Interiors by Stephen Dunn

Shadowscapes Tarot - The Queen of Swords (Artist:  Stephanie Pui-Man Law)

 

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"With her blade the Queen of Swords slices through lies and deceptions to the heart of truth. She is honesty and inner knowledge, sending forth her winged seekers into the world. They are an extension of her being and her soul.   The blinding white is the color of purity, honesty, clarity, uncompromised balance; but also of distance, and sometimes death, for sometimes to get to truth one must cast off the old to discard pretense and guile.  The Queen of Swords is an intelligent woman, loyal, witty, and humorous in her forthright way. She is valued for her accurate perceptions of the world around her, and her experiences.  In the language of flowers, purple dragon lilies are symbols of inner strength, and white chrysanthemums of truth." ~from Shadowscapes.com

 

Shadowscapes Tarot - The Hanged Man (Artist:  Stephanie Pui-Man Law)

 

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"Letting go and surrendering to experience and emotional release. Accepting what is, and giving up control, reversing your view of the world and seeing things in a new light. Suspending action. Sacrifice." ~from Shadowscapes.com

 

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Interiors

By Stephen Dunn

In New Orleans, a Bed and Breakfast in a seamy part of

town.  Dentist’s chair the seat of honor in the living room.
Dark, the drapes closed, a lamp’s three-way bulb clicked just
once.  I’m inside someone’s version of inside.  All the guests
looking like they belong.  Muffled hilarity coming from one
of the other rooms.  Paintings everywhere, on the walls, the
floor.  Painted by the proprietress who, on the side, reads the
Tarot.  In her long black gown she doesn’t mind telling me
things look rather dismal.  Something about the Queen of
Swords and the Hanged Man.  I wake early the next morning
for a flight.  5 A.M.  She’s sitting in the dentist’s chair, reading a
book about the end of the century.  Says a man like me needs
a proper breakfast.  Wants to know everything I dreamed.
This, I tell her, I think I dreamed this.
 
From:  “Good Poems, American Places” selected by Garrison Keillor, page 125

 

__________________________

Shotgun House, New Orleans

 

 

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Me:

 

 

Heartbreak & betrayal.

 

 



 

 

From Childhood's Hour by Edgar Allan Poe

Photo from Pinterest.

 

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From Childhood's Hour

Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
 as others were; I have not seen
 as others saw; I could not bring
 my passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
 my sorrow; I could not awaken
 my heart to joy at the same tone;
 and all I loved, I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood, in the dawn
 of a most stormy life—was drawn
 from every depth of good and ill
 the mystery which binds me still:
 from the torrent or the fountain,
 from the red cliff or the mountain,
 from the sun that round me rolled
 in its autumn tint of gold,
 from the lightning in the sky
 as it passed me flying by,
 from the thunder and the storm,
 and the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
 of a demon in my view.

 

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I thought this a perfect Halloween poem from one of my favorite poets.

 

xo,

Marion

 

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

 ~Emily Dickinson

Moonburn by Marge Piercy

Full Moon, 2011

 

(The Full Moon is Friday, October 18)

Moonburn
by Marge Piercy

I stayed under the moon too long.
I am silvered with lust.

Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes.
My voice is trees tossing in the wind.

I loose myself like a flock of blackbirds
storming into your face.

My lightest touch leaves blue prints,
bruises on your mind.

Desire sandpapers your skin
so thin I read the veins and arteries

maps of routes I will travel
till I lodge in your spine.

The night is our fur.
We curl inside it licking.

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A blazing yellow tree on my block taken 11-11-11.

 

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Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life. ~Hal Borland

 

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Why, Indeed?

Found at Pinterest.com

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Even Autumn has vivid colors.  Pink wildflowers in my lawn.

xo,

Marion

October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came,—
The Ashes, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand;
Miss Weather led the dancing;
Professor Wind, the band....
The sight was like a rainbow
New-fallen from the sky....

 ~George Cooper, "October's Party"

A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

Three little wild black kittens in my backyard, posing.  They're very mischievous.

 

 

 

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

By Edgar Allan Poe

 

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone? 
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

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Oh, what a fabulous book!  It had just the right amount of suspense, mystery and horror and the plot was riveting.  I love it when I read a book that makes me want to turn every single page as fast as I can, then, in the end, I don't want it to be over....ever.  This was such a story for me.  It was way better than "The Shining" but to be fair, Mr. King had over 30 years experience under this belt when he wrote this one.  King mentions the above Poe poem several times in the story.  Here's one passage:

 

"What you call double dreaming is well known to psychiatrists, and of particular interest to Jungians, who call it false awakening.  The first dream is usually a lucid dream, meaning the dreamer knows he is dreaming---"

 

"Yes!" Dan cried.  "But the second one---"

 

"The dreamer believes he is awake," Kemmer said.  "Jung made much of this, even ascribing precognitive powers to these dreams...but of course we know better, don't we Dan?"

 

"Of course," Dan had agreed.

 

"The poet Edgar Allan Poe described the false awakening phenomenon long before Carl Jung was born.  He wrote, 'All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.' ....

