Sunday, 22 August 2010
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Red
Red
(For two voices)
First Voice:
The tulips red
Not yet opened glance
At me
Noticing my eyes.
Peonies
White with yellow centres
Delicate
Like her elegant wrist in ruffles--
They turn away
And favour the room
Over me.
The world is not yet safe
It hovers
Tired animal
Unsure
If I would make
A worthy prey
Destined
To dread
Colour
Yellow was my fate yesterday
I saw it biting
Everywhere.
Voice Two:
Now I try to hide in red
Why is it a sinking
Thing?
It seems to shift like clay
But its redness
Growls and
Growls.
Speak!
The tulips say
Why have I chosen the
Insistence of red?
It’s everywhere like
Cherry orchards.
I should lose myself here instead
In the turquoise folds
Of these velvet curtains that drape
And fold the empty stage.
I long to disappear
Into the soft darkness of their pleats.
Coda:
Red knows how to laugh
Knows its origins
Are in wildflowers
Indian paintbrush
Painted on faces first
Or else on jars
Red knows mystery
Knows the place where the sacred lies
It is the color of the color
Of our liquid life.
Red knows itself
Through and through
It is the color of desire—
Red knows itself
On the blackbird’s wing—
In the flaming Autumn leaves.
Red knows and knows
Itself
As Love.
she was drowning in red (for Meredith Monk)
She was drowning in the music of red.
It seemed to be everywhere ---
In the Songs of Ascension,
In the lipstick that Meredith Monk wore.
The music was red, and
Her strange vocal sounds primitive,
suffused With red.
She thought of the red rocks of Teignmouth
That marked the last
Part of her journey home.
She was drowning in red,
And remembered Sylvia Plath’s tulips –
They wanted to devour her.
She couldn’t imagine where she began,
And they ended.
Red poppies for Remembrance Day---
32 million paper poppies sold
for remembrance they said –
Was that true?
She was drowning in red.
He had suggested red
Velvet curtains
and they had all laughed at this idea,
As if they recalled a bordello,
or an old theatre,
or the grandeur of an opera house.
Red velvet --- something you could sink into though,
But not drown.
She was drowning in red,
And longed for the safety of blue.
Someone she knew invented agapanthic blue,
But she preferred aquamarine or even turquoise.
Like the water around Iona,
surprisingly blue, like the Mediterranean.
She is drowning in red,
and must sink there.
Forget herself
Eternally in red.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Memory
What I longed for most----
was your hair
luxurious
Against my stubble.
The golden weight of it
in the shade.
Instead, I poured the memory of it
into a cup,
And stored it away,
So that I could sip a little
Every day
On my parched lips.
The amber liquid bathes
the stones
of my silence.
was your hair
luxurious
Against my stubble.
The golden weight of it
in the shade.
Instead, I poured the memory of it
into a cup,
And stored it away,
So that I could sip a little
Every day
On my parched lips.
The amber liquid bathes
the stones
of my silence.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
Correspondences -- Celan and Bachmann
For those of you who have enjoyed reading Celan, please do read the recently published correspondence between Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann in Correspondences translated by Wieland Hoban, and published by Seagull Press in Europe and University of Chicago Press in the US.
If you haven't read Bachmann there are several translations of her poems. Songs in Flight, trans. Peter Filkins is a good place to start. Also in German, a stunning collection of Bachmann's unpublished poems and fragments (published in 2000) called Ich weisz keinne bessere Welt/I know of no better World). .
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