BLACK WINDOW OF THE WEDDING NIGHT
A POETIC METHODBY WHICH THE WINDOW IS OPENED
“Myth and the possibility of myth become undone: there remains onlyan immense void, beloved and wretched.” – Georges Bataille
“I want the fire it is always possible to spark forth
from between the stones of time...” –Anne Le Brun
The sensitive nature of a biological eclipse, or the effects on a purely physical level, will threaten to darken the most secretive aspects of reason and disorder. It is the disheveled condition that precedes an absolute emergence of the marvelous into an ordinary perception of reality. It is the glow of the heretic that signals the loveliness of erotic pollination, that covers and re-engenders the city, that makes the bride a luminescent fountain in the City of Darkness that we inhabit like ghosts, scribbling feverish messages, cryptic beacons and glowing lynx often enough to ravish and impregnate the forests that stalk us endlessly...
Poetic travesties that breach the dikes from the inside out and further, from a much greater distance, deeper and darker, and spanning centuries in either direction. A declaration of purity is essential, where self-importance is of a useless quality compared to the kinship of a magical discourse: one needs a precise pureness of comprehension to proceed... The simple sentiment, taken without moral distinction separate from that unrestrained state of grace, THE PURE, that “lovers are more dangerous even than murders” presupposes a precise and wondrous conjuring. A marvelous unveiling as a sudden downpour, like a bonfire that brings the sea into the metabolism of wayward constellations.
“The silences come and go like brides...”
Automatic, clairvoyant, inspired, deranged, occulted: the flow of words has always been unsettling in uneasy environs surrounding the edges of the magical, which insists upon the utmost innocence of encounter. Images encounter each other like lovers, one breath upon the other, one phantom quality caressing another, one circuit-breaker after another thrown, in visual slips of the tongue... A purely dialectical game of desirable chance. That shadow lingering within your gaze, those personages, that secret gathering, the hybrids that tip their hats in your direction... The flickering of eyelids.... The incremental transformation that makes a negative journey, a gesture that reaches to grasp the opposite of itself, the double of darkness that reassembles you intact.
It all makes sense in the lightning that strikes your tree, the sudden appearance of thousands of sphinx moths at your back door, the owl couple appearing in the garden, the forest fire that occurs inside the house you were born in, those accidents that mark the fountain of molecules on a level that strikes the chord of your having passed through these inhospitable gates, striking gold... The rest is without equal.
“The unspeakable passion of the Night-Keeper’s daughter...”
Darker, ever more darker... While a sense of clarity might well favor a poetry of daylight, of the dark showing itself in broad daylight, further inclinations may also be of deliberate concern, by a darkening of the day, and noon showing itself at midnight as a phantom object. The shadow of an illusion. There is no darkness lonelier than an invented one. Narcissus sees only himself, not the others that haunt him, and it is this reflection of himself that sets itself on fire and burns black in the middle of the day.
I suspect that I will never exhaust or cease to be fascinated by the obscure and magical relationship between the reflection and the shadow. The reflection, however narcissistic or not, in which one confronts oneself to some extent, and the shadow as a distinct connection between the psyche, your reflection and what passes beyond the edges of your body. These two occurrences of mimicry, outside of the body, but because of it, lend an intoxicating air of misery and cruelty to the whimsy of an evening stroll that leaves its chalk dust swirling in the grass: messages of impending doorways that multiply for the arcs of your pleasure. The sun comes out at night, as another form of consciousness, a two-way mirror...
“Twins become precious minerals...”
It germinates at night in the wet, shimmering miasma of the forest, beneath the buzzing of a dark reflection, and fed on by animals drawn to it by the heat of its ambiguous scent. The beauty of it is in the useless babbling of its own shadow. The presence of it unfolds a conspiracy that never ends well. As an X-ray machine it unearths the endless keys of a lock that doesn’t work.
The wind is brighter coming from that forest, the darkness deeper, and the result of consciousness includes more stars, more fires and many more passages...
Thrones are growing in that very same forest, spawned from words that scatter like spores when spoken out loud, salamanders of discord and troubling presence. That same consciousness powered by starlight and the solemn gestures of forgers from the 15th century, in a small city of printers and alchemists in search of the perfect moment, on a street with less girth than a room lighted only with candles.
“It is noon. It is the negative of an original river...”
MONKEYS AT THE GATE
“Phantom flowers, these embalmed incubi and succubi...” Ghérasim Luca.
One is reminded of the essential thrust of the bright remnants in the agony of waking from a wondrous dream, heavy with arcs and windows from Al-Aqabah, that vendor of ancient springs more bird-like and humid than abandoned clothing still hovering in darkness. I can recall your features, as I will always see them, gracefully and without mercy––even veiled they arouse my sense of disquieting abnormalities twittering softly in the painful folds of the evening curtains. Your dark cinnamon locks, your latches and skeleton keys igniting the golden wheat of the arcades... love letters scattered to the four corners and shaped like dunes invading the city of locksmiths and witches. Yours was a hunger that defied gravity. I was a mere child without a name... A glove without a hand. A warm glow.
