situationists would have conjured up…

Click to enlarge

During a lecture, I drew one of the pieces on display {above}. you can find a photo of the piece here.

From the museum’s literature: The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breuteuil, Marquise de Châtelet, is from a series of five figures depicting notable philosophers from the eighteenth century. The marquise, fluent in several languages and an accomplished mathematician and physicist, personified the “enlightened” person. Her lasting legacy is the translation and critique of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica that is still used to this day. Despite the fact that the Marquise de Châtelet was a leading mind of eighteenth-century France, much of her work was overlooked because of her gender. Her most famous lover, Voltaire, described her as a ‘great man’ whose only fault was being a woman.

I like to think that the Marquise is headless because she has never been recognized for her work and her name is virtually unknown.

She has been deliberately omitted in the annals of His-tory.

The fabric of her dress also tells a fascinating story of colonialism and the fallacy of ‘tradition’.

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Lord Byron, Poet and Revolutionary

One of my most cherished books.

Lord Byron’s handwriting.

Stanzas Written On the Road Between Florence and Pisa

Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story;

The days of our youth are the days of our glory;

And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty

Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.

What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled?

‘Tis but as a dead flower with May-dew besprinkled.

Then away with all such from the head that is hoary!

What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory?

O Fame!—if I e’er took delight in thy praises,

‘Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases,

Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover,

She thought that I was not unworthy to love her.

There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee;

Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;

When it sparkled o’er aught that was bright in my story,

I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory.

George Gordon, Lord Byron

November, 1821

…


Romantics, for more on the lives of the Poets, you might hide here for a few days, and spend the evenings at your local cafe reading poems accompanied by a well-tempered clavier.  For my part, I have ordered Ugo Foscolo’s Le Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis)–and  look forward to sinking in its lyrical, poignant song that so well describes the passion and contradiction of the Italian spirit (and carries me back to the Halcyon days of Literature and Poetry studies in high school).  A presto, more watercolor portraits await…

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Desde La Habana {Dibujas y Recuerdos}

El Templete, Habana Vieja (with water from the Malecon).
Ink on hand.book paper. Habana, Cuba. April 2012.

Example of Moorish (Mudéjar) Architecture in Habana Vieja.
Ink on hand.book paper. Habana, Cuba. April 2012.

….

“Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.”

Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

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On This Sweet, Rainy Evening

 

 

The Arms That Wouldn’t Let Me Go

 

On this sweet, rainy evening

My thoughts run to you

Like water towards the ocean

In the city’s gutters and roofs

Towards countless drainstorms

Powerless in the face

Of a calculated incline.

 

It is a sweet rain that is falling tonight

It wears your scent of promises

It is music, it sings of gentle breezes through wooden wind charms,

Of a veranda in the Caribbeans.

A scattering of drops

Like miniscule sand pebbles on my books

As I wait.

 

O Night, your silence descends upon me like a mantle

It calms me

I could write lines like an ode to your burning eyes

Your long, long lashes that caught my tears

Brushed away listless years

And changed me.

 

Tonight I don’t see the bus stop in front of me

Or the muted lights of cars

I see you waiting for me on that street

The staircase that separated me from bliss

[I met my two loves on the steps of Italian cathedrals,

they gave me their blessings]

I know you are there

And when you see me, your eyes smile stars,

twinkling benign in the skies between us.

 

If the world ended in two days,

As predicted,

I would have felt safe

Your broad shoulders would have protected me

From all the walls and crumbling houses of the City.

 

Sleep, days, a thin membrane

Before and after us

A tender gauze between dusk and your sunset skin.

 

We stole nights

Like compassionate thieves

Time measured in kisses

A perfect, impossible life

Soft like the sound of a far-away gramophone

Or a clavichord in Vienna

(Will you come with me to cobbled alley-ed Vienna?)

 

I am home now

The lanes are deserted and streetlights have relinquished

their daytime tyranny

The night is wide with the tabac scent

Of water falling on hot concrete and asphalt

It is a summer night somewhen, somewhere else.

 

I am home now

The house is still

And bathed in red solitude

I need to stop writing

And conjure up what I’ll be wearing tomorrow

I need to stop thinking

That I could die happy tonight.

 

 

San Diego, April 25, 2012

 

 

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Desde La Habana { Poesías y Mentiras}

Moon Over Cuba

La luna sobre Habana
Tiene una sonrisa
De la Calle San Francisco a Espalda,
En el Vedado.

El Malecon vio’ todo, sus serenadas,
La trova y el son.

Las olas en la noche
Regresan y regresan
amantes para la izquierda
Como tu pensiero
Caliente
Que no me dejas dormir.

Todo es posible en La Habana
Dijo’ Graham Greene.
En la ciudad de las columnas
Tome’ las espinas ayer
Y ora
Tomo la Rosa.

Habana, 5 Abril 2012

Moon Over Cuba

The moon above Habana
Has a smile
From San Francisco Street to Espalda,
In the Vedado.

The Malecon saw everything, his serenades,
The trova and the son.

