The strength to resist

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93), November later afternoon, Stapleton Park, Leeds (1880s)

Outside an order
I calm within
Yet my soul in shambles

Friends, I wish I could write poetry like this whose lines make beautiful what my haiku condenses:

Crepuscular

(after Baudelaire)

The insinuating dusk, friend of all outlaws,
is here like a conspirator or as a wolf will pause
as it lopes; dark and light pass in the sky’s revolving doors,
our beast’s teeth lengthen like white buds in our jaws.

Twilight, old lover, how I still thirst for you
together with those whose hands can say and mean it too
today we laboured, O blue draught that grants relief
to the mind that is tom at by a feral grief:
the dogged visionary with his forehead of stone,
the screen-shrunk wage slave who straphangs home alone.
Meanwhile, in the infested air, astral parasites
rise like any cufflinked puppets of their appetites
and clatter their plumes on the steel-shuttered shops;
no wind perturbs the streetlights gleaming like sucked cough drops,
beneath which bought love’s flame strokes silver foil
as it releases the antennaed horde of those who toil
along the arcana ofcondemned estates’scrawled stairwells
(writhing like a worin in the city’s poisoned bowels
and turning to its own end all that men can eat,
an enemy assuming that victory’S complete).
Now and then you hear the sizzle of an angel’s wing
from striplit kitchens, the streets’ unhuman yipping,
the tack-tack-tick of the wheels in the gambling den
that flashes and dings like a giant playpen,
while the petty criminals, whose line of business
is just as exacting as a suit’s – and work it is –
are outwitting all locks with agile, godlike hands
so they can join the blazing feast and deck their queens in brands.

In this grave radiance, this fatal Now, my soul
recollects itself as the silent pupil of the whole
roaring vortex where dusk is always coming on,
where night’s trap snaps white necks with teeth of iron
and the sick take the exit for the pit (we’re lovin’ it);
the world is an asylum erected by a scream,
in which each evening one less gouches in his meat
in the comer by the heater where the nobles sit:
all who’ve never known unless in dream
the understanding that life’s holy, mere existence sweet.

— Ned Denny

I lack the actuating power
he provided and must endure
the straining to keep

to (as the man says)
“grave radiance
in this fatal Now.”

Or hold fast.
Jim would’ve put it,
That’s all there is, my you.

Portrait of a Young Woman, a fresco from Pompeii, 1st century CE

This was playing on NPR on the radio (my mother left me) while I was writing this blog:

Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto 2, 2nd movement — with a montage of landscapes

Nearby, Ian alert, Clarycat snuggling in:

I turn to do bills, then read Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzerald: A Life.

Saturday morning, cool, rainy …
Miss Drake