“The bath becomes the tributary of your brightness, and the switchblade of her midnight mating season: she opens you with the humming of her sensory liquids, her visionary sap, and she lays her eggs in you…”
It is in the weight of words that render the spells of casting and rich trade routes balanced between night and day, which signifies either the danger or the nurturing of adaptations in times of conflict. You were never in one place at any given time, but a scattering of seeds. She was ill-suited for the offering, ungainly for vague symmetries. Her ghostly appearance followed the insistence of dreams. You were the orphan and the twin, and your own mirror. She is ashes and a distant cousin, a melancholy substance...
“From the moment you leave, until the moment you return, the world reverses itself and shimmers in your mind, flowing through the arteries and streams of the thought that trowels its lair outside of your mind, guarded by the daughter of the owls and the Navigators who never sleep – ignited by meteors in cabinets of imaginary space that multiplies with the speed of light… It is you, at the gate, sleek and angular as a panther, and propelled by optical tangents filled with the healing substances of night runners and jugglers of the highest degree. A single drop of silver will always announce the moment of your receptivity to the changing of the guard, the tapping of a blind man’s cane, and with the most dangerous grace, the long-stemmed black rose finds it way, without fanfare, into the antechamber where the secrets of the universe are humming and rattling like wind-up toys. It is no wonder, then, that the Diviner is in love, and has always been in love with the refraction of moonlight in the golden alkali of your heavy breath, and the rapidity of crystal on your lips… When you move, the thought of transparency weighs heavier than the aurora when it lands, and is for all time transferred onto the door of no return, which only opens for the clairvoyance of the key, to which she has appended herself.”
The poetic imperative demands that kind of purity, that reckless abandon to the elements (those gears without wings that nonetheless always arrive before you) and the view from a great height, beneath a coven of fur-covered enchantments (those that have carved your features into the wind) and even before words are uttered with negative connotations: for instance, the figure that spends it’s days grinding light down to the intricate structure of its bones, so white, so dazzling in their absence, whispering your name and the details of your misfortune... Bones growing in the desert, becoming cities that defy the laws of accepted balance, releasing the sounds and hormones of dancing imps, the vials of unrepentant daughters and their shadowy suitors, the knives and wounds that implicate dawn and its dark fires... and that peerless river that swirls around (and then disappears within) your draped shoulder, bitten by a thirsty shawl.
“I have been your method of travel and the future reckoning of your expectations. I can see in your sleep; you can see in mine… Together we are incognito with our calipers and our liquids, and follow only the signs that illuminate those that are to follow–Apart, we form the ghostly moth of incandescence.”
THE SURFACE OF THE DREAM
“Le navigateur de la félicité est une cheminée fumante, dans
la portion illuminée du rideau..” -Alejandro Puga
When the sight of owls moves across the central plane, burning brightly like a door left wide open and unattended, there are exact measurements enabling the wings of ether to follow you, when you sleep, when you walk among the thorns of revenge and lightning, when the zookeeper unlocks your memory, when the laughter curls up under the table of sparks and controls, when the last to arrive quickly dresses up in the most appropriate bearing of nameless animals, when the melancholy of strange crystals refutes your presence, sharing your blood with strangers, when the earthly eclipse rises up through your body leaving by your heart, there are generous and lofty thefts beautiful enough even for the dead, when they vibrate in dusty corners, like vases filled with trances and other flagrant exploits, shooting stars, leaving obscure but potent clues, excuses, hastily scribbled missives, the scent of amethyst, threads of Medieval science, a King and a Queen in mortal combat and numerous caresses like fireflies in a bed of darkness and invisibility. A solar night beyond a reasonable doubt. The shape of treason is soft to the touch, and fluid as a stolen kiss.
“I am the pool of brightness around the dark solution; dip your hands into it and smear it over your body, wreak havoc on the tide that binds, and mesmerize... pierce it, and myth it... take away its life and give it moonlight, then revive it and breathe it in...”
LUMINOUS VESSELS
“Now the precise hour is striking when chance closes the parenthesis
it opened for us... when all we can do is choose between the tools of despair
and the vile balm of consolation.” -Georges Henein
The sudden appearance of a transparent landscape emits the tingling sensations of crystal when it is licked, and then swallowed whole... Love blossoms within the central chambers of those who have come to bear witness, offering long-stemmed wings. For all the most regal intents and purposes, transparency is a fine crimson dust, an aggressive pollen-like substance that spreads throughout the universe the way time does. There is no way to overcome this flood, this heartrending sense of an illusive quality bordering on restless sleep, without recourse to endless wandering. Forest fires might fill the gap with heavy breathing and untold psychological gifts and absurd tales. The movement of shadows away from their sources might slow down this irascible characteristic. Such tricks are an endless source of spinning-wheels smuggled in from Lebanon where beautiful tiny birds shine like threads in the bodice of a dreaming statue.Humor is the sunrise of a swimmer lost at sea.