The waves in the night
Return and return
unofficial lovers
As your thought
Burning
Which keeps me awake

Everything is possible in Habana
said Graham Greene.
In the city of colums
I picked some thorns yesterday
And today
I catch the Rose.

…

Ya lo se
Que voy a quierer de sentir
El sonido de tu voz
Tu acento

Par la calle la brisa es suave en mi piel
Aqui nunca hace frio
La noche te cubre
Con sus caricias
Su bufanda hecha de estrellas

Estoy olvidando
Todos mis dolores
Las olas se la traigan con ellas

Los muros conservan
Los abrazos de los enamorados
Todo me habla aqui
y tengo que regresarme
Tu me dices

Como escribir en la rena
Y esperar l’agua
Que borra
Un otro amor.

Habana, 8 Abril 2012



I already know
I will want to hear
The sound of your voice
Your accent

In the street the breeze is smooth on my skin
Here it’s never cold
The night covers you
With her caresses
Her scarf made of stars

I am forgetting
All my sorrows
The waves carry them away

The walls conserve
The embraces of lovers
Everything speaks to me here
and I need to come back
You say

It’s like writing on the sand
And waiting for the water
To erase
Another love.

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Good Morning, Habana

Habana

Nadie’ en tus arquiadas
En tus piedras llore’
Tus plazas me acogieron

Respire’ en la sombra de tus arboles
Sufrie’ por su cara
–los abrazos olvidados en la rena
estan alla’ hasta otro viento–

En tu son
Tu sol
Comprendi’ tus ojos infinitos
El calor the tus brazos dorados
Me calento’

En la noche el agua va corriendo en las fuentes–
Todavia estare’ alla’,
En los pasajes y las calles,
En las escaleras y las puertas serradas,
y en tu corazon de sal.

La Habana, Cuba, Avril 2012

…

Havana

I swam in your porticoes
On your stones I cried
Your piazzas welcomed me

I breathed in the shade of your trees
I suffered for his face
–the embraces forgotten on the sand
   there remain, until another wind.

In your sound
Your sun
I understood your infinite eyes
The heat of your golden arms
Warmed me

In the night
The water will continue to run in the fountains
I will be there still,
In your passageways and streets,
In your staircases and closed doors,
And in your heart of salt.

Havana, Cuba, April 2012

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Bassemah takes on Ghadah

Earlier this year I acquired two books from my lovely blogsister Ghadah Alkandari at PrettyGreenBullet.
One was to keep…the other to collage.

Here I asked my dear friend Bassemah, of Palestinian origins, to respond to one of Ghadah’s drawings.
She chose this one.

We spent an afternoon doing art in her warm San Diego home, playing Cuban and French music…I would love for you to have been there, Ghadah!

And to listen to the two of you speak Arabic *___*….

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Light The Candles

To Happiness by Carl Dennis

If you’re not approaching,
I hope at least
You’re off to comfort someone who needs you more,
Not lost wandering aimlessly
Or drawn to the shelter of well-lit rooms
Where people assume you’ve arrived already.

If you’re coming this way, send me the details
—The name of the ship, the port it leaves from—
So I can be down on the dock to help you
Unload your valises, your trunks and boxes
And stow them in the big van I’ll have rented.

I’d like this to be no weekend stay
Where a single change of clothes is sufficient.
Bring clothes for all seasons, enough to fill a closet;
And instead of a single book for the bedside table
Bring boxes of all your favorites.

I’ll be eager to clear half my shelves to make room,

Eager to read any titles you recommend.
If we’ve many in common, feel free to suggest
They prove my disposition isn’t to blame
For your long absence, just some problems of attitude,

A few bad habits you’ll help me set to one side.
We can start at dinner, which you’re welcome
To cook for us while I sweep and straighten
And set the table.
Then light the candles
You’ve brought from afar for the occasion.

Light them and fill the room
I supposed I knew
With a glow that shows me
I was mistaken.
Then help me decide if I’m still the person I was
Or someone else, someone who always believed in you
And imagined no good reasons for your delay.

“To Happiness” by Carl Dennis, from Unknown Friends.

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Even When He Dreams

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory.

That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry.

The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams.

Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.

Borges

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A Moon Over Berkeley

A Moon Over Berkeley
[We Became Art for a Moment]

There is no need to seek her
For she is the Moon
Her stunning face hangs over me
Never lets a night go without
The ache of her beauty
Do you see the small star by her?

Her shadow is cast over the city
Like Brunelleschi’s cupola over all of Tuscany.
The heaviness of her copper lies
[in my mouth]
She hides under train tracks and asphalt
She peeks from our longtrodden alleys
She’s under and above me.

I have to see about a City
-I said to him-
The way others go see about a Girl.
‘The city is a girl’ he replied.

They wrote about us
We became Art for a moment
Part of the city like streetlamps
A collage of colors
Red for San Francisco cars
Mustard like her scarf
White, my fedora
Red was our debaucherous light
Her crisp apple shirt matched paintings
[gray as planes]

In Buena Vista park we laid on the grass
Fed mosquitoes and waited fairies
I crafted stories on Bechtle’s California suburbs
Stories of quiet misery and afternoon beers, for her…

Blue for too many train tickets
We sat in a room full of patterns
And listened.

