March 2009 Archives

“Lift up your head, let
Comfort come through the devil’s clouds,
The nightmare’s mist
Suspended from the devil’s precipice,
Let comfort come slowly, lift
Up your hand to stroke the light,
Its honeyed cheek, soft-talking mouth,
Lift up the blinds over the blind eyes.”

—Dylan Thomas, “Lift up your face”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

“(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,
The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning
Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,
Let the wax disk babble
Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.
These are your years’ recorders. The circular world stands still.)”

—Dylan Thomas, “I, in my intricate image”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

“The sun was red, the moon was grey,
The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.”

—Dylan Thomas, “From love’s first fever to her plague”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

“Light, I know, treads the ten million stars,
And blooms in the Hesperides. Light stirs
Out of the heavenly sea onto the moon’s shores.
Such light shall not illuminate my fears
And catch a turnip ghost in every cranny.”

—Dylan Thomas, “Light, I know, treads the ten million stars”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

“Children of darkness got no wings,
This we know, we got no wings,
Stay, in a circle chalked upon the floor,
Waiting all vainly this we know.”

—Dylan Thomas, “Children of darkness got no wings”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

“And, as we watch, the rainbow’s foot
Stamps on the ground,
A legendary horse with hoof and feather,
Impatient to be off.”

—Dylan Thomas, “Rain cuts the place we tread”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

“Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue”

—Dylan Thomas, “Prologue”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

“The pencil I’m writing with is yellow, with the numeral 2. I want to note the tools I’m using, just for the record. . . .
    I have my paper, legal size, white with blue lines. I want to write ten thousand pages. But already I see that I’m repeating myself. I’m repeating myself.”

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 2003.

“He looked for poems of four, five, six lines. He scrutinized such poems, thinking into every intimation, and his feelings seemed to float in the white space around the lines. There were marks on the page and there was the page. The white was vital to the soul of the poem.”

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 2003.

“How do we know anything? How do we know the wall we’re looking at is white? What is white?”

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 2003.

“Each evening, ’bout the time for daylight to die
Each evening, ’bout the time when nighttime is nigh
Comes a feeling
Such a lonely feeling

It finds me anywhere I happen to be
Reminds me, ain’t nobody bluer than me
What a feeling
Such a lonely feeling

I pray to heaven, O lord what can I do?
But soon, soon as the evening sun goes down
I’m blue

Blue and wrapped up in sorrow
Blue like there’s no tomorrow
Empty and discontented
With life’s indigo hue

Each morning, I try to greet the day with a smile
By evening, after laying low for a while
Comes a feeling
Such a lonely feeling

I’m blue
I’m blue
I’m blue”

—Gildo Mahones (lyrics) and Jon Hendricks, “Blue,” recorded by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross in 1959.

“Above him shone the light, large, clinical and fierce. No furniture, just whitewashed walls, quite close all around, and the gray steel door, a smart charcoal gray, the color you see on clever London houses. There was nothing else. Nothing at all. Nothing to think about, just the savage pain.”

—John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, 1963.

“Your lips were like a red and ruby chalice, warmer than the summer night.
The clouds were like an alabaster palace rising to a snowy height.
Each star its own aurora borealis, suddenly you held me tight,
I could see the midnight sun. . . .

Was there ever such a night, it’s a thrill I still don’t quite believe,
But after you were gone, there was still some stardust on my sleeve.

The flame of it may dwindle to an ember, and the stars forget to shine,
And we may see the meadow in December, icy white and crystalline.
But oh my darling always I’ll remember when your lips were close to mine,
And we saw the midnight sun.”

—Johnny Mercer (lyrics), Lionel Hampton and Sunny Burke (music), “Midnight Sun,” 1947. The lyrics were written subsequent to the instrumental. “Johnny Mercer was driving along the freeway from Palm Springs to Hollywood, California, when he heard the instrumental on his car radio and started to set words to the song as he drove,” according to Wikipedia.

“I was walking along minding my business
When love came and hit me in the eye
Flash! Bam! Alakazam!
Out of an orange colored sky.”

—Milton DeLugg & Willie Stein, “Orange Colored Sky,” 1950.

“WE WILL DYE THE HANDS OF EACH CITIZEN WITH A DIFFERENT COLOR, he said. AND WILL THIS WAY DISCOVER WHO HAS BEEN PUTTING THEIRS BEHIND HERZOG’S COUNTER.
    Lippa R’s were dyed blood red. Pelsa G’s the light green of her eyes. Mica P’s a subtle purple, like the silver of sky above the Radziwell Forest’s tree line when the sun set for the third Shabbos of that November. No hands or hues were exempt. To be fair, even Herzog J’s were dyed, the pink of a particular Troides helena butterfly that happened to have died on the desk of Dickie D, the chemist who invented the chemical that couldn’t be washed off, but would leave smears on whatever the dyed hands touched.”

—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, 2002.

“The station was not ordinary, because there were blue and yellow papers from the ceiling. They were there for the first birthday of the new constitution. This did not make me so proud, but I was appeased that the hero should view them when disembarking the train from Prague. He would obtain an excellent picture of our country. Perhaps he would think that the yellow and blue papers were for him, because I know that they are the Jewish colors.”

—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, 2002.

“A lantern on a moonlit night is extravagance indeed, but Seijuro far surpassed this by burning lights during the very brightness of the noonday sun.”

—Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman, 1692.

I’m not gay, but if I was, this would be very sexy for me.