Showing posts with label cento. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cento. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

River Brink - a cento



The stream is brimful in the grassy fringe


stone bridge among the withes


        old as elms.



A thunder of horses stretches up the slope       



        freed from the harness.





Source text:



Saturday, August 20, 2011

Between Being and Becoming

  
Desire marks each of us so differently

no matter how long, how fiercely we love.

Between being and becoming, we fail

so often and in such ordinary ways.



See how the sliding days silt in,

taking our other hundred lives with the water -

each one waiting, having borne us this far,

becoming finned and whole, swimming off.


Silence completes us, simple as those few notes

that answer the dark on a summer night and fall still.







Source text for Cento: selected last lines from Jane Hirshfield's Of Gravity & Angels



Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Scribble the Holy Contour


Scribble everything!

Get drunk with your life, its own visionary tics, the true

story of the world interior – jewel center

of recollection. 

Swim in language,

in the holy contour of life

emblazoned in praise

of wild, undisciplined time.





Bits and pieces culled from Jack Kerouac's 30 Writing Tips

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Raw, Wild Summer


Prey to luminous mornings

  in whose golden pulp
        lay the core of long afternoons

raw      wild      summer
  
  drenched with honey





Cento Source text: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (pages 25 & 26)

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Erasure of Neruda's Epithalamium


At first I did not see you: I did not know
  your           presence:
  
the shouts of the wind in the shadow.


Do you remember

how sleep grew
in you,

      how  
               the wind
  
echoed  

      its secret syllable
  
and all things spoke 

of the seed that half opens?


Your name is on the petals

of the rose that grows on the stone,


       a scarlet mouth  

deciphers your name:
  
    broken window

crazy with light.  





Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Bonewhite light - A Plath Cento


Something else hauls me through air——


Listen: these are its hooves:


A bonewhite light

behind all things.

The low smokes roll from me like Isadora’s scarves.


A life baptized in no-life for a while,


the spirit

escapes like steam.



Tonight it has receded like a ship's light.


I can't get it out of my mind.





*





This is a cento constructed with lines from Sylvia Plath's poems from Ariel: Ariel, Elm, Fever 103, and poems from Crossing the Water: Insomniac, Last Words, The Surgeon at 2 a.m., Zoo keeper's Wife

Saturday, July 17, 2010

The Crescent of Silence is Brimmed - a Neruda collage





When I open the door of night,

the crescent of silence is brimmed.

It is midnight: all around me

death beats on a gong, black water

the screaming of birds in the rain.



Something shoves me toward damp houses, into dark

corners, into hospitals with bones flying out of the windows,

devoured by haze. All things that live

give some part of themselves to the air.



The big breathing encircles me

with its raddle of towering blossoms, mouths

with their teeth black at the root:

a kiss dusky with pitch.







 
 
Phrases and lines from Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 Pablo Neruda, translated by Ben Belitt
Painting: The Water-Sprite and Ägir's Daughters by Nils Johan Olsson Blommér