Like priestly imprisoned poets,
the poplars of blood have fallen asleep.

Gacela of Unforseen Love

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
Nobody knew that you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

A thousand Persian little horses fell asleep
in the plaza with moon of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.

Between plaster and jasmins, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say “siempre”,

“siempre”, “siempre” : garden of my agony,
your body elusive always,
that blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already lightless for my death.

F.G.L.

William Blake believed that art and the power of imagination can save the world from its ills.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e.e cummings

"In June, a little pale and worn,

And full at heart of vague desire,

She hideth in the yellow corn,

With sunburned Summer to respire."

“Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.”

“On the pavement
of my trampled soul
the steps of madmen
weave the prints of rude crude words.”

Aquatic Nocturne by Sylvia Plath

deep in liquid turquoise slivers of dilute light

quiver in thin streaks of bright tinfoil on mobile jet:

pale flounder waver by tilting silver:

in the shallows agile minnows flicker gilt:

grapeblue mussels dilate lithe and pliant valves:

dull lunar globes of blubous jellyfish glow milkgreen:

eels twirl in wily spirals on elusive tails:

adroir lobsters  amble darkly olive on shrewd claws:

down where sound comes blunt and wan like the bronze tone of a sunken gong.

Your smell the smell of your hair and many other things
will live on inside me.
In me and I’m not Ronsard or Baudelaire

I’m Robert Desnos who, because I knew
and loved you,
Is as good as they are.
I’m Robert Desnos who wants to be remembered
On this vile earth for nothing but his love of you.

A la mysterieuse

“There is a 3rd basic way to use the camera – a way that I term “the Transcendence of the Object” – Clarence John Laughlin

“The physical object, to me, is merely a stepping stone to an inner world where the object, with the help of the subconscious drives and focuses perceptions, becomes transmuted into a symbol whose life is beyond the life of the objects we know …”

“Everything, no matter how commonplace and how ugly, has secret meanings. Everything.”

[All images and quotes from Clarence John Laughlin.]