I am gong and cotton and snowy song... Michaux & Carracci

I have really become hard only by thin layers;
If anyone knew how marrowy I am at bottom.
I am gong and cotton and snowy song,
I say so and am sure of it.

Henri Michaux - I am Gong

details; Annibal Carrache (Annibale Carracci) (Bologna 1560 - Rome 1609); Pietà avec saint François et sainte Marie-Madeline. Vers 1602-1607; Louvre, Paris (originally in the Mattei chapel in the Church of San Francesco a Ripa, Rome).

Annibale Carracci, an exemplary Baroque painter, along with his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico, combined Florentine draughtsmanship with Venetian use of colour and texture to create an emotionally charged colourful core. Baroque painting - coinciding with the Council of Trent and its reformulation of the Catholic Church's representational style - emphasised exaggerated emotion, theatricality, expressive lighting, and clear intention; painting, and art in general, should become the literature of the illiterate, conveying story and moral in their stylistic vernacular - simple, direct, powerful. The restraint apparent in the Renaissance's sculptural and architectural influences gives way to dynamism and even sensationalism. Competing contracts and wealthy patronage saw ever more fabul-ist/ous works being produced inside a similarly aggrandising architecture. The modern pejorative use of the term Baroque, as anything with excessive ornamentation and sensationalist dynamism, derives from this development, as well as the Baroque's transition into Rococo.

you have crouched too long in the bruising darkness...

A Conceit

Give me your hand

Make room for me
to lead and follow
you
beyond this rage of poetry.

Let others have
the privacy of
touching words
and love of loss
of love.

For me
Give me your hand.


On the Pulse of Morning

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow,
I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Facedown in ignorance,
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out to us today,
You may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The free bird leaps

on the back of the wind

and floats downstream

till the current ends

and dips his wings

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with fearful trill

of the things unknown

but longed for still

and is tune is heard

on the distant hillfor the caged bird

sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze

an the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom. 

Passing Time

Your skin like dawn

Mine like musk

One paints the beginning

of a certain end.

The other, the end of a

sure beginning. 

The Vale of Rest - John Everett Millais // poems - Maya Angelou

tambourines in the dark ditch of the night...

Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly

The Storm


Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grands merveilles,
Leurs mains ne servent plus qu' à nous persécuter . . .†                                                    
(Agrippa D' Aubigné: À Dieu) 

The storm that trickles its long March
thunderclaps, its hail, onto the stiff
leaves of the magnolia tree;
(sounds of shaking crystal which startle you
in your nest of sleep; and the gold
snuffed on the mahogany, on the backs
of the bound books, flares again
like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)
the lightning that blanches
the trees and walls, freezing them,
like images on a negative (a benediction and destruction you
carry carved within you, a condemnation that binds you
stronger to me than any love, my strange sister);
and then the tearing crash, the jangling sistrums, the rustle
of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,
the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango. . .and overhead
some gesture that blindly is groping. . .
                                                           as when
turning around, and, sweeping clear your forehead
of its cloud of hair,
you waved to me—and entered the dark.

                                                                 
// Eugenio Montale, trans. Charles Wright
† (The princes have not eyes to see these great wonders,
Their hands do not serve but to persecute us)

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

// 1 Corinthians 13