Under brilliant suns we walked
To the edge of Sunset.
Faded too early in the streets of Janis Joplin
Among Tibetan jewelry stores,
Earrings and beads,
We found minstrels and poets.

Lemonade and Mate,
I told her about the weight of flowers
Narrated the geography
Of my broken heart.

It is night again
And I still choose my dandelion poetry
Over sleep
And being on time.

San Diego, March 7, 2011

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San Francisco My Love II

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My California

My world, my California, still needs to be made.
To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly.
To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one.
Maybe you have to be lost.
The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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I will wait for you (Il Mio Canto)

When the Sun rises…

I will wait for you…

 I will wait for you.

With the stubborness of a chair.

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Winter Venice

In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theatre. The play is finished, but the echoes remain.

Arbit Blatas

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

Alexander Herzen

There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.

Mary Shelley

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

Erica Jong

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand.

Lord Byron

…

A train-ride takes you from Milano to Venice..whose real name is Venezia, the Most Serene city and splendid, golden Republic. On the train you think about Byron, his letters written on trains, his Venetian Countess.

Through frozen fields and dormant earth, through fog and long-gone rice paddies , you deboard to the Sublime.

At dusk the lights from bars and cafes shimmer on the dark waters, and you start thinking in cliches, such as temporarily inhabiting an Impressionist painting.

Yet the feeling is fresh and true: each visit to this surrealists’ dream had its poignant moment of suspension of disbelief.

Each time the city grabs you and takes you away with her.
…
Here’s a taste of today’s acts of flanerie in La Serenissima.

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Dispatches from Milano

Crocheting Cathedrals. Il Duomo with parasitic architecture (stage for New Year's festivities). Ink and watercolor on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.

Aperol and Spritz. Most of the older ladies in my neighborhood are incredibly fashionable, decked in the latest trend winter coat. Here's two enjoying a mildly alcoholic aperitivo at 11 AM. Ink on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.

Santa Maria Presso San Satiro. The obligatory pilgrimage to the second Bramante's church. Last year I drew Santa Maria Delle Grazie, which is near to my place. I am always amazed by the playfulness and modernity of the oculi (round windows) on the Northern Romanesque facade. I found out that the space in front of the church is called 'Largo Jorge Luis Borges'. Can it get better than this?
Ink on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.

Window of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio. In an act of Flanerie, I got lost trying to reach the Roseto, and found these whimsical, almost Gaudi-like windows on a palazzo I had not seen since my childhood, painted in the typical warm 'Milanese Yellow' (think saffron rice and add a patina of melancholy, smog and time). Ink on hand.book paper. January 1, 2012.

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Fragments {and a Cashmere Wrap}

Dream before Nonno died. He was a fisherman. Ink on notebook paper, 2003.

Fragments {and a cashmere wrap}

The cashmere wrap finally arrived in the mail

so much weighs on this stole

‘opportunity a thief makes’

he said before giving me homework

– how we love.

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”

Saul Bellow

A lot weighs on this stole:

conversation is rippled with diamonds

they tumble , heavy, they are words, quotes

…out of the mundane…

a pearl – grasp it and keep it.

Wisdom is the only jewelry I wear this season

and my greediness awaits

meaning.

He who grasps more than he can hold, would be better without any.

If a house is crammed with treasures of gold and jade,

it will be impossible to guard them all.

Lao Tzu

Did you hear the sound of wisdom, Heart?

The message you sought.

My only wealth is my memory.

Like a mendicant I gather precious words,

fragments of light that I bring back,

puzzles I spend days composing.

- You, collector of spirit, feeder of souls.

Everyone wants to go to Heaven, no-one wants to die.

The falcon, scarred wing, alighted the sill.

– the magpies, once they have caught the prey,

lose interest

and look around for the next creature to pursue-

Yogis come and go,

grasp their message

Catch leaves in the wind

take them home, make a nest.

Heaven is simple:

let go of anything that is not love or peace.

San Diego, December 15, 2011

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Fall Bouquet {and a button}

Fall Bouquet {and a button}. November 26, 2011.

 

Think in images, not sentences anymore

or better, fill yourself with food-sounds

against hollow silences.

Colours are a kind of music

and music pours a red-yellow wine here.

Drink it.

 

Sit like a cat in the Sun,

this warm December Sun that heals

this warm December Sun that lights

all dusty corners of the soul

and renews.

My California, My South,

My brilliant blessing, I thank you.

 

Year, rush to an end.

Is it Spring when the birdlets leave the gilded cage?

Open all doors.

Is it Spring when the starlings return from Southern latitudes?

Then burst open shutters and windows

They never do close here.

 

In the photograph, the hand is like a wing that shelters

It is always there,

in the heart-home

that has no doors

like a nest.

