DAFNIS EN EL LAUREL

No debí huirte, Apolo,

el roce de tus dedos

en mi espalda, el vaho fantasmal

de tu aliento sobre mi pecho, tus manos

eléctricas entre mis muslos sueltos...

Me pasmaba el relámpago de tus ojos,

el zumbido de tu voz 
en mis oídos me espantaba,

tu presencia invisible me bañaba 
en sagrado horror.

No debí eludirte entre la hojarasca

del bosque,

ni esconderme dentro de la áspera

corteza de los árboles.

Tendida la carne cobarde

contra la dura fibra,

me desgarra el potro de tormento

de la naturaleza dividida—

como a un brote de enebro

en un peñon batido por el viento—

por el sol abrasado de día,

de noche agachado bajo las estrellas frías.

Libérame, Señor Apolo,

de la guerra encarnizada

de cielo y tierra; libérame

de los terremotos y las granizadas,

de las tormentas repentinas y las sequías sofocantes.

Libérame, sobre todo, de los hombres, 

que andan con filos largos,

buscando cualquier cosa que puedan derribar.

Fresno me llaman, hecho para talar;

cedro me nombran, fácil de tallar;

ciprés me dicen, o pino o roble,            

leña para romper y quemar.

Así me acechan todos

sin siquiera saber 

mi verdadero nombre.

tumblr_o02nekWC8p1r834teo1_1280.jpg

http://aomsoulfood.blogspot.com/?zx=639563947d0b7697

BOOK REVIEW BY AN ANONYMOUS BRITISH REVIEWER

BOOK REVIEW BY AN ANONYMOUS BRITISH REVIEWER
IN THE TIMES

An Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Valéry, in English Translation. Edited by Ángel Flores. Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.

After due consideration,

I tried reading a translation

Of French poets from Nerval to Valéry;

And although the Gallic nation

Holds them all in veneration,

I confess that they are not my cup of tea.

It’s all as dreadful as the antics

Of the German High Romantics,

And it goes about as far—about as deep

In that dark and bulgy wood

Where the moonlight drips like blood

And the bushes stretch and clutch at you, and creep,

And where flowers that devour

Yawn open by the hour,

And monsters pursue you and weep.

They were all full of spleen,

If you know what I mean,

And if you read the volume you will see

Forty stanzas of angoisse

Ladled out like vichyssoise

As the entrée to a long course of ennui,

And the endless, sad complainte

That the living are all dead

In the head,

And the dead . . .

Really ain’t.

And their stories: Jules Laforgue

Ended up inside a morgue—

Couldn’t pay for a burial place;

While Stéphane Mallarmé
Faded mystically away,
Like his symbols, into some interior space.

Poor Gérard, dit de Nerval,  
Suffered from le petit mal, 
And in his seizures entertained the ghost

Of a talking dead geranium
That resided in his cranium;
Then he hanged himself beneath a streetlamp post.

Enter Evil: Charles Baudelaire,

Who proclaimed himself the Heir

Of the Devil, after reading Edgar Poe;

Worst of all, poor Paul Verlaine,

Like Van Gogh, went insane,

And tried to kill his lover, Rimbaud.

(Save for jaunty, debonair

Prince Guillame Apollinaire,

They were really not the sort you’d want to know.)

Now Baudelaire may have been

Quite the specialist in Sin,

And Rimbaud as Rambonctious as could be,

But after reading this anthology,

I can say without apology,

It offered no Illuminations for me.

Author’s note:

The reader, like the author, should consider himself free  

To side with the Reviewer—or with les poètes maudits.

http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/12/9in-which-we-begin-to-roar-with-laughter-at-paul-verlaine-and...html

THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS _ UNCHAINED MELODY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-DZdwkfKxg&index=1&list=RDM-DZdwkfKxg


Deepest thanks to HG SANTTOS, who posted it.

VIEW OF THE MISSISSIPPI FROM FORT HILL AT THE VICKSBURG BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL PARK AND CEMETERY

    

     From the wide, meandering drive

     you look away, beyond the lines

     of white anonymous markers,

     down to where the barges

     are pushing past the piers,

     as slowly as the hour hand of a clock,

     while tiny speedboats whine

     as they skip up and down

     like mosquitoes, skimming the water

     to better their times.

     The digital tour guide at Fort Hill

     makes it a point to say

     that the River isn’t what you see 

     —“the River” around here

     always means the Mississippi—

     but the Yazoo Diversion Canal,

     an artificial waterway

     created by the Army Corps of Engineers

     after the River slid away

     and left Vicksburg behind.

     The real Mississippi winds,

     like a snake uncoiling, on the other side

     of the shifting sandbars and temporary islands

     that lie in the distance, looking like solid ground

     crowded with undergrowth, cottonwood, willow, and pine.

     Several hours farther down,

     at New Roads in the Parish of Pointe Coupée,

     the River once twisted itself out this way.

     On the farther, lower side

     they made the old bed into a resort,

     a playground for aquatic sports,

     called False River Lake.

     They have sail-boating and water-skiing there,

     and trolling and fishing from the shore,

     lined now with substantial real estate.

     It all sounds fairly dull and safe,

     and perhaps it is.

     Perhaps there’s a point to be made

     for placidity, though: There are some who say,

     with mandarin politesse,

     “May you live in interesting times,”

     —when they don’t mean to bless.

     But more than once the River has

     struck at a town:

     of that rip-roaring sinful place,

     Natchez-under-the-Hill,

     there isn’t much left now;

     and at Grand Gulf,

     half an hour south of here,

     fifty-six blocks of busy, sleepy people

     sloughed off into the water

     bit by bit, without a sound.

     Only a few minutes farther away,

     antique and beautiful,

     the clock-faced steeples of Port Gibson wait,

     set back decorously not-too-near

     the soft slopes of the Little Bayou Pierre,

     a minor tributary that everyone there

     calls “By a Pier.”

     They watch the town’s two bridges—

     the skeletal old one, mostly sucked down

     in the great storm of  ’Fifty-Four,

     and the squat, heavy new one, that brute mass and weight

     have held in place so far.

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https://mississippiriver.natgeotourism.com/content /historic-downtown-vicksburgmspa915737884acb72d3