There are orchids more beautiful with teeth through which dangerous caresses flow and smile in mortal conflict...
Is that the swarming of bees, or the passing of shadows made of water, and fire?
UNNATURAL DIMENSIONS
“Here is represented the obscure blackness that enters the center fromwhere she came. –Jacques Tesson. The Green Lion.
There is a revelation that words can encompass, that spills out into the street like an afterthought, an heraldic stream armed with revolvers of an absolute about-face, toward a more desirable thrust of movement, gesture and the intensification of hearing. A ghostly endeavor, an infrared sea that conducts the stones of magnetic attractions through the underground passages of a bridal chamber lit up by the tempting sadism of statues. The evenings are splendid.
Fugitives, lunatics, poets, children, tornados, and all wrapped up in the trembling of the leaves so strange and unexpected like lovers killing time. The forgery of languid hours that trouble the witches of bloodroot and dawn-oxide that holds your formidable gaze against all opposition, sets up a quicksand vanishing point for the portrait of forbidden fruit. Not a moment to spare. Such sweet despair. A bell is rung for the ceremony of phantom grasping, beneath the bees of reverse psychology and other phases of the moon.
A desert city near the sea is your disguise of ceaseless arrivals and departures. You have never been there, but it came to you in the early morning hours, with its telescopes and faded images, it appeared at that moment when you were least resistant to the fluctuations of time, its madly spinning fans and its silhouettes, its devilish chrysalides and disheveled gowns... when you braced yourself, pivoting for the puzzling lycanthropy of light, in the mirror, in the last voice of the evening... Your portrait reveals the blurred whirring of lost civilizations and unknown women brandishing dark breaths.
“Pure carbon! A barely audible sigh, like a precious body of water kept alive and aroused for centuries.”
There is the coaxing of your shape into sorrowful streets, rooms filled with landscapes and desperate measures that hold you in place, lit up by fires and lairs that unmask you in the lush exuberance of each animal that comes to breathe on you in the hard coal of your shade.
The fine aberration of secret space that makes the depths out of the night sea as bright and luminous as waking up unharmed each morning, having forgotten who you were the day before.
The alchemists, like those women that have haunted you, with their uneasy spell-bound cabinets, their vials of extra-sensory amusements, predicaments and dark corners of the world, shimmering with grandiose pronouncements and sad falconry... those alchemists of the secret passwords, in the mirrors, de-silvering the thirst for knowledge based upon certain reckless truths that spread consciousness far and wide like tales of lost measurements, and the multiplication of identities. In this, there are the forgeries of ideal objects worth their weight in gold. You slowly open the windows of night while the looms of sentient awareness thread your voice into the eyes of wolves. In sight of hunger...
Wisdom is a knife in the center of a bloody compass at the bottom of a well.
PROPOSAL FOR THE INTOXICATION OF THE SPECIES
"I can personally attest to the fact that everything herein
described, actually happened." - Ghérasim Luca (paraphrased.)
In the final analysis, awakening the wax linen threads that accompany you in the early part of the 16th Century, simmering in those ghostly jars of refusal (a brilliant game of whispering) now burning with laughter in the hallway... A sleight-of-body and position, a flight-pattern brought about by fierce condemnation and freely circulating moments of joy, when you dressed to kill for an evening of frivolity. The slow priceless feet of water gave you a slender window of precision, a lingering demonic glance, a hopeful stairway, a mouthful of black stones, and that hysterical calm of a caress through the cubicles of light: her gown eats its way out of the mirror. Light is not your fire, but the darkness of it. The polemics of distraction, your raw opal. This is the first step outside, and the shadow of entry into the mysteries of the first day of a precocious Spring-time gradually impregnated by lightning... Your weapons are flowering.
She is the mirror image of pleasure, the root system of jettisoned cities, while he develops biological landing-sites that mimic the third dimension, the 4th, and other forges in the aleatory duration of each movement, each mythical gesture heavily laden with each word that fires up in tangential reflections the coals of your absence, your whereabouts, and the form of your desires knocking at the door.
He follows the sequence of dreams that bring you to the vanishing point of discontent, a ghost vision, an evening bath of fireflies...
