Fay Lasner. portrait of Barbara Guest, 1970
Non Est . . .
Late at Night
[translation by Kenneth Rexroth]
The color which night decomposes
The table where they sit
In its glass chimney
The lamp is a heart emptying itself
It is another year
A new wrinkle
Would you have thought of it
The window throws a blue square
The door is more familiar
A separation
Remorse and crime
Goodbye I am falling
Gently bending arms take me
Out of the corner of my eye I can see them all drinking
I don’t dare move
They sit there
The table is round
And so is my memory
I remember everybody
Even those who are gone
Reverdy, Picasso, Cocteau, Brassai
Atelier de Picasso, Rue Des Grandes Augustins, Paris, 1944
photograph by Brassai
Outside
Mask that weeps between two tree branches
A carnival evening is quenching
tears that were streaming from its stony eyelids
tears from laughing and from bitterness and from regrets
Midnight
it’s all retouched
A new day begins
A drunkard comes to
Tells his story to the doorways on the street
Sad story
With him a morning light
It’s raining and your eyelids glitter
The sneezing trees sprinkle the pavement
And by the caves of your nose I watch the moon pass over
The streak of clouds races on the faded sky
To all those who cling against lamp posts
The illusion will be sweet
And dear your austere face
Mask
Smiles thinking of the dismal morrow
Passing along the clacking pavement
Avoiding the street where shadows grow thick
High up a light gleams
It’s so tranquil
The lodging that draws you on and awaits you where it is
The night doesn’t care about anything
But the sky
Perhaps it’s an empty apartment for you
version by Frank O'Hara
Just for Now
photograph by Brassai, 1937
translation by Kenneth Rexroth, art byA Lot of People
Over there is only a black hole
Beyond the gate a laughing head
And in dust the noise died away
Cloud
Chiaroscuro
Stop breathing
All the birds are dead
The sun has burst
Blood flows
In the water where his eyes were drowning
Pomade, 1913. Illustrated by Mikhail Larionov.
Dir bul shchyl
three poems written
in my own language
deferring from others’,
their words have no
definite meaning
1. Dir bul shchyl
ubeshshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez
2
Frot fron yt
I don’t argue I’m in love
black language
the wild tribe had it
too
3
Ta sa mae
kha ra bau
saem siyu oke
rainoke mola
al
The flowing moon
Now looks out
Now hides
A quarrel – shhh!
Lustra’s tearing the
stormclouds apart
that one’s dressed flowing-cloudlike
bread’s out on the table
cabbage soup
They say a nude woman’s
beautiful in the moonlight
The voice is deaf faces are red
Snacking mushrooms drinking
Spattering saliva scurrying
Ah where can I skedaddle to get away from you
The sky cleverly covering
with dove-blue grey rags
the whole night Busy with caviar
the sky’s choking and smelling of
the color of dove and udders
O love me pity
me
Eitherway I’m bleeding
me and you
Eitherway I’m already crucified
by the steppe and the willows
(First published in Kruchenykh’s Pomade, 1913)
portrait by Nikolai Kulbin
Invocation by Laughter
1908
Homage to Khlebnikov
I was aging, on my face formed furrow-like wrinkles–
Lines, the rails of trepidations and worries,
Where the woes of plosive ideas raced past –
Trains rattling into abandoned junctions.
You were aging and your face came to resemble a map
Scratched all over by a network of trestles
Where an unsaddled mare can no longer gallop,
And there’s nowhere for an unrestrained feeling to flee!
And these transparent eyes and eye sockets
Penetrated all the time deeper, and less often than fire
Impulses fluttered by, like startled birds,
Suddenly remembering the tenderness of an autumn day….
And consciousness flickered under the glutinous network
Of wrinkles, like a sky-blue moth in a sack,
And time flogged me with its vicious whip
But my steed was wooden.
1912
Chance F/light
Rest precares for toffee as
The slain defense portrays
Faint guardian precept
Tainting crew light
Serenity become preclusive
In the swollen fire
Taste widened a part of see-
Through clasp to frame
In part the terrace
And the bluff, the craven
Cache of lathe in scribbled
Winter on a far park
Twisted white and gemmed
As pure as soffit
If the color jaune
Turns simpler than the clouded sea
Refrain
Revoice the carriage as sure
Lack of aspirant’s repair
Streamline cauterized young piano
Tones plucked over raven stripes
Into the luster grasped to
Emirate divorce as faint
Daybreak wearing attitude divines
A toy broom corded fast
The latecome anchor swells
The wheat’s lone
Prowess as shy face
Afforded few bonanzas
Trace one finger where the hand
Traced on a page of paper
Becomes silver against the painted grape
As episodic float in space
A book about the state of life in America. Photographs by Richard Avedon and text by James Baldwin.
First published by Atheneum, New York, 1964; and C. H. Bucher, Lucerne, 1964
This edition, Publisher Dell Publishing, New York, 1965
[88] pages
Interview with Hilton Als (Antwaun Sargent, Galerie, 2017).
Commentary: Hilton Als (New Yorker, 2017).
Reviews: Brian Willis (Aperture, 2016), Steven W Thrasher(Guardian, 2017), Buzz Poole (LA Review of Books, 2018), Carmen Merport (LA Review of Books, 2018).
Me and Miss Mandible
Santa Fe Trail I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is th...
