Thursday, December 13, 2018

Michael Brownstein writes


THUMBPRINTS



currants of color
as in spices and herbs,
as in safety and ginger—
currents of water
have a way with words, too,
paddlefish, large mouth bass,
tiny vertebrae, bottom feeders



when the weather comes in,
mixing metaphors,
birch and mullein slip
deeper into the stream
and somewhere else color rises,
currant and current,
the scent of opium in tea
Castor and Pollution
 Castor and Pollution -- Max Ernst

1 comment:

  1. The smell of opium is "the most intelligent of all odors," claimed Pablo Picasso. "Apart from the wheel, opium is man's only discovery." In 1953 he told jean Cocteau, "Opium promotes benevolence. The smoker lacks greed. He wants everyone else to smoke, too."

    Castor and Pollux (known as Polydeuces to the Greeks) gave aid to shipwrecked sailors and brought favorable winds to those who made sacrifices to them. When their fellow Argonauts were endangered by a storm at sea Orpheus played his harp and prayed to the gods, the storm immediately ceased, and stars appeared on the twins' heads; the stars were interpreted as St. Elmo's fire, a weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a coronal discharge from a grounded object in an electric field in the atmosphere, such as those generated by thunderstorms created by a volcanic eruption. (St. Elmo, the Italian name of St. Erasmus of Formiae, is the Christian patron saint of sailors.) In one version of the death of Castor, Zeus allowed his immortal brother to share his fate: on one day Castor would dwell in Hades and Pollux on Mt. Olympos with the gods, and the next day they would change places.







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