Saturday, July 19, 2008

Moonlit Cove - Albert Pinkham Ryder


Sorrows of the Moon

Tonight the moon dreams in a deeper languidness,

And, like a beauty on her cushions, lies at rest:

While drifting off to sleep, a tentative caress

Seeks, with a gentle hand, the contour of her breast;

As on a crest above her silken avalanche,

Dying, she yields herself to an unending swoon,

And sees a pallid vision everywhere she'd glance,

In the azure sky where blossoms have been strewn.

When sometime, in her weariness, upon her sphere

She might permit herself to sheda furtive tear,

A poet of great piety, a foe of sleep,

Catches in the hollow of his hand that tear,

An opal fragment, iridescent as a star;

Within his heart, far from the sun, it's buried deep.

-Charles Baudelaire

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Apricot


A summer Taos sunset in your hand.
The weight of a small child's fist,
a girl, resisting sleep
as she sleeps.
The shape of a chicken angel's egg
Eros's lovely clefted backside
in velvet. Fleshy
as a horse's lazy, lower lip.
A faraway fragrance:
juniper in gin, that slow gin
kiss.
What God saw on the eighth day, and ate, and said of it--
way good.
The woody stone we worry-gnaw when death's near,
when we're toothless again as babies,
trying to keep a great thought
small.
-Deborah Slicer