Carlos Fuentes, 1987

Carlos Fuentes passed away on May 15th, 2012, at the age of 83. He will be remembered by this avid reader for his novels The Old Gringo and The Death of Artemio Cruz, along with his wonderful short stories, especially those in Burnt Water. His non-fiction is also very strong (This I Believe & Myself With Others), and pairing it with Milan Kundera’s heightened the effect of both for me. Both men being advocates of the democratic voice in literature, with many of the same literary “precursors.”

Fuentes was one of the chief contributors and promoters of the Latin American “Boom,” along with José Donoso, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Rulfo, his fellow Mexican novelist.…

The Sleeping Gypsy, by Henri Rousseau. 1897

Gypsy

The sadness of the dance
Between two opposites

The sadness of the work
Involved

No metaphors needed
Male and Female

Strong and weak
Yin and Yang

No metaphors needed
Because this is all

Delusion
    And comfort food

            Combined

Though the combination
Is a hopeful thing
A blessed thing

A dove sent

A plant thrusting upward
To the sun
From within desert sand
From within

Once barren minds

        The act of combination
                An act of liberation

Or may be
If we cross over

 …

The Eiffel Tower. Photo by Douglas Pinson. 2007

 Spinozablue has new poetry, fiction and photography on tap for May. Valentina Cano, Emily Ramser, Christina Murphy and Ben Nardolilli grace this site with their poetry; Penelope Mermall with her fiction; and Eleanor Bennett with photography. Emily and Eleanor have something in common. They are both in their teens. Their work, however, along with those already mentioned on this fine May Day, combines future promise and present achievement.

*     *     *     *     *

So, I’m reading The Three Pillars of Zen, by Philip Kapleau, and it’s kick-started all kinds of thought-trails. The book is quite good, though it lags at times when it shifts to interviews with adepts. Lags for me, because too many of the stories are similar.…

Lockdown

 
I turned to stone
that Saturday morning.
It wasn’t slow.
There were no gasps
as my fingers dried like corn husks,
or as my hair locked in place,
never to feel the breeze again.
There was no time for that.
In one second, I was staring
out of eyes sewn to our walls.
There was no blinking.
I was alone,
staring out into a room
I could no longer shut out.

In Amber

 
Softly, you turn.
Your face is a mask of ash,
drifting with the currents,
with my moods.
You peer at me out of cottonwood eyes
that reflect fires I’ve not yet set.
Cares I’ve not flung at you
like dirty clothes.
Stay like that.
Just like that, for an instant,
while I bring out
my words and boil them alive.…

(Click on the individual photos to enlarge and start slide show)

Eleanor Bennett is a very young and gifted photographer, whose art captures a stunning range of landscapes, people and other animals, along with the purely conceptual. It is obvious that she intuitively understands composition, drama, angles, lines, shadows and color. It is also obvious that she has command over her subject matter and a voracious interest in the world surrounding her. 

The above is but a small sample of her work, which is best seen on her own website.

Eleanor says of her work and journey:

I started doing photography around four years ago. It was for a biodiversity project on recording the occurrences of nature in your local environment. I enjoyed greatly creating art in that manner.

…

green is circuitous and certainly cubic, and you need ask
only Magritte, Beckett, or Monet for the certitude
that green has nothing to say of flatness, whether
horizontal or vertical or even in planes—nothing at all
as silent as the game of spring hiding behind blue winter

green—playing the complement of magenta and seldom
hiding from sight in trees and sprouts and stems
green—shining as an impulse in the new and yet to become
green—as the élan vital or the end of joy as jealousy
when the green-eyed monster claims its bounty in envy

green invites, cajoles, makes us believe in youth and rebirth
lingers in emerald seas and rivers of regeneration as the god
Osiris bids us to believe; but nothing gold can stay, as Frost
knows and eternity echoes—and nothing green can stay
before the endless fading to gold and eventual decay

in the twilight, in the fall of evening, green is a kiss, a dance
spun by the faeries, who know that, within each shamrock,
is a beating heart of the mystical, the celestial, that blesses
the poet, the bard, with voice and song; green as the holy,
green as everything complex and lovely and nothing sorrowful

– by Christina Murphy

Copyright© 2012, by Christina Murphy.…

                                                  
  Baby Jesus    

I drop in late nights and sink into a place that settles round me in a hush and the sight of bent backs lined up at the counter soothes me some. The waitresses own a toughness that remind me of shoe leather and sweep past at a swift clip with plates piled in the crook of arms.

I sit in a booth looking out on a town where street lamps throw a foggy glow and passersby exchange a pocketful of words. In the wide expanse of glass my hair hangs limp and a ghostly face stares back. I’m no stranger to myself in glass, where I exist neither here nor there. Snowflakes float down and melt like salty kisses and the red neon DINER sign blinks on and off.…

Heron Wings

For Justin Heron

heron wings floating
caressing clouds softly, they
glide through hot air drafts
.
shoulders extended
painting shadows, blanketing
ripples and swimmers
.
patterns on water
criss-cross slits of black and blue,
cobalt tipped feathers
.
soaring up into
the palace of the sun, bills
of light sunshine straw
.
cradling newborn and
ancient in the crest of its
eyes. spiritual friend.
.
wing-tips touching souls
of those past and gone, sending
onwards and beyond

– by Emily Ramser

Copyright © 2012, by Emily Ramser. All Rights Reserved.

Emily Ramser is a high school author living part time between North Carolina and California. She has been published in a small school anthology as well as in the online lit magazine, The Crocodile Journal.…

The 28th Palace

Plastered in a semi-invented tale
    little is recorded
enthralled brothers
starched blouses
    eyes as black
    as mourning

an endless hour
called to eat
years shall pass
    even the lowliest poet

    go home
to a meal
surrounded by sneering
skirts at night
    one slight man
hiding civil authority
    merely lengthens the shadows

on native soil
    that deserted road
 olive trees
one must be careful
on the shallow grave
    a failure
of red earth
    evil and the poet immortal.

    
    
Gates and Mountains

A jade flute
it’s the traveler’s thoughts

I stay on the green
a thousand feet

From whose home
feelings tower high

Terror secretly flies
my old friend’s position

The waves startle what reason
I fear to disturb

– by Ben Nardolilli

Copyright ©2012, by Ben Nardolilli.…

Composition VII, by Kandinsky. 1913

New additions to Spinozablue include poems from Kyle Hemmings and Howie Good. Both bring the uncanny and the marvelous to the fore in unique ways. Two things sorely lacking in Art, to our great sadness.

*     *     *     *     *

A few days ago I mused about The Other and difference. The foreignness of things, of certain subjects for Art, of their magnetism. In a sense, that could be a sign of my backsliding from the Zennish path, because Zen teaches the overcoming, the transcendence of difference. It teaches mastery over the process of discrimination and segregation, two of our biggest delusions:

That we are essentially different from one another
That we are not one with the All

Aside from the magnetic draw of the Other, there is an equally strong temptation to dwell inside that zone as if it is not an illusion.…