¡palabras! ¡words! ¡слова! & sappho’s aquarium
I want to hollow myself out, empty myself; I want the ocean. You might live next to one or in one or under one, you might write to me and invite me to visit, pole about on your punt, paddle about with flippers and snorkel, you might; yet that is probably not the ocean I want. Even by the act of wanting I am creating a transcendental situation. I am creating flimflam; for the ocean I desire is the one other's have created for me.
Is this the escapist urge to flee, from what? Enterprise? Errand fatality? Kismet? Not exactly, I am looking to see what worlds others have created. I want to be there, in your idyll's waters, her verse's depths, his ballad's sea. I am not interested in creating my own world, there are so many unconnected worlds to visit already. After all, as Margaret Drabble in TLS said: "When is a borrowing a theft, and when is it a benign sign of cross-cultural fertilization?" I feel fertile enough as it is, I break apart on every landmass I visit. No, I want sunburned insomnia, glorious asphyxiation twelve leagues down, ingenious hemorrhaging somewhere below the gut.
I think this started this morning with reading Beverly A. Jackson's little photo journey of Costa Del Sol, Spain. She linked it under the heading "Desire." Desire, maelstrom, frenzy. No poetry or even words, as I recall. Just wondrous photography awaking, what? Is it possible to write a poem like that? I have been working on minimal villanelles of late, finding single words that must carry the whole weight and meaning that my earlier iambic pentameter lines could lounge in. It reminds me of Whimsy Speaks' #9 Rule from Secrets of a Slush-Piler, a list of advice for up-and-coming poets wishing to avoid the pit-falls of submitting their work for publication, which goes as follows: "A mediocre poem is no less mediocre because each word is a single line."
But we are wasting time! It is Sunday night, my ability to be transcendental under dull pain is limited at best1. Halvard Johnson tell it like it is, fueling this urge for vagabonding with a meditation on preparation:
26.
replacing old maps with new ones
preparing the cat for summer camp
paying the bills in advance
brushing up on our Spanish
I like that. Spanish for Idiots, Spanish for Lovers, Spanish for the Languorous. I like poets who translate their ¡mots! ¡words! ¡λέξεις! for others too. Lisa Jarnot comments on her 1996 book,Sea Lyrics: "translation of [it] into Swedish is in the works." But the ocean I want is the one I found in The Earth decides to give birth by Birdie Jaworski, with the lines:
The water and sand
travel up my legs,
chilling my thighs,
ocean brine sloshing
inside the cavity of my body …
My body! These senses! As Whitman cried: "The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them," and now I stand apart from myself, and now they rage against me. Shelby and I have just finished making a spinach and triple cheese lasagna. I am drinking some jasmine and rose hip tea and my cat, who spent the better part of the day laying in the sun, is sitting on my lap. All these wonderful smells are floating about the house; melted cheese, tart tomato sauce, sebaceous jasmine, sun-baked kitty fur. To top it off, now that it is getting colder and colder each night, I went into my closet and found my peculiar, polar bear slippers to wear. Put together, all this makes me feel secure and snug, the exact opposite of where my emotions are going. Where is there any apprehension in this "watery world's welkin, eh? Any damned comprehension in this "mad milky melody"? I think this is where I shall start today's villanelle:
we've
succumb
to believe
that we grieve
for reason. "to become
ash and clay?" we've
cried, "we'll deceive
mab, bedlam,
erebus, we believe
we can reweave
the fate's loom." welcome
to our rebirth. we've
finally to achieve
a bedlam of boredom.
do you believe
it can be done? deceive
us at sappho's aquarium?
that last dish of life we've
worked so hard to believe.
- Not that I am stressed out, just under the weather … it is flu season; so I took these pain relief pills this afternoon but by accident I took the "P.M. Night" pills, not the "A.M. Day" which has made me all plaster-headed and woozy-brained [back]