Gorse Fires - Michael Longley
Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
Before carrying implements to separate fields.
I am travelling from one April to another. It is the same train between the same embankments. Gorse fires are smoking, but primroses burn And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.
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Objects and Apparitions - Octavio Paz
- for Joseph Cornell
Hexagons of wood and glass, scarcely bigger than a shoe box, with room in them for night and all it's lights.
Monuments to every moment, refuse of every moment, used: cages for infinity.
Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice, pins, stamps, and glass beads: tales of time.
Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes: in the four corners of the box shadowless ladies play at hide and seek.
Fire buried in the mirror, water sleeping in the agate: solos of Jenny Colonne and Jenny Lind.
"One has to commit a painting," said Degas, "the way one commits a crime." But you contructed boxes where things hurry away from their names.
Slot machine of visions, condensation flask for conversations, hotel of crickets and constellations.
Minimal, incoherent fragments: the opposite of History, creator of ruins, out of your ruins you have made creations.
Theater of the spirits: objects putting the laws of identity through hoops.
The "Grand Hotel de la Couronne": in a vial, the three of clubs and, very surprised, Thumbelina in gardens of reflections.
A comb is a harp strummed by the glance of a little girl born dumb.
The reflector of the inner eye scatters the spectacle: God all alone above an extinct world.
The apparitions are manifest, their bodies weigh less than light, lasting as this phrase lasts.
Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes my words became visible for a moment.
trans by Elizabeth Bishop
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A Poison Tree - William Blake
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine -
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Today I finally and decisively ended a saga of eating fruit from a poison tree, whose false fruit have long deceived me. While this is somewhat painful - it is interesting that even the end of what was merely a delusion or a phantasam can be painful if one had belived in it long enough; witness all the stark raving people in mental institutions or the stories of Kafka - coming out from under the shadows of a poison tree is extremely liberating, for one begins to live again, and life is liberating!
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