(from the myth of the God Freyr and Goddess Gerðr)
Freyr seated on the throne of Odin 1908 Frederic Lawrence
One night is long enough ǁ yet longer still are two;
how then shall I bear the agony of three?
Months have merrily passed ǁ quick flashes over
faster than half this desiring eve.*
Freyr, full of longing, laments
worlds made brighter by Gerðr
seemingly far from his reach
this cæsura separates the lovers
Envisioning divine coupling
of earth and sky bestow
peace and pleasure flowing
from union’s blessed purpose
He lives now into his destiny
to bathe in beauty’s light
he sets foot upon the path to Barri
nine nights hence embracing bliss
Her ineluctable desiderata for ideas stream
limning kinetic edifications, epiphanies of delight
fillips inspire pluralistic inquiries
ontology fueling her eclectic explorations
Clepsydra drives the mechanism
six thousand years measured
by the gentle flow of water
Transgressions of the mother fate her imprisonment
vulnerable, potent mind now chained to rock
threatened by encroaching ignorance, a dark sea monster
Cetus, chaos destroying without empathy or thought
Emphatic supernal delights contrast
her now inchoate existence
astronomical phenomena’s illumination ends
her passions lie dormant in temporal restraints
awaiting the beneficence of another to redeem
visions of her life flourishing, counteracting paucity
She scries the approaching hero
his nuanced seriatim a lapidary poetry
magnanimous meticulist denaturing her world view
illuminating prescient symbols, signs of her release
Perseus invisible arrives to slay the beast
his artistry Al-Jazari’s castle clock
zenith of invention, mystical implements
obliterate pernicious vitiation
striking the sea creature eristic clashes ensue
Perseus claims victory
Epicyclic gearing turns celestial spheres
concentric annulus, planet carrier and sun enmesh
liberty returns to Andromeda as numinous globes
enticing clouds of thoughts, igniting quixotic ruminations
Promises of consummate affinity traverse
ardent declarations of diaphanous happiness
fertile fields of creation birthing philosophies, art, and science
stereographic projection starcharts of their noetic constellations
Before the monastery in Haghbat
prior to the Persian invasion
and death’s black end
that finished my singing
I was the master of song
my love a passion overflowing
the vessel of our lives
birthing poetry
Harmony realized through
creative energy
my beloved books
become the tools of your seduction
Handmade poet’s lyre
turning the inlaid handle
tuning my instrument to your key
each strum upon the body
brings me closer
to the essential
You work the threads of my childhood
Its color and aroma
into the lace of your purity
through you I discover my grace
A gentle wind streams silk
I am the wandering nightingale
burning this white rose for you
water flows over stone
in the Turkish bath of my desire
‘I am careful with your mouth, you speak in fables…’
We players now imbibe love
skipping, drumming, whirling
as we empty our vessels
‘How am I to protect my wax-built castles of love
from the devouring heat of your fires?
You are fire, your dress is fire.
We were searching for a refuge for our love;
instead we found the land of the dead.’
Prodding the lion with a stick
the vultures eye orbs
life’s fragility a globe of glass
tossed in the air, harbinger of
midnight horses and animal hides
antlers and barren branches
Peacock drinks from your lips
muskets fire above your still breast
your death cements my longing
spurs me along the path
lined with stained rubies
The walls of the mausoleum
preserve the tattered ash
of my words
you exist only here, abandoning us
an encaustic imprint
of the dramaturgy of color
Memory shifts the frame of consuming passion
moves me with its rhythm
you wove the lace of death
its visage conceals my pain
your shells upon the black vase
Death obscures your almond eyes
I cannot recognize you
or see my image reflected within
The peacock cries in the window
I will follow you through the black door
though I am cloaked in your colors
I am forbidden to enter now –
blind to the source of my life
I wait for the Persians
‘Who took my mind? I did not see the magician.’
Sayat Nova was an Armenian poet/troubadour (1712-1795) born Harutyun Sayadian in Tiblisi. Sayat Nova means ‘master of song’. His wife, Marmar, died leaving him with their four children. He was killed during the Persian invasion. All quotes are translations of his poetry. Sergei Parajanov was a Soviet Armenian film director. His film The Color of Pomegranates is based on Sayadian’s life. He was banned from making cinema for 15 years following its release for putting aesthetic concerns over ideology.
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Catalyst, you traverse me, a speed racer, love’s intriguing anomaly
Supernova manna, illuminates the overwhelming implications of this intriguing anomaly
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Denise Levertov
When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.
Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.
Robert Anton Wilson
Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).
Witold Gombrowicz
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Gustav Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Dušan “Charles” Simić
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Monique Wittig
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
W.S. Merwin
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Thomas Aquinas
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Chromapoetica 