Big Sur

Strange Sea

"Implausible fish bloom in the depths,

mercurial flowers light up the coast;

I know red and yellow, the other colors,—

but the sea, det granna granna havet, that’s most dangerous

to look at.

What name is there for the color that arouses

this thirst, which says,

the saga can happen, even to you—"

BY EDITH SÖDERGRAN

Translated from the Swedish by Averill Curdy

"Big Sur" Official Film Trailer 2013 from Edward Einhorn on Vimeo.

Last Tango

for he will always love her more than words can ever say

Maria Schneider on the set of Last Tango

Neo - Classicism

Jean - Auguste Dominique Ingres (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867)

Grande Odalisque

“The moment you feel like you have to prove your worth to someone is the moment to absolutely and utterly walk away.”

Unknown 

.

a poem

4:13 AM

The shift of sleepwalks and suicides.

The occasion of owls and a demi-lune fog.

Even God has nodded off

And won’t be taking prayers til ten.

Ad interim, you put them on.   

As if your wants could keep you warm.

As if. You say your shibboleths.

You thumb your beads. You scry the glass.

Night creeps to its precipice

And the broken rim of reason breaks

Again. An obsidian sky betrays you.

Every serrate shadow flays you.

Soon enough, the crow will caw.

The cock will crow. The door will close.

(He isn’t coming back, you know.)

And so wee, wet hours of grief relent.   

In thirty years you might forget

Precisely how tonight’s pain felt.

And in whose black house you dwelt.

© 2008, Jill Alexander Essbaum
From: Poetry, Vol. 192, No. 3, June, 2008

a poem

The Dead Heart

After I wrote this, a friend scrawled on this page, “Yes.” 

And I said, merely to myself, “I wish it could be for a 
different seizure—as with Molly Bloom and her ‘and 
yes I said yes I will Yes.'

It is not a turtle 
hiding in its little green shell. 
It is not a stone 
to pick up and put under your black wing. 
It is not a subway car that is obsolete. 
It is not a lump of coal that you could light. 
It is a dead heart. 
It is inside of me. 
It is a stranger 
yet once it was agreeable, 
opening and closing like a clam. 

What it has cost me you can’t imagine, 
shrinks, priests, lovers, children, husbands, 
friends and all the lot. 
An expensive thing it was to keep going. 
It gave back too. 
Don’t deny it! 
I half wonder if April would bring it back to life? 
A tulip? The first bud? 
But those are just musings on my part, 
the pity one has when one looks at a cadaver. 

How did it die? 
I called it EVIL. 
I said to it, your poems stink like vomit. 
I didn’t stay to hear the last sentence. 
It died on the word EVIL. 
It did it with my tongue. 
The tongue, the Chinese say, 
is like a sharp knife: 
it kills 
without drawing blood. 

Anne Sexton