throbbing light machine

Elegy Before Death, Edna St. Vincent Millay

There will be rose and rhododendron
When you are dead and under ground;
Still will be heard from white syringas
Heavy with bees, a sunny sound;

Still will the tamaracks be raining
After the rain has ceased, and still
Will there be robins in the stubble,
Brown sheep upon the warm green hill.

Spring will not ail nor autumn falter;
Nothing will know that you are gone,
Saving alone some sullen plough-land
None but yourself sets foot upon;

Saving the may-weed and the pig-weed
Nothing will know that you are dead,—
These, and perhaps a useless wagon
Standing beside some tumbled shed.

Oh, there will pass with your great passing
Little of beauty not your own,—
Only the light from common water,
Only the grace from simple stone!

The Concert

No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?—
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.

If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice my own,
Will mark with icy mirth
The wise advance and retreat
Of armies without a country,
Storming a nameless gate,
Hurling terrible javelins down
From the shouting walls of a singing town

Where no women wait!
Armies clean of love and hate,
Marching lines of pitiless sound
Climbing hills to the sun and hurling
Golden spears to the ground!
Up the lines a silver runner
Bearing a banner whereon is scored
The milk and steel of a bloodless wound
Healed at length by the sword!

You and I have nothing to do with music.
We may not make of music a filigree frame,
Within which you and I,
Tenderly glad we came,
Sit smiling, hand in hand.

Come now, be content.
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Carl Sandburg ~ Snow

Snow took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains, we saw velvet blue cows eating a vermillion grass and they gave us a pink milk.

Snow changes our bones into fog streamers caught by the wind and spelled into many dances.

Six bits for a sniff of snow in the old days bought us bubbles beautiful to forget floating long arm women across sunny autumn hills.

Our bones cry and cry, no let-up, cry their telegrams:
More, more—a yen is on, a long yen and God only knows when it will end.

In the old days six bits got us snow and stopped the yen—now the government says: No, no, when our bones cry their telegrams: More, more.

The blue cows are dying, no more pink milk, no more floating long arm women, the hills are empty—us for the smoke valleys—sneeze and shiver and croak, you dopes—the government says: No, no.

Forgotten Language

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers...
How did it go?
How did it go?

-Shel Silverstein

Caliban Upon Setebos
or Natural Theology in the Island

"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself."

['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
And while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,--
He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web,
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
And talks, to his own self, howe'er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
Because to talk about Him, vexes--ha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
When talk is safer than in winter-time.
Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
In confidence, he drudges at their task,
And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.]

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.

( Read more... )

First, a rec: The House of Your Heart is Lit From Within, a gorgeous Prydain NYR fic that thistlerose unknowingly wrote for one of my Boy's yuletide prompts.

Second, I just have to register my nebulous and yet ongoing squee over DreamWidth. This is going to be sooo cool homg. (and oh my god do I ever want one of those codes!)

Third, a poem in honor of the cruellest month, in hopes that it will not be so for me:

Song Of A Second April
Edna St. Vincent Millay

April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep,
Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun,
Pensively,—only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.

Alix Olson, [eve’s mouth]

Eve’s mouth hurts from trying not to laugh
at some joke some scholar made
about her being someone’s half.
It was a joke, a lie, exaggeration, a fib
And now you all believe I came from his rib.

She screams at the top of her lungs:
"I’m whole! I’m body, I’m heart, I’m mind, I’m soul."

Well, Queen Victoria gave her daughter some advice
as her daughter shook and trembled on her wedding night.
Queen Victoria, she said to her daughter:
"Baby, lie still and think of the Empire!"
And her husband, though kind and mild,
he never stopped to wonder why she never smiled.

( she screams )

Overheard on a Saltmarsh
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.
No.

Give them me. Give them me.
No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

Hush, I stole them out of the moon.

Give me your beads, I want them.
No.

I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.

-- Harold Monro

William Carlos Williams

from "Spring and All" (1923)

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--

whither? It ends--

But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry--

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses--

The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

Then the naming meme:

1. My username is ______ because ______.

lotesseflower, because it always has been. I picked Lótessë as a name for myself back on the TolkienOnline.Com boards, when I was maybe thirteen. Sometimes I think about changing it, because it's a bit girly and flufftastic as a representation of who I am now. But I like that it links me to Tolkien: I don't talk about him much anymore, but he was my beginning place, and he's lodged all deep down in my heart.

2. My name is ______ because ______.

"My heart is like a singing bird," from the Christina Rossetti poem "The Birthday." Virginia Woolf uses this poem in "A Room of One's Own" to talk abut the purity and the joy of love poems before the war, the uncapturable perfect happiness of the past. I'ma post the excerpt, actually, because it's beautiful:

What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.

"Isle of Gramarye." It's a quote from a Tennyson poem, but my association is actually with T.H. White - the poem is his epigraph to the first part of "The Once and Future King." White is another thing I don't talk about much, but he was my first in every way that matters. My daddy read OAFK aloud to me when I was five years old, and it was my first Arthur story, and it was the first time I really thought about good and evil, love and death, and it was the first time I thought like a philosopher. I'm a pretty big King Arthur buff, though the stories sit quietly at the back of my heart and don't burst through into speech all that often. I picked the quote as a name for my fannish home-base because T.H. White has always meant home to me.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

"will the circle be unbroken," from the folk song. Expresses the concentric circularity of conversation and community on eljay, speaks to happiness and connection and again, for me, home. My grandma used to sing this song with me at bedtime.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.


A new one, actually, from the Waterhouse painting of Miranda, with text from Neruda. Miranda's one of my babies right now - I'm working on a bit of (publishable!) derivative fic with her in it. I have a pet reading of "The Tempest" that exposes the tension between Miranda and Caliban as the propagandistic lie that it really is, the black male rapist narrative that both demonizes black men and at the same time deprives white women of any access to their own sexuality. Um. The Neruda because I love him, and because I'm living away from my big water right now, and because like Sam Gamgee the sound of the sea has sunk down deep into my heart, and I can never be free from the longing of it. So the icon as a whole means the sea, and wanting things, and rebellion, and hope, and naivete, and new chances.


And a poem. Leonard Cohen counts as both songs and poems.

( Hunter's Lullaby )

...which is my spn happy place at the moment.