 

~Stephen King, "Doctor Sleep", page 77

 

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I've had too many of these dreams to count...they're sometimes disturbing and sometimes enlightening, but always fascinating, mainly because I often remember them in detail.  Most dreams I have, I forget a few moments after I wake up. 

 

It's hot and muggy here in the swamp.  We didn't get any rain from tropical storm Karen, but we're supposed to get a cold front through tomorrow night.  I can't wait to drag out my booties (short boots) and scarves.  I've had enough 90-something degree days to last me until next year.  I've been busy reading (of course) and doing some Fall cleaning.  Our stove (oven) died a few months ago and we're shopping around for a new stove.  Gotta have an oven for holiday baking.

 

Happy October, everyone. 

 

xo,

Marion

 

"That old September feeling... of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air.... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes and failures had been wiped clean by summer." ~Wallace Stegner

Gliding Over All - Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass - Breaking Bad

Walt Whitman (1819–1892).  Leaves of Grass.  1900.

271. Gliding Over All

GLIDING o’er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul—not life alone,
Death, many deaths I’ll sing.       __________________________________     A fond, sad farewell to "Breaking Bad".    __________________________________ 

The Necessity for Irony by Eavan Boland

Painting by Toulouse Lautrec.

 

The Necessity for Irony
By Eavan Boland

On Sundays,
when the rain held off,
after lunch or later,
I would go with my twelve year old
daughter into town,
and put down the time
at junk sales, antique fairs.

There I would
lean over tables,
absorbed by
lace, wooden frames,
glass. My daughter stood
at the other end of the room,
her flame-colored hair
obvious whenever—
which was not often—

I turned around.
I turned around.
She was gone.
Grown. No longer ready
to come with me, whenever
a dry Sunday
held out its promises
of small histories. Endings.

When I was young
I studied styles: their use
and origin. Which age
was known for which
ornament: and was always drawn
to a lyric speech, a civil tone.
But never thought
I would have the need,
as I do now, for a darker one:

Spirit of irony,
my caustic author
of the past, of memory,—

and of its pain, which returns
hurts, stings—reproach me now,
remind me
that I was in those rooms,
with my child,
with my back turned to her,
searching—oh irony!—
for beautiful things.

"The Necessity for Irony" by Eavan Boland, from The Lost Land.

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I highly recommend Ms. Boland's anthology, "New Collected Poems" which is where I read this perfect poem just last week.  Her poetry is spectacular.  Ironically, I heard it read on the "Writer's Almanac" segment on NPR this morning, too, so I assumed it wanted to be here.  Synchronicity for a rainy morning. 

 

I awoke after dreaming that I had died and my body was being cremated (as I so wish) and letters, words, sentences, stories were wafting up into the sky (instead of smoke) from my body.  It was a spectacular dream, with no fear or sadness.  Every book, poem, word that I had read was floating into the sky and my spirit with them.  :-)  I love that dream supremely.  It made me very happy.  xo

 

 

 

 

"Let life be as beautiful as summer flowers
And death as beautiful as autumn leaves."
~Rabindranath Tagore

 

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I love you all,

~Marion

 

Books I'm reading this week:

 

"Offshore" by Penelope Fitzgerald

"The Shining" by Stephen King (a re-read before starting the sequel, "Doctor Sleep").

"New Collected Poems" by  Eavan Boland

"The Weight of Small Things" by Sherri Wood Emmons

 

Delicious Autumn - Welcome!

 

Woke up to our first cool, stoned, humidless morning.  It's magically, deliciously delightful.  The heat of summer 2013 put me in a coma-like, zombie-state.  Time to awake now and begin again.  xo

 



 

At Burt Lake
By Tom Andrews

To disappear into the right words
and to be their meanings. . .

October dusk.
Pink scraps of clouds, a plum-colored sky.
The sycamore tree spills a few leaves.
The cold focuses like a lens. . .

 Now night falls, its hair
caught in the lake's eye.

 Such clarity of things. Already
I've said too much. . .

                                  Lord,

language must happen to you
the way this black pane of water,
chipped and blistered with stars,
happens to me.

From:  "The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle" by Tom Andrews, page 13.  (Winner of  'The Iowa Poetry Prize')

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Mistaking Opiates for the Clear Light
By Suzanne Paola

There's always been this confusion with white things---
hospitals, cold, moonlight.
They seemed to embody the will
paralyzed into peaceful acceptance.
Blank paper consecrate
to the end of words:  I love that,
secretly, more than this.
Quaaludes in my palm, rowers, eucharistic form.
Clear bag of heroin.
Stuff, we called it.  Too foundational to define.

*

In a clear bowl, a pear & a pomegranate wizen
into color.  Almost
alive, skins rucking
in on themselves.  Cheeks
sunk, russet
& carmine, seeming
almost to care about this...
Each a countenance
too private for a face, collapsing
in the hard gravity of color.

I was their opposite, pale girl, not living
or dying.  They were
what I feared.

