Monday, September 30, 2013

SHAPE SHIFTER






The jellyfish in ball gowns twirling in the lights
She who feigns not to be the cause of this celebration
Not to know that this accompaniment repeated each day back and forth 
Is votive




Excerpt: André Breton, “Full Margin” (“Plein Marge”), trans. Mark Polizzotti,1940.

Josie and the Pussycats: Shape Shifter (Link)

Sunday, September 29, 2013

SUNDAY MORNING STABLES





  ‘Sunday morning stables’ being one of his favourite ceremonies, the Colonel now led us from one loose-box to another, commenting affectionately on each inmate, and stimulated by the fact that one of his audience was a stranger.  Each of them, apparently, was a compendium of unique equine qualities, on which I gazed with unaffected admiration, while Stephen chimed in with “Never seen the old chestnut looking so fit, Colonel,” or “Looking an absolute picture,” while Dumbrell was deferentially at hand all the time to share the encomiums offered to his charges.  The Colonel, of course, had a stock of repertory remarks about how each one of them, including how they had won a certain point-to-point or (more frequently) why they hadn’t.   



  The last one we looked at was a big, well-bred brown horse who stood very much ‘over at the knees.’  The Colonel had hunted him twelve seasons and he had an equivalently long rigmarole to recite about him, beginning with “I remember Sam Hames saying to me—(I bought him off old Hames of Leicester, you know)—that horse is the most natural jumper I’ve ever had in my stable.  And he was right, for the old horse has only given me one bad toss in twelve years, and that was no fault of his own, for he landed on a stump of a willow tree; it was at that rough fence just outside Clout’s Wood—nasty place too—you remember I showed it you the other day, Steve;” all of which Stephen had probably heard fifty times before, and had been shown the ‘nasty place’ half a dozen times into the bargain.  It was only when he heard the distant booming of the luncheon-gong that the Colonel was able to tear himself away from the brown horse’s loose-box.

 



Upper:  Glyn Warren Philpot, Portrait of Siegfried Sassoon, 1917.

Center:  John Frederick Herring, Sr. (1795-1865), A Bay Hunter In A Loose Box, date unknown.

Lower:  Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man, 1928.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

SATURDAY MORNING FEVER (SHIKI, 1901)


 



yūgao no                        I dream of making
tana tsukuran to             a trellis for moon-flowers
omoedomo                      to climb
aki machigatenu              but oh my life that will not
waga inochi kamo            bear the weight till autumn!
 
Note:  How on earth can anyone stand to live with me?  I’ve borne the weight till autumn, by the way, but not gracefully. 

Tonight we adjourned again to our drive, a majestic platform fit for Chariots Of The Gods? visits, at significant sunset.  We live deep inside forest and overlook woods and rises from Signal Hill, Chester County's apex.  Light the most beautiful I had ever seen; no Hollywood artificer-necromancer conjuring A Midsummer’s Night Dream light could possibly have improved it.  It fit my inside-outside-somewhere I guess mood, was substrating, honest and real.  No ballooning spiders but instead a stone, a leaf and an unfound door.