.
[Remembering]
Malevolent swans
on the still lake
and later grease stained
Newspapers
in quiet moments I can still hear
Rippling, still feel
Crimped edges
[scraped wafers on Billboards
reposted so often that all they promote
Now is mess]
Sibilant dragons embroidered in
Silk on Silk
thousands of red paper lanterns
leaving, levitated
by scented candles
Mah-jong tiles in the rain
.
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23 comments:
I think this is rather beautiful, File, and a bit sad.. those poor abandoned mah-jong tiles...
I think it's sad too. There is a sense of quiet beauty, but I don't see why the swans are the bad guys.
Maybe my childhood - remembering swans as beautiful and rather tame being fed ends of stale loaves.
Of course you always knew that a swan could break your arm, but actually I never knew of that happening.
I guess I've missed the point of this poem.
The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
(...)
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore.
See, you're not the only one, Filou, to find the swans ominous. And you could be in worse company, poetically, like.
I didn't "understand" it either, but I enjoyed it, which is better than the other way around.
Trees in autumn beauty - not here mate! We are in the full spring into summer.
Trees are in their way brilliant creatures, the spring green is unbelievable after winter times.
M Offie- your October must be our summer.
And yet I thing that you have the understanding of Swans in the balletic way.
Swan Lake - the Kirov in Paris - yes I understand
perhaps I can finish your perfectly astute quote O;
"Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?"
just a little reflection on the dynamics of remembering Mimi, malevolence was my own perception, time past is, perhaps, to be felt rather than understood
It's not my october, Mimi, rather Yeat's twilight years at Coole, in Oireland. We're heading into winter here, but it's evergreens all around.
I've never played Mah Jong, by the way. Is it any good?
beautiful, drawing poetic inspiration from a Swan a la Baudelaire,
a Swan escaped from his cage........
..Sometimes, like Ovid's human tilt a
greedy head on a quivering neck,toward the sky, toward the cruel ironic sky,
as if reproaching God....
his poem was dedicated to V. Hugo.
zeph,
I'll never forgive Andersen to f... with children brains.I think he is the guy to blame for File's traumatic post-childhood behaviour.
did you pull the rag under my feet?
(Sorry, too many typos, trying again)
Tried playing mah-jong once but got hopelessly confused.
I like swans a lot but they can give you a nasty look, especially if you're in a small boat and on their level. In fact, in a very small boat they may even be looking down at you, which can be unnerving.
Yeats and Baudelaire, good company indeed Filo:)
There's a very dark Hans Andersen story about a girl whose brothers were turned into swans and she had to weave graveyard nettles into coats to change them back... twisted geezer that Andersen, definitely scarred my childhood psyche with that one.
Oops, sorry Guitou - people, you have to read these last comments backwards, or in reverse order anyway:)
it's o.k zeph backwards or forwards, I never make too much sense..as Hans Christiano Anderson, oops typo again!
yes, zeph! My psyche was also scarred by that story, and the last brother left with one wing...
I do like swans, though, but hate geese. As a child I was attacked by a giant malevolent goose. I thought it only seemed giant because I was small, but I asked my mother recently and she assures me that it was in fact a freakishly large demon-mutant goose.
File, like a lot of your stuff, there's something really eerie about this (in a good way).
Hans Christiano Anderson was indeed to blame for my post-childhood behaviour, see, it's not my fault, beware the hand of Hans
... also the rape of Leda by Zeus as Swan (more Yeats but check the Michaelangelo)
memory = grease stained newspapers, scraped billboards, mah-jong tiles in the rain = distorted pictures/text
swans are so beautiful but aloof and dangerous, their dark, sinister eyes
oh Filo
where are the last Romantics now?
when I was little I thought romantics were people who lived in a gaily painted wooden caravan which trundled along behind a big white percheron... in land where there were no hills, only forests full of animals and rivers and all of which could be tamed by some person playing a piano accordian by a campfire...
now I see that these images have been pasted over and the message scumbled especially around the edges...
two great poems penned before two great wars and now the olympics bearing down on us and the dragons rise from File's poem to fight anew and the swans swim into view... crustier and angrier and more real perhaps but once again named as signifiers...
and yet more mature and fascinating as the internet stacks the cypher tiles one upon another in great walls of meanings and we ants at keyboards scurry with our hands to unscramble the code of other languages and alphabets yet to be crystallised... whilst our feet are anchored in ancient poems of blood and hopelessness
and the answer to your question is a yes, or no, or possibly, or most probably, and as long as you can read the tiles and distinguish one season from another (S is for spring or summer?) then we are likely still sailing to Byzantium are we not? - or at least marching,.. and anyhow to somehwere... are we not?
and which hemisphere are we in again...
oh look could I have one of theose quiet moments again pls... I need to think about this if only the picture would stop changing as I look at it...
Malevolent swans you say... pass me a chip pls...
no no one of those potato ones salted wrapped in newspaper...
Ah, Doc, your little self must have wanted to be like the tygers in Richard Adams' The Tyger Voyage, who "went poaching with the Romany Chal And read the Tarot magical. And so like gypsies lean and tanned They travelled on from land to land."
Fine quality chips are always available here, salt and vinegar on the bar. If we run out of newspaper there's a stack of File's rough drafts to wrap them in.
There's a recent scientific study claiming that the "stack of File's rough drafts" is likely to tilt the earth off its axis in the next couple of years. But, hey, can't believe everything you read in the scientific papers, can you?
In fact, the only thing preventing the earth's axis from shifting right now is the couterweight provided by the Doc's stack of rough drafts in the other hemisphere.
That and the virtual weight of my own blog posts.
I'll have some of those salt'n'vinegar chips, Zeph, please. With a pint of the black shtuff.
doc dude, the image of romanticism you had most reminded me of the band of travelling actors in Bergman's Seventh Seal ... but that's another story!
many thanks for your splendid reaction to this; putting the swan and the dragon into historical/political juxtaposition is really interesting, our feet maybe "anchored in ancient poems of blood and hopelessness" but our Rosetta Stone is a cross-section of the whole world and all of it's histories
...and while our commonwealthy states are still apologising to their aborigines at least there is some movement in the right direction (albeit slowly and with blinkers on)
here's to quiet moments and opportunities to connect with the source
zeph, many thanks for trying to recycle my rough drafts! Posterity/epicurie ... it's a fine line eh?
offie, the virtual weight of your blog posts is comprised entirely of some dark anti-matter and may yet consume the whole of cyberspace yet also (and strangely) provide the energy necessary for inter-galactic travel
Quite frankly, Mr Shankly there is only the winners, but who knows, I am searching and losing so not the greatest of ideas,#
Mostly, he comes around about every two weeks for dinner.
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