Storm Light, from Ocean View

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Storm Light, Oregon coast: photo by Austin Granger, 25 October 2012

The big storm looms off shore in black ecstatic light

Preparing us for the violence of landfall

The old weird light of the North Pacific, cold

And deep, bright and dark
The blue wind In the thin black trees
And the pavement in the city street hissing

In the rain so late yet so strong in coming

Making up for a whole season strangely missing

As if until now it had had better things to do

Rain, Oregon coast: photo by Austin Granger, 26 January 2012
 

Rain, Oregon coast: photo by Austin Granger, 26 October 2012

After the Rain, Cape Lookout, Oregon: photo by Austin Granger, 26 October 2012

Hidden Villa

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Untitled: photo by Adrian Tsim, 3 January 2014

fallen down hutch
dry rot
.........broken step
leaf mulch
................detritus

litter village

.....tangled

....under woods

.........let there

.................hang this

singular epithet

in the speech balloon:

..................[ -- ]*
_____

* an imprecation heard

in weedy language

Hidden Villa: photo by Adrian Tsim, 16 February 2014

Hidden Villa: photo by Adrian Tsim, 12 February 2014
 

Hidden Villa: photo by Adrian Tsim, 16 February 2014

Pierre Reverdy: Slippage

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A piece of slate: photo by Jon Zander, 2007

On each slate
..............that slipped from the roof
....................someone
..................had written
..............................a poem



The gutter's lined with diamonds
.......................the birds sip them

 

 

Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960): "Sur chaque ardoise...": from Les Ardoises du Toit (1918), trans. TC

Slate roof, Tannery, St. Fagans: photo by Zureks, 2007 (Wales National Museum, Cardiff)

Sur chaque ardoise

...................qui glissait du toit
................................on
.........................avait écrit
....................................un poème

La gouttière est bordée de diamants
.............................. les oiseaux les boivent

Windows: Egon Schiele, 1914 (Österreichische Galerie, Wien)

Robert Desnos: I Am a Shadow

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3323: photo by Petros Kotzabasis (pkomo), 24 December 2012

The Last Poem

I’ve dreamed so much of you
Walked so much
Talked so much made love to your shadow
So much that there’s nothing left of you
What is left
Of me is a shadow
Among shadows but 100
Times more shadowy than the rest
A shadow that will come
To rest
In your life in which the sun
Is so much.

Robert Desnos (b. Paris 4 July 1900, d.Theresienstadt concentration camp, 8 June 1945): Le Dernier Poème (The Last Poem), addressed to the poet's wife Youki, found in his effects after his death at Theresienstadt concentration camp, 8 June 1945; English version by TC

Nous sommes à jamais perdus dans le désert de l'éternèbre (We are forever lost in the desert of eternal darkness): still from Man Ray and Robert Desnos: L'etoile de mer, 1929; image by SOLARIXX, 19 January 2012

Le dernier poème

J'ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,

J'ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,

Tellement aimé ton ombre,

Qu'il ne me reste plus rien de toi,

Il me reste d'être l'ombre parmi les ombres

D'être cent fois plus ombre que l'ombre

D'être l'ombre qui viendra et reviendra

Dans ta vie ensoleillée.

2675: photo by Petros Kotzabasis (pkomo), 30 August 2012
 

5302: photo by Petros Kotzabasis (pkomo), 8 September 2010

J’ai tant rêvé de toi (1926)

J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.
Est-il encore temps d’atteindre ce corps vivant et de baiser sur cette bouche la naissance de la voix qui m’est chère?
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués, en étreignant ton ombre, à se croiser sur ma poitrine ne se plieraient pas au contour de ton corps, peut-être.
Et que, devant l’apparence réelle de ce qui me hante et me gouverne depuis des jours et des années, je deviendrais une ombre sans doute.
Ô balances sentimentales.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi qu’il n’est plus temps sans doute que je m’éveille. Je dors debout, le corps exposéà toutes les apparences de la vie et de l’amour et toi, la seule qui compte aujourd’hui pour moi, je pourrais moins toucher ton front et tes lèvres que les premières lèvres et le premier front venus.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé, couché avec ton fantôme qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être, et pourtant, qu’àêtre fantôme parmi les fantômes et plus ombre cent fois que l’ombre qui se promène et se promènera allégrement sur le cadran solaire de ta vie.