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Fall Bouquet

Cafe' De Flore, Paris, October 2011.

Cafe' De Flore, Paris, October 2011.

Fall Bouquet


“El cariño que te tengo. Yo no lo puedo negar.“

Paris sun

is the glow of her cafes.

It is a dusk sun that burns in the night,

the warmth of crowds,

bright minds while shadows fall.

Cigarette ambers,

the heat of Bossanova bass

in St. Germain.


“Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí”

Fallen leaves of orange, gold, copper

I make a bouquet

for our house of glass love.

Sunset is each day’s autumn.

I fill rooms with colours

Gardener of my own heart.

Draw before you lose them

Orange umbrellas

I’m left with buttons.

“¡Y ahora si quieren bailar,
búsquense otro timbalero!”

 

You opened my heart

with a wound of light.

 

There are flamenco guitars and sheeshas

on roof terraces

There are nights such as these

–filled with stars–

in Tunis or Bayreuth.

 

There are dancing sunrises in Ibiza

and white cabanas on Miami beaches.

 

There is a cafe where our traveling souls will meet

There is poetry after the fire.

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To Choose a Pair of Gloves

To choose a pair of gloves
Is serious business.

I place your brown leather small
On top of mine
It is as if you are protecting me
A tender shelter for my hands
Made of florentine winters
cobblestones, morning trains, domes.
It runs a bit short
A black cashmere wrap, or
the vulnerable clinging of the young.

The gloves are empty
Your hands are not there
Your gloves are shells
Echoing your touch

Your gloves are naked
They are the skin you use to protect your skin
I carry them now
I carry you

Then I place mine on top
Brown like yours, but bigger
Your gloves poke from under , happy.
Mother and child of the same tan.

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Murmurations {Seven Hundred Sixty Days)

Murmurations Upon Watching Un Chien Andalou. Digital Collage.November 20, 2011.

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The Secret of the Lost Umbrella | Essay on Orange

Ink drawing, Watercolor. 16 November 2011.

Ink drawing, Watercolor + Digital Manipulation. 16 November 2011.

I was recently reunited with luggage lost 45 days ago.

Three items were missing: a bottle of Cinema Eau De Parfum by Yves Saint Laurent, a beloved collaged orange umbrella bought in Barcelona and a pair of Sketchers shoes. Go figure.

Immediately i set out to substitute my lost umbrella. As said in one Law and Order episode (I paraphrase): “Hardheaded Calabrese: the people there are very stubborn… once something is taken away from them, they don’t rest until …they get it back.”

My mind went back to the orange umbrella I bought for my mom in Milano last Christmas (probably with her money;)), from one of my favorite stores: Muji.

In my quest, I ran into this glorious essay on a particular shade of orange.

I have a box of orange objects in my house that I have been meaning to combine into a series.

Tomorrow seems like a good day for it, and orange thoughts are perfect for winter-short days and too much yin.

Before you read, keep this in mind:

Fire in Arabic is ‘Nar’.

………….

My Orange

by Michele Foyer


If we lived during the time of the Dutch West Indies Company, I would tell you that the color that so captured me was the child of paprika and chocolate. The world no longer swoons over spice willing to risk a sail beyond the end of the known. And yes, sadly rape and pillage in its desperate greed. I had only to pass the window of the Muji store in Manhattan’s Chelsea to discover this color in an umbrella.


What is it that grabbed me? Is it a vibration for which the color is only a foil? Or is it something about the color itself lodged between memory and desire? This redder orange infused with luxurious chocolate yielded a strangely jazzier yet muter tone than orange. But if we are mapping out its terrain inevitably the orange relation comes up.


My “Muji Orange” is a distant relative of the neon orange of warning, as well as a “tangerine streamlined baby” of sixties psychedelic abandon. Its crazy older paternal cousin might be the Tang of astronauts or maybe the impossible orange of orange Crush soda, or possibly even Blake’s Tyger burning bright, but its doting grandmother, is definitely — yes, most definitely — a bittersweet French marmalade.


There is some mystery to orange. Orange is the only color in the seven-color spectrum besides violet that originates as a noun, naming a particular thing. It refers to the berry fruit of the orange tree, something very concrete and specific and not as abstract as the other colors. Was the experience of the orange fruit so strong that it came to stand for the orange experience?


The Old English Dictionary (OED) states that in Medieval Latin “the forms ‘arangia’, ‘arantia’ (Du Cange) whence ‘aurantia’ have “popular association with ‘aurum’ gold from the colour.” Perhaps, the OED postulates, there is an etymological relationship between the Old French “orenge” for “arauge” after “or” gold. The OED traces the “loss of the initial ‘n‘ in French, English and Italian” as “ascribed to its absorption into the indefinite article” resulting in “narange” absorbing “une” and “narancia” absorbing ”una.”


Also from the OED we understand that the “native country of orange appears to have been the northern frontier of India, where wild oranges are still found and the name may have originated there.” In Late Sankrit the word for orange is “naranga;” in Hindi it is “narangi” (OED, p. 2001)


Is “orange” related to the color of the fruit and/or to gold and the word “ore” (OED, p. 2001)? Are both these not only things, but also perhaps experiences of light? More questions arise as we consider other correspondences that I call “rhymes and ricochets.”


