Your speech evokes a thousand sympathies,
And all my being’s silent harmonies
Wake trembling into music.
Dreams, Amy Lowell
Newcleus, Jam On it. 1984.
AG2025_DSF6022a evokes a thousand sympathies
AG2024_DSF6786a or a silence not silent
The ??launiu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons.
Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night.
Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am,
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,
the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge.
I held his tiny body, floating through a silence
not silent, but a greeting from this other land,
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—
a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway
between our nights, and through it, voices.
Sleepless Pantoum, Laurel Nakanishi
Luminescent
it seemed to depend more than usual on the predisposition of the Observer. (GS)
Blue Black
Blue Black, curated by Glenn Ligon, Pulizter, 2017.
Song of Hal: Conclusio in C Minor · Nicholas Britell
necessities of ordinary
… it had been set in motion some time ago by what have by now become the familiar complaints that citizens of democracies make about all their leaders, particularly left-leaning ones, however moderate: that they represent an out-of-touch élite, that they are unresponsive to the economic necessities of ordinary people, that they are too sympathetic to outsiders at the cost of the native population, and all the rest.
Adam Gopnik on Trudeau’s resignation.
Long views of Coral Gables, Florida
comprend sans effort le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes
Élévation
Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,
Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l’onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l’immensité profonde
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.
Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l’air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.
Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l’existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse
S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;
Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
—Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!
Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire
He whose thoughts, like larks,
Freely fly toward morning skies,
–Who hovers above life, and knows without strife
The language of flowers and of silent things!
-translated by Nathan Brown, Verso.
Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.
Saidiya Hartman
“The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative.”
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, 1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41.
AG2024_DSF6049a or fragmental as a new year
Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could rove incognito
to places pinned in office calendars. Too long I’d
mothered myself with the admiration of onlookers.
I was grateful to be alone in my abstraction. To be both
ignored and abraded by a coarse sky. I did not offer up
parts of me like kindling. I will not embellish a single
hemisphere. The ground bulges with a wet sound.
It is glutted with what was given. I do the wolfish work
of god and make myself again. Ripen like lichen on
the pavement. Like rain carrying the memory of lightning.
My Hair Burned Like Berenice, Ruth Awad