Cambridge rant x 3
krm
The sun shines once a year my hothouse garden
delirious green and red and white as if
they'd painted then set you apart for some
coincidental dream in all these minds
my hothouse garden only blooms inside
this small gray universe, the cobblestones
unreal beneath my feet as they pass by
the statues squint the centuries are blind
with molten gold today my hothouse garden
iii. Gin blossoms
These tiny bleeding constellations,
no currency left to appal:
one night to step away and count
the last of flowers, the first, the burnt
miasmal red of carnival
iii. Pleni sunt caeli
Ironic wool-and-leather angels
spit music in the face of entropy
you ask them: Why so many notes,
with foolish generosity, or more,
or waiting for the whirlpool to drown
a form it can no longer clutch:
the singer in a child's sketch
his mouth an open sore
Slawomir Andrzej Oleksy
krm <k...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
Well done, k. Give us more!
SAO
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krm
> Well done, k. Give us more!
Thanks. <blush> I'd never tried ranting in verse before; what did you
like about it?
Your poem on the Grunewald _Crucifixion_ is stunning (as the painting
itself is.) Have you ever seen it in person? Someday I'll have to make the
trip to Colmar and contemplate it for a few hours....
Kerry
Slawomir Andrzej Oleksy
>On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Slawomir Andrzej Oleksy wrote:
>
>> Well done, k. Give us more!
>
>Thanks. <blush> I'd never tried ranting in verse before; what did you
>like about it?
Lots. It is smart, smart in a quiet, confident way. It has a natural
flow, a flow which carves its way through the complex, melts the crisp
imagery without impedance, effortlessly, like red hot lava slipping down
the steep, cobblestoned streets of some south American village
nestled on the slopes of a volcano, dormant no more. Finally
(forgive me for skipping a few flower beds) I hear you, and,
hearing you, I hear myself. This perhaps is why I like your rant so much
:)
>Your poem on the Grunewald _Crucifixion_ is stunning (as the painting
>itself is.) Have you ever seen it in person? Someday I'll have to make the
>trip to Colmar and contemplate it for a few hours....
No, I have not seen it in person. I took a few free elective courses
on the history of art, back when I was studying chemical engineering
(god, it's been so long!). The Crucifixion made a lasting impact on me;
you could almost say I'm stuck on it.
I'm glad you liked the poem. I'm not fully satisfied with it -- made
several feeble attempts at a rewrite, but none seemed to work as well
as the first draft (with all its faults). I painted black the excess
gore around the head, but somehow it felt as though too much was
lost. I hacked away at the body, but what was left just fell
apart. Stitching it all back together proved vain: the head and feet
appeared grotesquely close. I stretched what was there to begin with,
but then they seemed too far apart. Finally, in desperation, I
severed the foot of the cross -- but alas, everything collapsed
into a heap of flesh and bones!
Unless you have been around rap and have a very good and long memory,
I assume you saw the poem at my web site. I don't think I could find a
better place for it than this:
http://www.angelfire.com/ma2/oleksy/TheCrucifixion2.html
It hangs there, in all its failure and misery, held together only
by the hacked off limbs of Grunewald's masterpiece. Without them
it would not, it cannot exist.
SAO
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