In Persian the world for pomegranate is “nar” (OED, p.2001) which echoes the nar of narange. Is this coincidence or relationship? The OED states it is not certain. Was the “nar” / pomegranate the fateful fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden myth? It is possible because the pomegranate rather than the apple was the indigenous fruit. If the pomegranate was the tree of knowledge, what was the knowledge that this golden ball embodied? Might it have reflected a relationship of light to dark?


Is there anything other than coincidence to the resonance of the pomegranate which also figures in the myth of Persephone who spends half her days in a descent into Hades when the earth experiences the dark of winter and the other half above ground when the earth experiences the light of spring – alternations or gradients of light and dark?


In one narrative color is dependent upon history and culture. The OED by definition is a history of the English language, tracing the history and values of the western world with its migrations and roots to the East. Today we think oranges are synonymous with the warm climates of Florida and California. We often believe they are indigenous to North America. However, they were planted by conquistador sailors who needed to create supplies of vitamin C to take with them to guard against scurvy on their long sea journeys.


What is orange in cultures outside of the European? In other cultures closed off to our own for so long by the migration and exchange of trade, say the Japanese or Chinese, what is the etymology of the word orange? In Cantonese Chinese (but not in Mandarin), the word for orange is related by sound to the word for gold. At New Year’s the Mandarin orange embodies good wishes for prosperity. Are “gold” and “orange” a conflation of all these color experiences of light?


What about other earlier societies? I wonder whether orange might “rhyme” with “fire.” Fire had the life-giving power that made a large difference to a culture. If gold wasn’t the commodity of value, it might make sense for the word for this experience to be “fire.” Might gold be in part only an imitation of the light of fire?


These richoceting ruminations about gold and fire are vital, because it is precisely the light of gold or fire that starts to go missing in “my” Muji Orange. It is that chocolate brown in addition to the red of the orange that makes the color “step back” toward the shade. Muji Orange recedes from the saturation and almost clear brilliance of an ordinary orange that lags just behind the brilliance of yellow—whether the origin is the light of sun, gold or fire.


Muji is a Japanese company and that perhaps contributes and infuses a measure of its aesthetic into that of the west. The store’s name is related to “mujo” which evokes “transience” in Japanese. I once heard about Japanese “killed colors.” These colors had a little bit of death in them, fading from their original brilliance and glory. I couldn’t find reference to them again but only to the rikuyu colors made from graying. In Muji Orange the quality of orange steps away from the brilliance of the sunny orange into the shade, holding a note of something that is darker. It is not a sinister dark to be avoided but one to be savored like a fine chocolate.


Is my “Muji Orange” so beautiful to me because it captures the life of light and its brilliance — and the life of dark and its recession? To me “Muji Orange” is a kumquat color par excellence. First like the sweet rind of the kumquat there is a “taste” of brilliance and then immediately, almost simultaneously, just as the fruit yields a sour taste, my Muji orange bursts with another very different moody, darker earthy “taste.” Does Muji Orange with its paprika jazzy zest want to dance the tarantula? Is it death or lack of light that gives my Muji color its kick?
I have questioned whether it was the vibration of the color that pulled me into the Chelsea store — the umbrella an extraneous element. But I wonder if the precise color of orange might also be a “rhyme” with the function of “umbrella”? Are the form and the vibration related in the poetry of memory?


Recently I recalled an earlier encounter with umbrellas. When I studied in Madrid in my 20s, I would often take the subway to go downtown to the Turner bookshop. I’d climb the stairs of the appropriately named Sol subway stop that spilled out onto Jose Antonio, emerging more often than not into a scorching sun.


On my way to the bookshop I would pass outside the window of a store that made confectionaries of violets sold in white and purple miniature hatboxes. But my favorite was the neighboring shop entirely devoted to umbrellas with a placard handwritten in a swirly old-fashioned cursive script in the window that read “Manana llovera.” Both its whimsy and its sales-minded craft were not lost in the English translation — “tomorrow it will rain.”


Last December, many years after my sunny Spanish sojourn, when to me it is now irrefutable that night and day, death and life are folded into one another and that Persephone must braid both dark and light — the Muji Orange color caught my eye. Manana llovera. Tomorrow it will rain. Dear Reader, I bought the umbrella.


Bibliographic Note The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume I, AO, (Oxford University Press, United States, 1982).

Copyright Michele Foyer. Web: http://michelefoyer.com/news.html

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Meditations on the Sun and Moon

Meditations on the Sun and Moon

Hurricane after silence,
The Sun gives liberally –
You cannot trap its warmth:
Love cannot exist in a prison
It is true
But the Sun will always have her one Moon.

Fences in the water are useless
the water will continue to flow-
You can take a horse to it.

You cannot start fires and complain
If you get burned
You cannot sow seeds on puddles, asphalt,
Dirt
And marvel when a plant doth sprout.

