Marianna Mercouri
from Athens, Greece
Μάριαν..
Cold and final, the imagination
Shuts down its fabled summer house;
Blue views are boarded up; our sweet vacation
Dwindles in the hour-glass. Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair
Tangling in the tide's green fall
Now fold their wings like bats and disappear
Into the attic of the skull. We are not what we might be; what we are
Outlaws all extrapolation
Beyond the interval of now and here:
White whales are gone with the white ocean. A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack
Of kaleidoscope shells
Probing fractured Venus with a stick
Under a tent of taunting gulls. No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone
That chucks in backtrack of the wave;
Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,
A grain of sand is all we have. Water will run by; the actual sun
Will scrupulously rise and set;
No little man lives in the exacting moon
And that is that, is that, is that.
-Sylvia Plath
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God's lioness, How one we grow, Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to The brown arc Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye Berries cast dark Hooks --
Black sweet blood mouthfuls, Shadows. Something else
Hauls methrough air -- Thighs, hair; Flakes from my heels.
White Godiva, I unpeel -- Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. The child's cry
Melts in the wall. And I Am the arrow,
The dew that flies Suicidal, at one with the drive Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning
-Sylvia Plath
_-_The_Girl_With_The_Pearl_Earring_(1665).jpg)
I cannot make speeches, Emma," he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing. "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it. Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover. But you understand me. Yes, you see, you understand my feelings -- and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear, once to hear your voice." --Emma,J.A
"Careless of her happiness, thinking only of my own amusement, giving way to feelings which he had always been too much in the habit of indulging, I endeavored, by every means in my power, to make myself pleasing to her, without any design of returning her affections
-Sense and Sensibility , J.A