Bee

If questioning would make us wise No eyes would ever gaze in eyes; If all our tale were told in speech No mouths would wander each to each. Were spirits free from mortal mesh And love not bound in hearts of flesh No aching breasts would yearn to meet And find their ecstasy complete. For who is there that lives and knows The secret powers by which he grows? Were knowledge all, what were our need To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?. Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why" I love you now until I die. For I must love because I live And life in me is what you give. ------------------- by Christopher Brennan

Open the window and you want to fly out, though you never actually do— I think I see you, still there on the ledge, where I've left you. How pulled-awake and flung can one life be? Again I thought, It will end. Again I promised and clung. I learned there that to cling was in my nature. I think I see you, though you flash quickly through the shutter. I think I hear you, though I sleep. Remember this as a bolero, a finite flaring— both the tulip tree burning in full bloom and the weeping silver birch. by Jennifer Tonge

Lordship is the same activity Whether performed by lord or lady. Or a lord who happens to be a lady, All the source and all the faults. A woman steadfast in looking is a callot, And any woman in the wrong place Or outside of her proper location Is, by definition, a foolish woman. The harlot is talkative and wandering By the way, not bearing to be quiet, Not able to abide still at home, Now abroad, now in the streets, Now lying in wait near the corners, Her hair straying out of its wimple. The collar of her shift and robe Pressed one upon the other. She goes to the green to see to her geese, And trips to wrestling matches and taverns. The said Margery left her home In the parish of Bishopshill, And went to a house, the which The witness does not remember, And stayed there from noon Of that day until the darkness of night. But a whip made of raw hippopotamus Hide, trimmed like a corkscrew, And anon the creature was stabled In her wits as well as ever she was biforn, And prayed her husban...

Sunset backlights some pine to...a caped sponge and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch, no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange drawing a rope, horizon's doubledutch. Mina Loy + Arthur Cravan As blood hits the air & goes red, so I burst outside exhilarated. He has thrown a tippet on the double-bass, which rests on its end-pin the way a singer rests on a glittering stiletto while the other foot slips on a banan—piano. The strings are not the electrified wires of a prison camp, but she's the instrument of his escape, leaving me to educate my feelings, subtracting the red from night til a winebottle dawns green. Leonora Carrington + Max Ernst I saw the chessplayers over their griddles, all the furor of thinking swallowed like a song in a furred flute; so it must seem when a small daughter disappears with a wife, morning reabsorbed into a lambent priori. Jacqueline Lamba + André Br...

As I drew nearer to the end of all desire, I brought my longing's ardor to a final height, Just as I ought. My vision, becoming pure, Entered more and more the beam of that high light That shines on its own truth. From then, my seeing Became too large for speech, which fails at a sight Beyond all boundaries, at memory's undoing— As when the dreamer sees and after the dream The passion endures, imprinted on his being Though he can't recall the rest. I am the same: Inside my heart, although my vision is almost Entirely faded, droplets of its sweetness come The way the sun dissolves the snow's crust— The way, in the wind that stirred the light leaves, The oracle that the Sibyl wrote was lost. by Dante Alighieri xxxiii, 46-48, 52-66 Translated from the Italian by Robert Pinsky

She awoke to find her fishtail clean gone but in the bed with her were two long, cold thingammies. You'd have thought they were tangles of kelp or collops of ham. "They're no doubt taking the piss, it being New Year's Eve. Half the staff legless with drink and the other half playing pranks. Still, this is taking it a bit far." And with that she hurled the two thingammies out of the room. But here's the thing she still doesn't get— why she tumbled out after them arse-over-tip... How she was connected to those two thingammies and how they were connected to her. It was the sister who gave her the wink and let her know what was what. "You have one leg attached to you there and another one underneath that. One leg, two legs... A-one and a-two... Now you have to learn what they can do." In the long months that followed, I wonder if her heart fell the way her arches fell, her instep arches. by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Translated from the Irish by Paul Muldoo...

You couldn’t pack a Broadwood half a mile— You mustn’t leave a fiddle in the damp— You couldn’t raft an organ up the Nile, And play it in an Equatorial swamp. I travel with the cooking-pots and pails— I’m sandwiched ’tween the coffee and the pork- And when the dusty column checks and tails, You should hear me spur the rearguard to a walk! With my‘Pilly-willy-winky-winky-popp!’ [Oh, it’s any tune that comes into my head!] So I keep ’em moving forward till they drop; So I play ’em up to water and to bed. In the silence of the camp before the fight, When it’s good to make your will and say your prayer, You can hear my strumpty-tumpty overnight, Explaining ten to one was always fair. I’m the Prophet of the Utterly Absurd, Of the Patently Impossible and Vain— And when the Thing that Couldn’t has occurred, Give me time to change my leg and go again. With my ‘Tampa-tumpa-tumpa-tumpa-tump!’ In the desert where the dung-...