A plane cuts the sky
Writes a requiem
Draws parallel light-hopes.

I live for that tender moment at the end of my days
As the sun is in full crescendo glory,
giving the last, sweet ripeness
Her moon rushes to a corner
Small, full of mischief
and twinkling laughter.

San Francisco, November 2011

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Beyond Right and Wrong

Les Tuileries, Paris. 2011.

Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrong doing

There is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about

language, ideas, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi

مولانا جلال الدين محمد بلخى

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Full Moon Salutations

La Seine, Paris. Photograph+ Digital Alteration. November 2011.

I am sorry
For my jumbled mess of thoughts
my contradictions
my ash offerings

I am sorry
for my sterile hips
for burning like a fallow candle
for not fathoming your fullness
(I salute it now).

Penelope undoes at night
her morning’s narrative.
It changes with each day:
two steps forward and one back
is not a step forward.
In fact, it is very much like
marching in place
while wearing a hair shirt.

I am sorry for my darkness
For wanting to hurt you with dandelions
for standing by a ripped promise
like a stubborn stone.

I write because
I have to.
If necessary, I can beg for a pen and paper
to hold again my favorite barbed wire.
(Sylvia Plath tell me again
how much fun it is
to write a poem).

…

I move my arms to caress
the petals of a giant sunflower
Inhale, lenghten
Exhale, melt.

In my raw silence,
my shard-sharp mind, my heart-awareness
forgetfulness is that one wine
I cannot purchase:
The door was ajar
yet I chose not to enter.

“Forgive my thoughts,
for they bloom at night
Nightflower’d orphans
banished by light”.

 

San Diego, November 2011.

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Thinking With My Hands

Thoughts set free. Ink on paper and trace. November 9,2011.

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time,

then I’m neurotic as hell.

I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another

 for the rest of my days.”

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 8

 

I have to thank my colleague Alan Rosenblum for sharing the concept of thinking with one’s hands and the visual poetry of The Mystery of a Murmuration. His advice is to watch this in silence.

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Getting Lost in Le Marais

Calvary and Atonement. Paris, Le Marais district. October 2011

The Dark Night of the Soul

St John Of the Cross

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised–oh, happy
chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.

In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,

Without light or guide, save that which burned in my
heart.

This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me–
A place where none appeared.

Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!

Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

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Where Buildings are Concrete Poems

No blind facade allowed. Paris, 2011. Intersection between Clovis and rue Descartes. Mural by Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky, poem by French poet and writer Yves Bonnefoy (2000)

Passant,
regarde ce grand arbre
et à travers lui,
il peut suffire.Car même déchiré, souillé,
l’arbre des rues,
c’est toute la nature,
tout le ciel,
l’oiseau s’y pose,
le vent y bouge, le soleil
y dit le même espoir
malgréla mort.

Philosophe,
as-tu chance d’avoir arbre
dans ta rue,
tes pensées seront moins ardues,
tes yeux plus libres,
tes mains plus désireuses
de moins de nuit.


Yves Bonnefoy

…

Passerby,
look at this great tree
and through it,
that could  be enough.For even torn up, sullied,
the tree of the street is
all of nature,
all the heavens,
the bird alights there,
the wind moves there,the sun there expresses
the same hope
in spite of death.

Philosopher,
if you are lucky enough to
have trees in your street,
your thoughts will be less arduous,
your eyes more free,
your hands more desirous,
at least at night.


My own translation based on this one.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

L’arbre bleu: A concrete poem to Paris

By Cara Waterfall



A luminous, blue tree explodes above the Paris rooftops of the 5ième arrondissement. L’arbre bleu (or the blue tree) is the flâneur’s reward for roaming the streets of Paris in reverie and without a map.

This 2000 mural by Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky, completed in situ, is at the intersection of rue Clovis and rue Descartes. At Alechinsky’s request, the painting has been accompanied by a poem by his friend and renowned French poet and writer Yves Bonnefoy.

The tree’s radiance is in stark contrast to its metropolitan environment: it is a bright blue column with only a few errant splashes to mar its clean lines; the branches emanate from the trunk like an open palm, fingers outstretched. The image reminds the observer that nature still has a place here – although it is somewhat camouflaged by the crowds and the congestion of buildings.

But the border of this central motif tells another story: Alechinsky, 84, delights in imperfection and the margins provide a narrative of their own. Each block in the border of l’arbre bleu reveals the troubled fragments of this urban world: charred trees have succumbed to civilization and now wilt against the concrete backdrop; bursts of royal blue spatter blemish the other blocks of the frame.

Bonnefoy, 87, has written extensively about the meaning of spoken and written words. His style is unembellished with a simple use of vocabulary that can be misleading: he manages to imbue a sensuality into this sparseness of language. As such, it is the ideal complement to Alechinsky’s l’arbre bleu.