Robert Desnos and his wife Youki: photographer unknown, 1933; image by Menerbes, 29 October 2008

Last known photo of the poet Robert Desnos, in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp: photographer unknown, c. May 1945; image by Menerbes. 20 October 2008

[The eyes of Robert Desnos]: image by Camilo_ Hoyos, 9 May 2009

Curzio Malaparte: Into the Ukraine

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Abandoned Soviet T-34 tank, Ukraine: photographer unknown, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

Meanwhile the sun was coming up from the horizon of green, and gradually the hoarse call of birds was becoming shriller and more lively. The sun seemed to beat down hammer-like on the cast-iron plate of the lagoons. A shiver ran along the water with a kind of metallic vibration and spread to the surface of the pools, just as the sound of a violin spreads like a shiver along the arms of a musician. By the roadside, and here and there in the cornfields, were overturned cars, burned trucks, disemboweled armored cars, abandoned guns, all twisted by explosions. But nowhere a man, nothing living, not even a corpse, not even any carrion. For miles and miles there was only dead iron. Dead bodies of machines, hundreds upon hundreds of miserable steel carcasses. The stench of putrifying rose from the fields and the lagoons. The cockpit of a plane was sticking up from the mud in the middle of a pool. The German cross was clearly discernible: it was a Messerschmitt. The smell of rotting iron won over the smell of men and horses -- that smell of old wars; even the smell of grain and the penetrating, sweet scent of sunflowers vanished amid that sour stench of scorched iron, rotting steel, dead machinery. The clouds of dust lifted by the wind from the far ends of the vast plain carried no smell of organic matter with them but a smell of iron filing. And all the time, while I was pushing into the heart of the plain and approached Nemirovskoye, the smell of iron and of petrol grew stronger in the dusty air; even the grass seemed to be permeated with that undefinable, strong and exhilarating smell of gasoline, as if the smell of men and beasts, the smell of trees, of grass and mud was overcome by that odor of gasoline and scorched iron.

*
 
It had been raining for days and days and the sea of Ukrainian mud slowly spread beyond the horizon. It was the high tide of autumn in the Ukraine. The deep black mud was everywhere swelling like dough when yeast begins to work. The heavy smell of mud was borne by the wind from the end of the vast plain and mingled with the odor of uncut grain left to rot in the furrows, and with the sweetish stale odor of sunflowers. One by one the seeds dropped out of the black pupils of the sunflowers, one by one fell the long yellow eyelashes from around the large, round eyes, blank and void like the eyes of the blind.
 
The German soldiers returning from the front line, when they reached the village squares, dropped their rifles on the ground in silence. They were coated from head to foot in black mud, their beards were long, their hollow eyes looked like the eyes of the sunflowers, blank and dull. The officers gazed at the soldiers and at the rifles lying on the ground, and kept silent. By then the lightning war, the Blitzkrieg, was over, the Dreizigjährigerblitzkrieg, the thirty year lightning war, had begun. The winning war was over, the losing war had begun. I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of German officers and soldiers. I saw it spreading little by little, gnawing at the pupils, singeing the roots of the eyelashes and making the eyelashes drop one by one, like the long yellow eyelashes of the sunflowers. When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. That is when the Germans become wicked. I repented being a Christian. I felt ashamed of being a Christian.

 Curzio Malaparte (born Kurt Erich Sickert, 1898-1957): from Kaputt, 1943, translated from the Italian by Cesare Foligno

Abandoned Soviet KW-1 tank, Ukraine: photographer unknown, 1942 (Deutsche Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

 
Destroyed aircraft, Ukraine, Soviet Union, beyond the Dnieper: photographer unknown, 2 September 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv/German Federal Archive)


 
Burning Soviet T-34 tank, Ukraine: photographer unknown, 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv/German Federal Archive)
 

Burning houses mark the struggles of the 6th army in the advance toward Stalingrad: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

Wreckage of Soviet Polikarpov I-153, during the Russian retreat: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June 1942 (Deutsche Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

Abandoned Soviet KW-1 tank on the steppes near Stalingrad: photo by Horst Grund, August 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv /German Federal Archive)

Abandoned Soviet T-34 tanks: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June, 1942 (Deutschse Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

Abandoned Soviet T-34 tanks, during the Russian retreat: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv /German Federal Archive)

Junkers JU-52 in flight over Ukraine, August 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv /German Federal Archive)
 

German IV Panzer odvancing in Ukraine, 1941: photo by Horst Grund, 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

Fieseler Fi 156 transport plane at air strip under construction on the steppes near Stalingrad, September 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

View of Stalingrad-South, 23 September 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
 

Stalingrad-South, ruins after battle, 23 September 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)



German IV Panzer on the way to the Eastern Front, 21 June 1941: photo by Horst Grund, 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)

Stevie Smith: Dear Child of God

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 Bucket Boy (found photo).  Found in Amsterdam, December 2013: image by robert schneider (rolopix), posted 2014

Dear child of God

With the tears on your face

And your hands clasped in anger

What is the matter with your race?

