A CONVERSATION WITH A.
if you forget time
how old are you then
in the ears you accept music
only in a certain place
the voice you wait for
at the end always kills you
how old are you then
in the ears you accept music
only in a certain place
the voice you wait for
at the end always kills you
there is nothing new for you
you rotate by the law of sweetness
and so you create more lives
the fiction that you exist somewhere else as well
it turns you against me
something is painful in Divano bar*
you rotate by the law of sweetness
and so you create more lives
the fiction that you exist somewhere else as well
it turns you against me
something is painful in Divano bar*
lots of antique clocks
with different numbers and needles
have weightlessness
the room is empty
(a waiter should not exist)
still life
and the swaths of
withered flowers
heavy fumes
for easy life
take you back to axiom topics
such knowledge does not give much hope
do you think sometimes about Poe
with different numbers and needles
have weightlessness
the room is empty
(a waiter should not exist)
still life
and the swaths of
withered flowers
heavy fumes
for easy life
take you back to axiom topics
such knowledge does not give much hope
do you think sometimes about Poe
his dark world
did not leave secrets
did not leave secrets
everyone loses wife
and dresses her again
using the measures of the previous one
in this world no one is innocent
in dot of fogging
we become incomplete and outraged
when you find a dream
it turns off after some time
like the little candle in church
you've lit because of it
you see
eyes turn
circle cracks
irregularity leads
it turns off after some time
like the little candle in church
you've lit because of it
you see
eyes turn
circle cracks
irregularity leads
*A cafe in the town of Vranje, Serbia
--tr. Danijela Trajković
Angel Footfalls [illustration of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"] -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I asked myself — “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death — was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious — “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
ReplyDelete--Edgar Allan Poe
When Edgar Allan Poe was 27 he married his 13-year-old 1st cousin Virginia Clemm (she claimed to be 21). She was named after a 2-year-old sister who had died 10 days before her own birth. When she was 7 she met Edgar 4 months after his 1st discharge from the army. (He had enlisted as "Edgar A. Perry" and claimed to be 22 though he was actually 18; in 2 years he had attained the highest noncommissioned rank but revealed the truth about his identity in order to get out of his 5-year enlistment and go to the West Point military academy instead. But after 6 months he pleaded not guilty to charges of gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church -- he knew he would be found guilty and be dismissed. But his court martial allowed him to pursue writing as a full-time career, the 1st American to do so successfully.) His publisher claimed that Poe's "love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty." However, after a decade of marriage, as Virginia's health failed, he began a flirtation with a 34-year-old poet, Frances Sargent Osgood who was at the time estranged from her husband. He temporarily gave up alcohol to curry Osgood's favor, and the 2 wrote poems to each other. They may have had a child together, who died when she was 4 months old. The affair led to a fistfight between the poet and Osgood's brother (which they both claimed to have won), and the relationship ended when the Osgoods reconciled. When Virginia's tuberculosis made her an invalid Edgar claimed, "Each time I felt all the agonies of her death -- and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive -- nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." She died at 24 in 1847 after 5 years of illness and Poe began drinking again. He died 2 years later, 4 days after being found delirious on a street in Baltimore, Maryland.
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