The poem gently intrudes on the individual’s consciousness and suggests that this image is sufficient to begin a dialogue about how humans interact with their environment and specifically, how art can bring us closer to nature. The poet further explains that although it is only the image of a living tree, this “torn, soiled tree of the streets” is vivid enough that a bird perches on it, the wind moves it – even the sun shares its hopeful rays with it.

L’arbre bleu was a natural sequel to Alechinsky and Bonnefoy’s initial collaboration: in 2009 Bonnefoy had written a book about the artist’s pictorial method of expression in Alechinsky, Les traversées (The Crossings). He was well prepared for this text having written numerous essays on the subject. The book also explores his involvement with the CoBrA Group, a radical art movement from 1948 to 1951, of which Alechinsky was one of the founders.

Alechinsky is the sole surviving member of the CoBrA Group. (The name was coined by one of the founders, Christian Dotremont, from the initials of the members’ hometowns: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.) The Group was inspired by primitive art and children’s drawings. Their painting is characterised by vibrant colours, and vigorous brushstrokes; this liberty of movement is evident in l’arbre bleu. Critics have dismissed Alechinsky as “the man who grew up to be a child” and his art as infantile scribbling, but this spontaneity is representative of the CoBrA movement.

In the early 1950s Alechinsky became enamoured with oriental calligraphy: this highly stylized way of writing with an ink-wet brush allowed for greater variations in the curve and thickness of the lines he used in his work. His experience as the Paris correspondent for the Japanese journal Bokubi (The Joy of Ink) further informed his artistic methods. But the overriding trait of his art remains the combination of writing and pictorial signs.

The Blue Tree mural in Paris

L’arbre bleu differs from “standard” graffiti in that it was not created under cloak of darkness, but was commissioned; however, it still fits into the category of street art as a political vehicle that is countercultural. The painted tree explores our relationship to nature and underscores the fact that the concrete jungle can be fertile ground for the imagination.

But the real strength of l’arbre bleu lies in its economy: the painted image and the poem are layered with meaning. They articulate that nature can be accessible anywhere. Alechinsky and Bonnefoy have redefined the concrete poem: its lyricism unfolds amid the circuitry of the city – the painted tree no more out of place than a real one would be.

From indietravelpodcast.com.

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Sketching at Bassam II {and two poems}

Ink on Miquelrius paper + Digital collage. October 2011

I want to share these two poems by Ilyas Abu Shabaku, which were given to me as a gift. Poetry is a candle in a dark room: our job in this life may just be to burn as bright as torches, as bright and as alive and loud as we can, for each glorious day we have left.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened,

Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Buddha

YOU OR I?

By Ilyas Abu Shabaku, Lebanese poet (1903-1947)

This beauty, is it yours or mine?

In you I see a person beautiful in love

Like me. And which of us has given me life?

Is it your shape or mine that i love so?

When in my dream I see love’s images

Is it your shadow in my soul or mine?

Love, all of love, dwells in all I see

Whence all this light? Your universal soul?

Did I create you in the world of fancy

Or are you my creator?

Am I the first whom inspiration blessed

Or was it you? Who writes this verse?

Did I write it for you or you for me?

And who in love can be dictated to

And who dictates? Our imaginations blend,

Your soul within my soul, your mind in mine

When things appear obscure to me I see

A doubting shadow dawning in your eyes

When we met first I found my beginning

As if you were a lost part of my being.

Translated by Adam Haydar and Michael Beard

I LOVE YOU


By Ilyas Abu Shabaku, Lebanese poet (1903-1947)

I love you more than human heart can bear

More than a poet dreams or lover feels

You are the perfumed cloud from heaven sent

To rain upon me your enchanted dew;

I feel your heart, your veins flow into mine,

No gap to let the impure world creep in;

My heart confronts your heart, finding its twin,

As two cups meet in one eternal vow;

In us when wine is made to mix with wine,

A blend of perfume, breeze, and dew combine;

My inspiration dwells within your eyes,

And swells when lip on lip instructs my art;

For us the fire rages, though unfed,

Though we are calm, a storm erupts within.

Translated by Adam Haydar and Michael Beard

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Beauty Of the Rain {Paris Days}

Everytime it rains in San Diego, I get giddy.

I used to dislike rainy days but now, they are just…”Paris days.”

The city acquires a new depth, a warm, poetic melancholy.
That feeling of being inside a Caillebotte painting, where the real city, what I see, what i inhabit, what i fall into, is the image in the water; that wet,beautiful canvas. The rain on the asphalth, rivulets, currents, puddles become a mirror that scrambles, abstractizes, seduces….

The rain on the windows when you are sitting in a literary cafe’, and the place becomes a haven not only for the soul (as it usually is), but a toasty, welcoming,peopled orange-glow that will shelter the body in the intemperate, stormy weather. So seeing the sign of the cafe’ in the rain, in the mist,  is what the ship, no longer wreck-bound,  feels at the first glimpses of  the watchtower in the fog, keeper of her dreams and saviour.

It is as though the rain is inside the cafe’. The window panes are frosted and dewy. We could be anywhere. We could be in Paris.

