Eveline and Maria: what a strange pair. Eveline, too, is lifeless, but by virtue of being numbed to the world around her. Maria is reactive, but in no ultimately meaningful way, a life of minutiae and trivia that she elevates to an anesthetized substitute for passion.

I had to search for “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” to try to figure out the “mistake” Maria made singing it. It turns out to be a telling one: Maria sings the first verse twice, one in which the speaker exists in a state of already existing love, riches and remarkable ancestry, foregoing the second in which she would be singing of ‘”suitors that sought her hand” and active vows of love and faith—a state in which she would not only be wanted, but in which she would have to be an active participant in her own life, something she, like Eveline before her, will never be.

“Pythagoras Goes to Work”

Triangulate the sun’s ascent. Two oaks
the baseline on this steel-chill winter’s day.
Diversion, suddenly now, in the way
a hawk bisects low triangle of sky
as if she lectures on geometry
to clouds that hover close. The more he looks
the more he calculates a feathered Pi
that multiplied by gold reveals the light
the hawk explains in her wind-scything flight
to audience of fluff and haze. But soon,
no warning, hawk dives for its prey below,
a transitory scholar only; now
a blur of angling talons, wings; that’s how
the mind is ruled by blood. The dawn’s lesson.

–Lee Slonimsky
from Valparaiso Poetry Review (v7, n1)

“Nothing should slow us down; that’s why we have not opened our parachutes.”

I poked around a bit on the web and found selections from an anthology that looks rich, Serbian Secret Weapon, also with selections by Geary. Some of the selections are somehow simultaneously as sharp as a scalpel and blunt enough to bludgeon the reader, such as this by Rade Jovanović:

“We will slaughter each other.
We have no one closer than that.”

I’m still trying to figure out if either of these titles are available in an English translation.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

In the heart world’s mythology, the enlightened rise so high their nascent wings appear. Slipping spinward, the pain is enormous. They rise toward something like the sun. Left behind: first birth. Ahead: the crash and cacophony of a world on the other side of dreams. In between: the coriolis and the craving and the falling in every direction.

“Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull in hand: ‘Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment , that were wont to set the table on a roar?’

Laughter is the father of beauty.”

–William Matthews

Stranger and stranger to one another
waitress on her hands and knees to brush
the carpet underneath a booth. You know–
crawling around on all fours like a dog

underneath a human booth etcetera
to be human—to crawl—to

walk through broken glass with gory feet.

People crying on airplanes,
weeping seven miles above the ground,
the grief
taller than Mt. Everest:

People on the street thinking:
I wanted this. And now it’s a cloud of chalk.

A pile of blood and guts and torn bones thinking
how beautiful is the tiger who killed me

the shit/ of days

–Denis Johnson
found in The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets

“Poetry fails, in each poem, to be as good as poetry ought to be—or as I somehow think it somewhere is, somewhere I’m not looking. Every flesh is flawed and poems are flesh.”

–Donald Hall

“This journal of mine will offend many people. It has offended even me… I do not feel that I have been sincere; I tried too hard to have succeeded.”

–Jules Renard
from The Journal of Jules Renard (January 1892)