“Imagination certainly is an entertaining thing to have—and it is great to be a fool.” – Georgia O’ Keefe
She,
in painting
the bones
and the blue
while distilling,
in tenderest strokes,
the interior lives
and longing of flowers,
applied
fool-proof measures
and grace
to the lore of Imagination,
unquestionably entertained
by its own heart
for heart’s sake.
“I am not indifferent to the greater dramas hanging over us, but drama is everywhere the same, microcosm or macrocosm. It is not my destiny to live the drama of Spain, war, death, agony, hunger. It is my destiny to live the drama of feeling and imagination, reality and unreality, the drama underlying the others, a drama without guns, dynamite, explosions. But it is the same one, it is from this one that the other is born: conflict, cruelty, revenge, jealousy, envy. In me it all happens in another world, in myself, and myself as an artist who remembers each day more what each day of my life touches in the past. I do not live beyond war, the drama that hastens death, accelerates the end. I live the personal drama responsible for the larger one, seeking a cure. Perhaps it is a greater agony to live this life in which my awareness makes a thousand revolutions while others make only one. My span may seem smaller but it is really larger because it covers all the obscure routes of the soul and body seeking truth, seeking the antiserum against hate and war, never receiving medals for its courage. It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women. It would be simpler, shorter, swifter not to seek this deepening perspective to my life and lose myself in the simple world of war, hunger, death.”— Anais Nin, Spring, 1966
A thousand women
lived
and breathed
in the billowing span
of a single heart’s
revolution
to seed itself
in the dark fertile memory
of an earth
limitless
by terms.
“Tedium . . . it’s perhaps, after all, the dissatisfaction of the intimate soul because we haven’t given it a belief, the desolation of the sad child we are deep down, because we haven’t bought him a divine toy.” – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
All those sad children,
orphaned to tomorrow,
and thrifting cloth
from shadow
to conceal
their wanting in existential drag–
yet,
no cover-up
can soundproof
the heart’s barest cry
for that legendary toy,
ordered by the divine,
and damned near
impossible to claim.
“What absurdity. There is not one novel of America. There are a thousand Americas. Big Business is only one of its inhuman, monstrous products. But jazz is the expression of America’s romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force. Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything. Why not pay attention to the artists who humanize, keep the source of feeling alive, keep hope alive?” – Anais Nin, Winter, 1956
On the street corner
where Main meets
wherever,
a thin man in a beret,
holding a briefcase,
standing in front of a mounted
American flag,
barking through a megaphone–
Souls
bought and sold
souls bought and sold
here—
while three blocks down,
in a nameless alley,
the sound
and fury
of a squealing sax,
eliciting lore
from a calling
measureless in its purge.
“… the blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged train and transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”– B.F. McKeever, “Cane as Blues”
Your fingers
know, by heart,
the relief route–
Allow them
the knead
and saving grace
of a fluid trespass
upon your most aching parts,
as you whistle
your way past the graveyard
under the stars
your blues
running on
to catch the dark
dreaming.
“My whole life has been little else than a long reverie divided into chapters by my daily walks”–Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To ground,
daily,
these dreams
of novel origins,
bracing bold contact
with rounded edges,
off which falling
is favored
and soundly encouraged.
“The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have … excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.” – Anais Nin to Henry Miller
It was a gag,
or maybe not.
Maybe a seance of sorts,
a call to the past, or . . .
whatever it was, it demanded action.
I bought a tall black armchair
at a thrift store, one of its legs
slightly shorter than the rest,
which somehow felt right.
I placed the armchair in the attic
and draped a white sheet over it.
Drew big dark eyes on the sheet
in permanent marker,
and then a Rorschach blot of a mouth.
I laid a pair of my ex-girlfriend’s
black lace stockings on top
of the sheet, almost as an erotic offering
to flesh things out.
My ghost of Anais Nin
now needed sound
and so I
made a mixed tape of clips
of her voice
then placed a cassette player
with the tape inside
under the sheet
and turned out all the lights
in the attic
as I lit one thin long candle
which gave off a warm auerate glow
and then communed with the ghost of Anais Nin
for however long eternity lasts
in the world of one
who sails
according to Imagination’s standards
alone.
“I think we are climates above which pause threats of storms that take place elsewhere.”—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
What then, this weather
of strange balloons
and vanities engorged
like blowfish bladders
purpling to the point of bursting?
Who, among us,
will gather the sentient crackles
of a given storm
and secret them
away in a wicker basket
where, at a much later date,
when the sun has passed through the clouds,
the basket can be set on the grass for a picnic
in an imaginary park with invisible friends–
yes, imagine, you are a kid once again,
with all realities open to your gambits–
who, then, do you become,
when living according to whim and fancy,
and the kite-tailed night-birds of the heart,
you embrace the manic music
of the seasons,
and come to regard climate,
personal or otherwise,
as a cauldron, seething and bubbling,
seeking its rightful sorceress.
“The longer a poem, the weaker the impression that it has been dictated from above: Heaven is not verbose. The more you talk, the more you lie.”–Vera Pavlova
When I am overly verbose,
I am trying to convince myself,
or my angels that I am worth
their undying devotion.
That, or I’m trying to validate
my reason for being
to unrealized eyes
living in the back of my head.
When I am silent,
I am like the cat
who fluently models
Chekhov’s explanation of grace
as some definite action accomplished
in the least number of movements.
I’m pretty sure if Chekhov and the cat
were in the kitchen together
and Chekhov were explaining his definition,
in so many words,
the cat, remaining still,
would yawn and close its eyes.
Some poems, teasing verbosity,
don’t go anywhere,
yet simply lapse
into the waiting cradle
of silence.
“It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it was so quiet that you hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.”—Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success” (1937)
Within
the tenderest latent merger
of youth
to bloom,
the golden hours
of dreaming
lose favor to time–
this, a narrowing passage
and gist,
dimming,
yet
in its call to longing,
wholly sublime.
John Biscello 