Or all of it sunk in an ocean, a majestic  ruin overgrown with algaes and debris. All of it, wooden tables and chairs from Lebanon, credenzas and tapestries from Jordan. The wine, the coffee, the tea jars. They are all tubling down. And us with them.

It is as though we are sinking in a sweet, decadent oblivion. We drink in the atmosphere while we happily drown in a vague past with no memories. Where everything is possible, allowed, forgiven. And everywhere else, outside of this retro submarine, is desert.

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Strangers | The Poetry of Arab Women

October 2011

Strangers

by Huda Ablan

 

1.

No one belongs to the path

except a pocket

stuffed with the leaves of the night.

It keeps steps in stock

from a shop at the crossroads of the will,

patched with the skin of an old dream.

When yawning,

it invites them to a dance

with few feet and much madness.

When hungry,

it devours their warm, ripe whispers.

When thirsty,

it drinks their cries washed with holy water.

When lonely,

it forsakes its lenght and shrinks

to a remote corner of the heart

leafing through pictures of those

who have passed away

ensnaring with their song…

It will cast glances,

and tremble with the silence.



2.

No one belongs to the rose

except its melting

in the hand of a sad lover

who plucks it from slumber

every morning

and plants it in the vase of a tear

overflowing with pain.

He teaches how love sings

and how to breathe the secret

hiding behind the eyes

so it may reveal itself

without words.



3.

No one belongs to the heart.

Immersed in opening its chambers–

Shut tight with red forgetfulness–

It stirs the beats of a love

over which a curtain has been drawn

for a thousand nights,

and shakes a cup of blood

freezing as it faces circulation.

It alone

stabs the rug of a wound

made ready for crying

and prays

facing death.



4.

There is no one in the house

is dozing cracks obscure

the rounded journey of a small sun.

In the enclosure of the spirit

its walls bend in the face

of blows from the winds.

Its warmth ages and shrinks

in the coldness of waiting.

With the eyes of the absent

it soaks up warm places that flow

at the very edge of the passage

and melts in the shudder

of an endless beckoning.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     .

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Mending Walls

Namaste. Ink on paper, digital manipulation. October 2011.

MENDING WALL

Robert Frost

---

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side.  It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it
Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'  I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.  I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

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New Jewelry Design: ‘Three Talismans | Nodes’ necklace

Three Talismans|Nodes necklace by Archist Design Studio © . I used Industrial Chic spacers.

A talisman (from Arabic طلسم Tilasm, ultimately from Greek telesma or from the Greek word “telein” which means “to initiate into the mysteries”) is an amulet or other object considered to possess supernatural or magical powers. (thankyou wiki.)

Each spacer/bolt has the word intre·pidi·ty embedded on it.

Susan Lenart Kazmer, of Industrial chic ,gives us this definition of a talisman:

tal·is·man \ˈtælɪzmən\: objects worn to bring specific qualities into your life, such as strength, happiness and protection.

She considers herself a “contemporary builder of talismans utilizing objects of her own culture”. As soon as I saw her rugged and evocative spacers I was immediately inspired to create an industrial/architectural piece.

 

 

A pretty package containing rugged things.

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Paris Diaries: Cafe De Flore, Quartier Latin

Ink and watercolor on watercolor paper. October 2011.

The birthplace of Existentialism.

 

Les chemins de la Liberte’ passent par le Flore.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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Paris Diaries: Le Quai de la Seine et St. Michel

Ink on paper. Paris 2011

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Books for the Parisian Flaneur

For many travelers, Paris is Parisland. Here’s the Eiffel Tower. Let’s take aboat ride along the Seine. Ah, the Champs Elysees. Five museums on the list —
let’s whip through them. And, late at night, we’ve got to find that nightclub where the girls kick up their …heels.

Others — that’s my brood and me — go to Paris for the quiet. We sit in cafes for hours. We settle on parkbenches. We take long walks on nearly empty streets. It’s still Parisland, just another kind: an open-air library, a set for dreaming, an urban pillow for outdoor naps.

From a review of Quiet Corners of Paris

Here is a curated list for the flaneur/flaneuse to pack on your messenger bag.

And here, more on the The Flâneur: A Radical-Chic Icon

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Love and the Sea

“Inside a lover’s heart there’s another world, and yet another.”

        Love

        rests on no foundation.

        It is an endless ocean,

        with no beginning or end.

        Imagine,

        a suspended ocean,

        riding on a cushion of   

        ancient secrets.

        All souls have drowned in it,

       and now dwell there.

        One drop of that ocean is

        hope,

        and the rest is

        fear.

        Rumi

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The Hrönir of the Discussant {Fiction and Poetry in Prose}

Ink on paper. September 2011

In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges, we find the description of a hrönir.

In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent.

Two persons look for a pencil;the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to its expectations.

These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer.

…

The methodical fabrication of hrönir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists.

It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.

Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree –the hrönir derived from another hrön — exaggerated the aberrations of the initial one;

those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second;

in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hrön of twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality.

Stranger and more pure than any hrön is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope.

Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten.

A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.

At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges

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