Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.

My spirit is too weak--mortality

Weighs heavily upon me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring 'round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time--with a billowy main--
A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.

-John Keats
(quoted from memory)

Photo: mine, photoshop art

The Point of Origin

unless

You have denied yourself a self.

You have abstracted your flesh
into a formula of hope.

As if the air. The mid-day air.

"Panic in the face of the moon--round effendi
Or the phospored sleep in which he walks abroad
Or the majolica dish heaped up with phospored fruit
That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,
To anyone that comes--panic, because
The moon is no longer these or anything
And nothing is left but comic ugliness
Or a lustred nothingness. Effendi, he
That has lost the folly of the moon becomes
The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty. [...]

Here in the west indifferent crickets chant
Through our indifferent crises. Yet we require
Another chant, an incantation [...]

Truth's favors sonorously exhibited."


-Wallace Stevens, "Esthetique du Mal"