THE GOLDEN HOUR
“No ceremonial, no incantation, no rites, but attainment of the state of lucidity
in which the notion of time becomes a fruit one can peel.” –Robert Lebel
On a table made of bright fog, in a room of hard black coal, the visitors arrive and depart like ghosts more desirable as water than memory. They manipulate time into splendid movements that could be both sublime and dangerous as a form of erotic landscape – in an animal sense of being, when desire hunts for its object of hunger. Movements that imitate the velocity of quartz, which begins to grow and spread out like an organic wave filling the city with tender kisses, or crimes of passion that light up all the little corners and niches of the world.
THE HUMMINGBIRD’S REVENGE
“Love is conspiracy to commit mayhem.” -Anonymous
There are very few reasons why magnetic obsessions are not biological reflections from the mirrors of the forest in the rain. It is in the breath that sees its twin magically aligned against the folly of distant events that hunts to enliven its initiation into the non-locality of poetic violence. Sunlight is the prism of night, and the phoenix of its fatal arousal. Time is moving in a very different direction. Transparency is the anomaly of devastation: euphoria is the art of disorder. When she comes to you, morning is the hummingbird’s revenge.
VANISHING POINTS
“Bee swarm, lightning flash, and absolute condemnation: three
oblique angles of our summit.” –Rene Char
Navigation will always be inspired by master astrologers from the Orient, scintillating ambassadors leaving no mystery unturned, and coaxing out of dark places the most unreasonable perfumes to quell the fears of powerful intuitions that dazzle your grave markings. Your trust in the errant façade is toned with acid. The mad sepia of quarries idealizes the diaphanous bodies and transplants of your causality... through every change of your presence, for the other by another, there remain the divergent gauges of thought-provoking absence. The notes you left behind were filled with obscure references to archaic cosmologies, while the images themselves brokered regal doubts... as to where exactly, and when, you danced by starlight in the slaughterhouses. Wondrous ligatures remained...
THE ENCHANTED CALIPERS
“A night left swinging, a night suspended.” Jean-Louis Bédouin
The future is a form of desire. Your eyes the casting of flares over the abyss. Words that charm are the lacerations of Sapphic floods overpowering the motors of the city. Trust is not without its roots of sorcery, or its flowers of betrayal. There is nothing evenly proportioned that grinds radiant colors out of smoke like ravens out of fire. The optical fluids will always flow in the direction of the moon, unless heated to the level of a desirable conflagration: to see is not to see what isn’t there, without blind passion caressed by the velocity of thorns. There is only the conquest through flames, the ravishing fur, and the slaughter among pines, where stars shimmer in the mind like fading rooms. Incantations are tigers, clairvoyance is rain, and consciousness follows suit. You leave by the window of the raptor.
PHASES OF THE LOON
“As strange as it might have seemed, the visitor
had come and gone.” –Eric Bragg
The silvered and tenuous cynosure of lacerated glances that dispel the ashes of a feverish Angelica, (in her blood-shaped gown of nightfall, somnambulant shipwreck) nailed to the rafters in the guise of a compromised royal slave, (the power struggle unbalanced at dawn, the gloating unbearable...) its grand and unreasonable desires, polished beyond reproach... It is her joy that lights the torches, releases the keys dipped in the eyes of ruby, under the fingered and flint-stroked cloak of medicinal cleverness. She understood the last rites and marked them with her black circles, and he (the one who resembles your shadow in the fresh wound) was impeccable down to the most unfashionable of details, and appeared as neither liquid nor breath. Transparency was the bride of the assassin, and the claws of the moon growing poppies in doorways. The wind was a mummy of ether, and the invisible pearl of a last resort is the window through which can be seen the dance of scorpions. The only way out was through reckless abandon. Gates are swinging like sighs...
In the tree of mirrors facing each other, the seeing-eye leaves arrange according to desire the language of flagrant roots, to illuminate the night masks that hunt and haunt, that lacerate the dark aching stones of a glance that deciphers your name and your awkward linage. The secret rendezvous is an indication of identity, when it least expects it, when it moves the fountain of promiscuous water just a fraction of a shadow to the left of your face, veiled by the clamor of words playing. Bright fissures of a clairvoyant embrace. Your mask is a conscious forest, an abandoned city, the fall of clothing from an animal precipice, and a bloodline of glowing worms.
Your reconnaissance is not the sunlight but the mask that looks back at you from the distance of a wishbone that cannot be broken. A multiple of twice. The aleatory rose...
CLOSING REMARKS
“Do not leave the following morning without erasing your name, The glazier is bleeding windows. Do not forget the spreading hives of noon (for the Grand Mirages) and never spill the evening rivers without those painful biographies of gratuitous tinkering and evasive maneuvers that call to you, disturbing the inviolate perfume sleeping out in the dark, reclining, glowing, evolving, humming...”“Do not forget the dusk swinging from your landscape that withers in the fire of your blood-like reflection, leaving shadows everywhere, obscure and redeeming objects speaking in tongues, the brightest weapons. Do not forget those weapons...”
J. Karl Bogartte - 6.17.09
..................