To My Lady of Poetry
By Alfonsina Storni
I throw myself here at your feet, sinful,
my dark face against your blue earth,
you the virgin among armies of palm trees
that never grow old as humans do.
I don't dare look at your pure eyes
or dare touch your miraculous hand:
I look behind me and a river of rashness
urges me guiltlessly on against you.
With a promise to mend my ways through your
divine grace, I humbly place on your
hem a little green branch,
for I couldn't have possibly lived
cut off from your shadow, since you blinded me
at birth with your fierce branding iron.
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From Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch in this morning's Washington Post Book World. "Near the end of her life, the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) wrote a dramatic series of poems that she called 'antisonnets,'" he writes. "These poems abandoned rhyme but maintained a traditional structure of 14 lines: two quatrains, or four-line stanzas, and two tercets, or three-line stanzas. They are argumentative poems that take the traditional subject of the sonnet, romantic love, and radically dismantle it." Here's another one:
To Eros
By Alfonsina Storni
I caught you by the neck
on the shore of the sea, while you shot
arrows from your quiver to wound me
and on the ground I saw your flowered crown.
I disemboweled your stomach like a doll's
and examined your deceitful wheels,
and deeply hidden in your golden pulleys
I found a trapdoor that said: sex.
On the beach I held you, now a sad heap,
up to the sun, accomplice of your deeds,
before a chorus of frightened sirens.
Your deceitful godmother, the moon
was climbing through the crest of the dawn,
and I threw you into the mouth of the waves.
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I was surfing Sid's Play Place for gratuitous Russell squeeage and stumbled across this transcript and screen grabs from an ITV parody of Master and Commander (complete with Titanic and Gladiator references) from a show apparently called The Impressionable John Culshaw that apparently repeats on ITV2 on March 9th. If anyone had a way to capture this in a way that I could watch it, I would be her slavegrrl.
My parents are redoing my childhood bedroom, having torn out the rug that has been there for 30+ years, and keep bringing me crap they have found in the closet and such. Yesterday it was an ashtray I made for my grandmother when I was younger than my kids, and a couple of Chinatown wall hangings that I'd forgotten I ever owned. Do I keep these things for the sake of nostalgia or give them away ASAP? Keep in mind that I am the queen of crap collecting and my husband is also a pack rat and will never notice more junk around here...
Today we are supposed to go to Baltimore, which I have been looking forward to all week. Had to dodge several bullets including the possibility that one son's baseball practice would get moved to today, the other son's basketball practice would get moved to today or my mother would successfully guilt my children (behind my back) into wanting to attend a Purim carnival at which they have gotten bored after half an hour the past two years. (It drizzled yesterday during baseball practice, which almost got it cancelled, but the sun came out and there was this huge rainbow over the shopping center.) Then last night we heard on the news that a passenger ferry had capsized yesterday, killing a couple of people and causing all kinds of shutdowns in the Inner Harbor. I am hoping that this does not mean either that the Constellation will be closed, nor that the harbor area will be a security nightmare, but it is entirely possible that I will not get my day in Baltimore after all.
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