Antville lacks an easy interface to dump information/raw data here, directly from the web browser. Couple this with my customary laziness for not recording encounters (I will be cursed to reconstruct all of them later like Proust because of this laziness perhaps?) in order to spead the 'good news' to others, and what you get is quite a dormant blog. Perhaps I should force myself to write a short missive here everyday, as an exercise in writing as well as to keep record of the stuff that knocks my neurons (dying, slowly dying) around.

So for today, as I tool around in Cyber-ia, for I am waiting for Godot, I bring to notice this museum exhibit in the British Museum (O Londoners, go go to this one!) on Ancient Persia:

www.nytimes.com

Interesting question this rises: can museum exhibits reconstruct history? I think not, for history is narrative stories (historians would grumble here that, yes but the story has to be based on verifiable conjuctures; to which the skeptic would snort, baah a bunch of verbose speculators) that we tell ourselves over and over again. So to change the story, the new story has to be told and accepted over the old, over and over again.

And this tasty beast poem, which I read before the above article on Persian art, for lunch today:

from Apollinaire's Le Bestiarie

Elephant

An elephant has got its ivory But I also have a treasury In my mouth... Words precious As the grandest tusks...

Love is like the lion’s tooth ~ W.B. Yeats

Once I walked at nights like this, Only to get as fast as my legs Would ferry me, away from My small tremors of loneliness:

This was before you poured One whole milky way into those craters.

So when I walk again into this autumn night, A joyous contentment spills from me like The whirligig of leaves, like the cottony angels Sent out by dandelions into the bowing wind.

So I color the night, this rustling silver spotted ribbon, With splashes of azalea red, for you have poked me Everywhere, with your lion’s tooth.

I forget this present world. I remember only you
An iridescent O bracketing my world now as the sun’s bangle
Brackets the moon in one of those not too common conjunctions
Of stellar bodies, all aligning themselves, all eclipsing themselves.

I forget the appropriate word. I remember only you
Pulsing like old silver or fall sunlight, which speckles the quite tangle
Of my nerves buzzing, as I bend over my long meditation
On what I can only describe as love for you.
I forget the open book. I remember only you
Rising to meet my eye with the curvature and the angle
Of your belly, translucent and mysterious like an altar, on which
I drop these empty pages as speechlessness falls around me.
I forget the unfurling cello. I remember only you.
Chugging through my smoky nights as your green eyes un-spangle
The stations of memory situated on Time’s liquid rails, like notes of music
On staves arching over ache of this momentary separation.
I forget the massed beeches. I remember only you
As I run my palms over their smooth barks, from which dangle
Weathered lovers’ advertisements, gashes made with knife or nail –
This is how I want you to cut me, again and again with your fine
Scalpeled presence, and spring me into the clearing of being.




My Poems