In the beginning, Father,

You made the terms of our survival

That we should use our intelligence

To kill every rival.

The poison of this ferocity

Runs in our nature,

And O Lord thou knowest
How it nourishes thy creatures.

Oh what a lively poison it was

To bring to full growth.

Is then becoming loving

As much as our life is worth?

It is a price I would pay

To grow loving and kind,

The price of my life

And the life of human kind.

Father in heaven

Dear Father of peacefulness

It is not often we remember

You put this poison in us,

Generally we stand

With the tears on our face

And our hands clasped in anger,

Faithful but unfortunate.

Florence Margaret "Stevie" Smith (1902-1971): Dear Child of God from Not Waving but Drowning, 1966

Untitled: photo by Malcolm Markovich, 1975
 

Untitled: photo by Malcolm Markovich, 1975
 

Untitled: photo by Malcolm Markovich, 1975
 

Untitled ("Geordie bairns encounter London freaks taking a break on the tour bus"): photo by Malcolm Markovich, 1975
 

Untitled: photo by Malcolm Markovich, 1975

Untitled ("Is there a story behind this set? did you know these kids?" "Didn't know them, no. Gryphon, the band I was playing with at the time, were touring the UK supporting YES. To the best of my recollection we were in or on the way to/from Newcastle and decided to pull over -- can't recall why. This bunch of kids, just out from school, saw a bunch of freaks in a bus, a camera, and did what kids do."): photo by Malcolm Markovich, 1975

Somewhere in the north of England: photo by Malcolm Markovich, c. 1975

Henry David Thoreau: Close to Earth

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  Nelson Island #24 (Rowley, Massachusetts): photo by Jim Rohan, 9 February 2014

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Henry David Thoreau: from Walden, 1854

Close to Earth: photo by Jim Rohan, 15 January 2011
 

I went to the woods and all I got was this lousy Henry David Thoreau t-shirt (Concord, Massachusetts). (Walden Pond is one of the most "un-wildernessed" places you could ever visit. I'm sure Thoreau is spinning in his grave. I also shot this with people in it (hard not to at Walden Pond) and given the smarmy title I came up with, probably should have posted a peopled version of this...): photo by Jim Rohan, 27 June 2012
 

Bench #2, Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts: photo by Jim Rohan, 6 January 2012
 

The Great Marsh #5 (Newbury, Massachusetts): photo by Jim Rohan, 14 April 2013
 

 Professor Chandler's Long Walk #3 (Rowley, Massachusetts): photo by Jim Rohan, 6 February 2014
 

Abandoned shack, Stackyard Road, Rowley, Massachusetts: photo by Jim Rohan, 18 February 2014
 

Cove, Lynn Woods, Lynn, Massachusetts: photo by Jim Rohan, 12 October 2010

Richard Brautigan: Lonely at the Laundromat

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 Laundry day. What's he looking for? (Albany, California): photo by efo, 18 October 2006

This poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. The author is unknown.

By accident, you put

Your money in my

Machine (#4)

By accident, I put

My money in another

Machine (#6)

On purpose, I put

Your clothes in the

Empty machine full

Of water and no   

Clothes

It was lonely.

Richard Brautigan (1935-1984): San Francisco, from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, 1967

Wash Dry 10 Cents Laundromat, 806 Divisadero Street, Western Addition district, San Francisco: photo by Dave Glass (Dizzy Atmosphere), 1979, posted 2 January 2008

Laundromat, 3040 18th Street, Mission District, San Francisco: photo by Dave Glass (Dizzy Atmosphere), 1988, posted 5 May 2010
 

Jesse, laundromat attendant, Fulton and Divisadero, Western Addition district, San Francisco: photo by Dave Glass (Dizzy Atmosphere), 1977, posted 17 December 2009

Little Hollywood Launderette, 1906 Market Street, San Francisco. Art Deco storefront, Market and Laguna: photo by Dave Glass (Dizzy Atmosphere), 1 January 2008



Wash 20 cents. Old laundromat sign in Oakland. (This one I took because it's closed and I'm afraid the sign will go away soon...): photo by efo, 16 July 2005



Adeline Wash House, Oakland: photo by efo, 1 September 2013
 

Abandoned laundromat -- holgarama: photo by efo, 8 February 2014
 

Laundromat (San Francisco): photo by efo, 19 February 2012