.
Lorelei with wet hair riverine,
black delta, white beaches
coming out of her moonlight shower --
her cold, cold beauty is the chimerical
other for whom the subject's
erotic longing is like a phantom itch
in a part of the body that died long, long
before we started to patrol this part of the river.
Dark eyes, and wet hair trailing in
the reeds like a subjective language of sedge
through which the timeless current snakes.
Iris pseudacorus, by the river Nidda, Frankfurt-am-Main: photo by Karin Wicker, 2004
Iris pseudacorus: photo by George Jansoone, 2005
very interesting and strange Tom.
ReplyDeletesedge linguistically
and there are slippages in this
is like
s-edge
which makes me think of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction
and things like diffraction gratings
I've used the light metaphor of language for a long time, but
returning that to the vegetative register is really fun, there are many historical precendents for both, but
an optical metaphor of language
does seem to connect
eros to a certain frictionlessness
apparent in the photonic
the masslessness
become a corollary to slippage
and the formal relationship
bewteen light and matter
and its wild-child
life
Lanny,
ReplyDeleteIn a vision Norman O. Brown pops up in a cartoon cloud over your dead lion head, I meant to type dear lion head! O Phaneronoemikon!
Life. And yet there is the starved lovesick knight's claim that the sedge has withered from the lake, in a series of slippages in the vegetative register.
Lanny, your seductive formalisms spin the kind of night-patrolling webs in which I see many streams of light diffracted:
"In this river..."
Down with friction!
Yours in riverine non-friction,
And thanks as ever
The mythology of nature has inspired the sensitive soul of poets to write delicious verses throughout history. And it still does!
ReplyDelete