*

I trust in the bardo wisdom:  how the gods,
with their soft white light, draw us in, convince us
their stuporous world is all there is.

I've seen them, slumping
forward, burning themselves with cigarettes.

How grand they were for a while:  their leathers, their etched
            bodies, a stalled
writhing eagle on each arm.
And their nectars, their secret foods, that gave
an easy kind of sensate order.

Though a god's world finally
suffers itself away from him, braille of the tracks
of a thousand needles, transgressions of red
under the skin---

From:  "Bardo" by Suzanne Paola, pages 6, 7 (Winner of "The Brittingham Prize in Poetry")

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Bardo (from Wikipedia):  "Used loosely, the term "bardo" refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions.

For the prepared and appropriately trained individuals the bardo offers a state of great opportunity for liberation, since transcendental insight may arise with the direct experience of reality, while for others it can become a place of danger as the karmically created hallucinations can impel one into a less than desirable rebirth."

Might As Well Face It...

 

Addicted to Love

Songwriter: Robert A. Palmer

 

Your lights are on, but you're not home
Your mind is not your own
Your heart sweats, your body shakes
Another kiss is what it takes
You can't sleep, you can't eat
There's no doubt, you're in deep
Your throat is tight, you can't breathe
Another kiss is all you need

Whoa, you like to think that you're immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough
You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love

You see the signs, but you can't read
You're runnin' at a different speed
Your heart beats in double time
Another kiss and you'll be mine, a one track mind
You can't be saved
Oblivion is all you crave
If there's some left for you
You don't mind if you do

Whoa, you like to think that you're immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough
You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love

Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love
Might as well face it, you're addicted to love

[break]

Your lights are on, but you're not home
Your will is not your own
You're heart sweats, your teeth grind
Another kiss and you'll be mine
Whoa, you like to think that you're immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough
You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love

Might as well face it, you're addicted to love

The Color Master by Aimee Bender - A Glowing Review

 

Read this book.  Read this book.  Read this book.

 

 

Every once in a while I'm fortunate enough to get a book (to my bookaholic, bookslut delight, this one was an Advance Reader's Copy) that blows my mind...not often...not even semi-often, because I'm a jaded reader.  I've been reading since the age of 5...for over 50 years.  My brain is overflowing with words, plots, poems, stories, books, and madness to boot.   And don't ever think that books can't be poetry.  These stories are pure poetic prose.  I read some dark detective novels that are pure poetry (James Lee Burke comes to mind and Robert Crais).

 

But this book of short stories by Aimee Bender is magical and yes, original.  As I said in my Amazon review (the first one under the book):  If you're looking for a book full of stories that will make you see the world around you differently, then this is the book for you. These stories astonished me with their ingenious originality. 

 

I'm going to quote a page from my favorite story, "Tiger Mending":

 

"Watch, Sloane whispered.

 

I stood behind.  The two women from the front walked into view and settled on the ground near some clumps of ferns.  They waited.  They were very still-minded, like my sister, that stillness of mind.  That ability I will never have, to sit still.  That ability to have the hands forget they are hands.  They closed their eyes, and the moaning I'd heard before got louder, and then, in the distance, I mean waaaay off, the moaning grew even louder, almost unbearable to hear, and limping from the side lumbered two enormous tigers.  Wailing as if they were dying.  As they got closer, you could see that their backs were split open, sort of peeled, as if someone had torn them in two.  The fur was matted, and the stripes hung loose, like packing tape ripped off their bodies.  The women did not seem to move, but two glittering needles worked their way out of their knuckles, climbing up out of their hands, and one of the tigers stepped closer.  I thought I'd lose it; he was easily four times the first woman's size, and she was small, a tiger's snack, but he limped over, in his giantness, and fell into her lap.  Let his heavy striped head sink to the ground.  She smoothed the stripe back over, and the moment she pierced his fur with the needle, those big cat eyes dripped over with tears.

 

It was very powerful.  It brought me to tears, too.  Those expert hands, as steady as if he were a pair of pants, while the tiger's enormous head hung to the ground.  My sister didn't move, but I cried and cried, seeing the giant broken animal resting in the lap of the small precise woman.  It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moment..."

 

from:  "The Color Master" by Aimee Bender, pages 34, 35

 

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I'm going to leave you there in hopes you'll buy her book (or get it from your local library) and read the rest of this brilliant story and all the other fabulous stories in this book.  My next favorite is the title story, "The Color Master".  It made me see differently.  Literally SEE with new eyes.  It glows with a rainbow of colors...There are 15 stories in all and each, in its own way, is a startling revelation.

 

We're having an entire rare, stormy, rainy week here in the swamps...perfect reading weather.  School starts here this week, so I also think of this as back-to-school weather...I'm headed off to read more of "Open Field - 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets", an amazing book overflowing with great poetry by my friends from the great frozen North.  I highly recommend it.

 

 

 



 

My favorite poet on earth is from Canada.  ;-)

 

xo,

Marion

 

 

"From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world's life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind's own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened."  ~Helen E. Haines

 

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