windless

Press your lips

to the door

the day is windless.

Skin of unbroken water

broken by dogs

blackly opening the door

of the water.

history images (last dreams before waking)

In rivers north of the future

I cast the net you

haltingly weight

with stonewritten

shadows

Paul Celan

parody and delerium

25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments

Parody and delierium. One must be born in Husi to smell the poison of melencholy that eats into mind and soul. One must be born in Husi, where even the crows turn back, to grasp this dream of glory of the native land, to understand this nightmare. Madness is left, becuase only in madness can one overturn, if for a moment, the order of the world that gives not a damn for Husi. - Andrzej Stasiuk -(On the Road to Babadag)

31.

Via here

Today I live on an Island, in a house which is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a shere rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of a prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison. - Curzio Malaparte

and here

Almost. Everything.

Almost. Everything.

It is almost too beautiful

this morning. The world

has begun again.

How long has it been

since I heard the sound

of the wind or saw, dizzied

the tallest heads of grass

scuttled all at once in the sun?

I almost fainted.

It is almost as if

I have come to this place unaware

of what will happen to me.

As if someone had ushered me

through a dark doorway, and now,

having placed before me this sea

of images, turns to leave,

saying, you will lose everything.

heartbreak hotel

Midnight

Midnight

It is another year gone by

the last rain still clinging

to the leaves, cicadas

all of a sudden

overpowering the evening.

Entering the church you

pass the white glimpse of a priest

and a man holding, alarmingly

for a moment, the life-sized body

of a toy child. Wet your head.

Sit beside someone else –

so timid and what? young enough?

With her practical shoes, her

bare, blemished legs beneath a blue skirt.

Shake hands when it is time.

Look her in the eye. Forget

her face almost instantly.

You are dying of thirst and drunker

than you wanted to be. Before you,

in the glow of candles and weak neon

the Priest speaks like a man

drowning in air.

What he wants he cannot quite say.

What we all want we cannot say.

Leave early. Go out into the dark.

Drive home. The revolving light.

There are madmen on the streets and

police and they speak

without making any sound

on the other side of the glass.

the dynamically sublime (take me with you)

summer

Olafur Eliasson - Beauty

Summer

The rain dizzies us and at night

forgives even us and trembles

at the edge of the world.

A sheath of water thrown over

the darkness.

Somewhere

a rough sliding door opens

or thunder.

dear sebald (18 May 1944 - 14 December 2001)

W. G. (Max) Sebald, the acclaimed German author swerved into oncoming traffic and was killed ten years ago today, in Norfolk, near his home in Norwich, East Anglia. He was fifty seven years old, and, not that it matters I suppose, a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. An excellent discussion of his work and influence can be located at the blog Vertigo and at the beautiful incongruity that is Five Dials.