Come Live With Me and Be My Love.. poem by Marlowe

...The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me and be my love.

from Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Ode To A Large Tuna In The Market by Pablo Neruda

Here,

among the market vegetables,

this torpedo

from the ocean

depths,

a missile

that swam,

now

lying in front of me

dead.

Surrounded

by the earth's green froth

—these lettuces,

bunches of carrots—

only you

lived through

the sea's truth, survived

the unknown, the

unfathomable

darkness, the depths

of the sea,

the great

abyss,

le grand abîme,

only you:

varnished

black-pitched

witness

to that deepest night.

Only you:

dark bullet

barreled

from the depths,

carrying

only

your

one wound,

but resurgent,

always renewed,

locked into the current,

fins fletched

like wings

in the torrent,

in the coursing

of

the

underwater

dark,

like a grieving arrow,

sea-javelin, a nerveless

oiled harpoon.

Dead

in front of me,

catafalqued king

of my own ocean;

once

sappy as a sprung fir

in the green turmoil,

once seed

to sea-quake,

tidal wave, now

simply

dead remains;

in the whole market

yours

was the only shape left

with purpose or direction

in this

jumbled ruin

of nature;

you are

a solitary man of war

among these frail vegetables,

your flanks and prow

black

and slippery

as if you were still

a well-oiled ship of the wind,

the only

true

machine

of the sea: unflawed,

undefiled,

navigating now

the waters of death.

Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire

Sonnet d'automne

Ils me disent, tes yeux, clairs comme le cristal:
«Pour toi, bizarre amant, quel est donc mon mérite?»
— Sois charmante et tais-toi! Mon coeur, que tout irrite,
Excepté la candeur de l'antique animal,

Ne veut pas te montrer son secret infernal,
Berceuse dont la main aux longs sommeils m'invite,
Ni sa noire légende avec la flamme écrite.
Je hais la passion et l'esprit me fait mal!

Aimons-nous doucement. L'Amour dans sa guérite,
Ténébreux, embusqué, bande son arc fatal.
Je connais les engins de son vieil arsenal:

Crime, horreur et folie! — Ô pâle marguerite!
Comme moi n'es-tu pas un soleil automnal,
Ô ma si blanche, ô ma si froide Marguerite?

— Charles Baudelaire

Autumn Sonnet

They say to me, your eyes, clear as crystal:
"For you, bizarre lover, what is my merit then?"
— Be charming and be still! My heart, which all things irk,
Except the candor of the animals of old,

Does not wish to reveal its black secret to you,
Whose lulling hands invite me to long sleep,
Nor its somber legend written with flame.
I hate passion; intelligence makes me suffer!

Let us love each other sweetly. Tenebrous Love,
Ambushed in his shelter, stretches his fatal bow.
I know all the weapons of his old arsenal:

Crime, horror, and madness! — pale marguerite!
Are you not, like me, an autumnal sun,
O my Marguerite, so white and so cold?

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

In The Wave Strike Over Unquiet Stones by Pablo Neruda

In the wave-strike over unquiet stones
the brightness bursts and bears the rose
and the ring of water contracts to a cluster
to one drop of azure brine that falls.
O magnolia radiance breaking in spume,
magnetic voyager whose death flowers
and returns, eternal, to being and nothingness:
shattered brine, dazzling leap of the ocean.
Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence
while the sea destroys its continual forms,
collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,
because in the weft of those unseen garments
of headlong water, and perpetual sand,
we bear the sole, relentless tenderness.

Waves-collageillustration©2010Y.E.

Fame is a Bee by Emily Dickinson

Fame is a bee

BY EMILY DICKINSON

Fame is a bee.

It has a song—

It has a sting—

Ah, too, it has a wing.

Leda and The Swan by William Butler Yeats

A SUDDEN blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

La Belle Helene

’T is true, ’t is certain; man though dead retains

Part of himself: the immortal mind remains.

The Iliad

Book 23.

My " I LOVE NY " logos

Having fun with Milton Graser's famous I Love NY logo.

Itzhak Perlman plays Klezmer

Klezmer music is both immensely joyful and immensely sad, it makes me want to dance madly and cry madly. Here is great virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, great artist, humanist, lovely man in a jam session with Klezmer players. Enjoy!

The Peacock by William Butler Yeats

What's riches to him

That has made a great peacock

With the pride of his eye?

The wind- beaten,stone-grey,

And desolate Three Rock

Would nourish his whim.

Live he or die

Amid wet rocks and heather,

His ghost will be gay

Adding feather to feather

For the pride of his eye.

Metamorphosis by Kafka

From Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked."

When I was fifteen, the opening lines of Metamorphosis captured my and boarding school friends' short term teen attention span like no other book ( well may be with the exception of 'Call me Ismael', another fascinating opening we kept gigglingly repeated each time we encountered a hot guy on Rue de Bourg ) and it started my long lasting infatuation with Kafka, the author and the man.  In 1970's Prague we had searched and searched for his house only to be told it was in Old Square where we were already hanging out  smoking clover cigs. That was 1978! Ominously it was no: 2 right behind the square with the enormous clock towering over it.

The fact that Gregor admitted so very calmly to his hideous transformation was bewildering. ( Why wasn't he screaming in fright and asking his sister to burn him right there? )

We were in our teens and creatures in transformation, insolent monsters in our changing bodies. We did behave as beastly as possible mainly towards authority...

Kafka had become our idol, and this book our favorite although we did't really get it. In some fashion Gregor's sufferings became our suffering and his humiliations felt familiar. I guess hanging on our walls his handsome posters was our unarticulated “Fuck You” glowering down at world.