Mad Aggregator

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse (8)

2009-07-20T01:19:00.001-07:00

rising smoke

One last morning under the pergola we discussed what had happened in the godhead's crucible, but the berries distracted us, we lost the thread, you touched my hand, and we were smoke.

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse (7)

2009-07-20T00:55:00.001-07:00

Emil Schildt

It was never natural, not cosmic rays unspooling, epic failure of photosynthesis. The lovers were fuse and timer, thrusting seconds home.

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse (6)

2009-07-20T00:28:00.001-07:00

Jason DeMarte

It was natural. Rivers divorced seas under the aegis of ending, tectonic plates shattered against apartment walls, all evolving closure.

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse (5)

2009-07-19T22:07:00.001-07:00

link

It was not human. The bridges into the city were empty at midnight, the trains were silenced, bars dark: one great godflash, and lights out.

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse (4)

2009-07-19T21:39:00.001-07:00

F. Gillette, Cerebrum/Cerebellum Reducere, 2006

It was human. A double knot in the double helix hardwired them not to fate but inevitable accident: one molecule awry, everything collapses.

Re-runs of the Apocalypse (3)

2009-07-19T16:24:00.001-07:00

Alexy Titarenko

It was no one's. A destroying wave passed through Being, positron to pulsar, invisible, unknown to them as they removed each other's skin.

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse (2)

2009-07-19T16:05:00.001-07:00

a voice from the grave

It was not theirs. The boundaries betrayed them. Out of the core of their argument a shape arose, arsenical whirlwind, last word.

Re-Runs of the Apocalypse (1)

2009-07-19T15:43:00.001-07:00

skeleton lovers

It was theirs. They stood by the water at dusk, lovers scarred by the violence of their alchemy, transmuting the darkness at the skyline.

Biography of Eros (7)

2009-07-17T23:44:00.001-07:00

John William Waterhouse

Entropy, etiolation, emptiness: Nothing left but the bed, and the lovers on the bed, and the galaxy surrounding them, dark matter ascendant.

Biography of Eros (6)

2009-07-17T22:28:00.001-07:00

Emil Schildt

Inside the penumbra there was no dying--death, yes, always, but no motion except the back and forth of the body, the thrust, and the scream.

Biography of Eros (5)

2009-07-17T22:13:00.001-07:00

BibliOdyssey

In the dream words were absence. An empty book had contained all truth but for one false letter. He, or was it she, read the other's shadow.

Biography of Eros (4)

2009-07-17T21:56:00.001-07:00

William Blake

They knew it was insanity, and accepted it, but differently. One thought: madness, endlessly. The other thought: madness, finally.

Biography of Eros (3)

2009-07-17T21:44:00.001-07:00

link
They wore raptor masks. One used a small flexible whip. Its marks were radiant traces of ichor. Thus the walls of the sanctum were broken.

Biography of Eros (2)

2009-07-17T21:17:00.001-07:00

Vlad Gansovsky

Sleeping, one of them moaned. It was the dream of the interpenetration of souls. Death is in everything, crystalline arsenic dissolved in alcohol.

Biography of Eros (1)

2009-07-17T18:31:00.001-07:00

link
The witnessing of things in the mind. But what mind? The lovers lay on the bed, handcuffed, saying Please, and just for a moment he knew.

Assimilation (7)

2009-06-28T15:31:00.001-07:00

Declan McCullagh

He now remembers the path forgotten all his life: it leads to a ruined door through which everything vanishes, even the key that opens it.

Assimilation (6)

2009-06-27T22:27:00.001-07:00

sirocco

Human emotion reduced him; every passion wore off a layer of skin, every rage took a subsection of organ. Eroded, he walked through walls.

Assimilation (5)

2009-06-27T16:39:00.001-07:00

bincabonca

Part of him was lost,two fingers from the right hand. His music suffered. When he played the piano, there was a shadow in the treble, a deadness.

Assimilation (4)

2009-06-27T14:33:00.001-07:00

Chiharu Shiota

The walls of the house have thickened, the rooms grown smaller; the foyer is just the size of a mailbox, and he gropes there for his bills.

Assimilation (3)

2009-06-27T12:41:00.001-07:00

Javier Marin

What he touched penetrated skin and clung, but he did not want to release the pen, sofa, wallet: they defined him as the boundaries faded.

Assimilation (2)

2009-06-27T11:47:00.001-07:00

Jake Longstreth

Lovers had become landscape--the woman he knew that ancient summer was lost in a hedgerow, flowering, leaving, framing what could be seen.

Assimilation (1)

2009-06-27T00:03:00.001-07:00

bas princen, photography

Even his fingerprints vanished. His skin smoothed like river stone; his grip on the world diminished. He was sliding someplace frictionless.

Observatory (8)

2009-06-25T11:52:00.001-07:00

aknacer

Over great distance, the mechanism flattens what it reveals: dark matter, an arc of stars, under an arch of oak limbs the lovers, made one.

Observatory (7)

2009-06-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

soap bubble

Light gathers in the perfect lens. Its restlessness is such that it cannot remain there, even in perfection: it moves to clarify or destroy.

Observatory (6)

2009-06-24T23:40:00.001-07:00

Mark Lawrence

Two lenses moved randomly in her mind until they fell into the right relation. She saw him clearly then, and cursed the perfection of focus.

Observatory (5)

2009-06-24T10:04:00.001-07:00

black hole

Safe in the great dome, at the end of the tube, she watched her lover at a great distance enter the black hole, and the universe imploding.

Observatory (4)

2009-06-24T00:28:00.001-07:00

anonymous

Tiny figure against the expanse of firmament, seen through the magnifying gaze of something godlike with a cross-hair and an ounce of lead.

Observatory (3)

2009-06-23T22:53:00.000-07:00

Ergül Cengiz

We lifted the brass tube: moons came into being, planetary rings, such distances that our bodies faded to shadows in the obliterating lens.

Observatory (2)

2009-06-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

Stanko Abadžic

A bountiful harvest season, everything ripening at the decisive moment, whole galaxies tipped like so many apples beyond the event horizon.

Observatory

2009-06-23T15:15:00.001-07:00

Silke Otto-Knapp

Clear night sky scribbled to the margin with stars--that's the problem: everything is written, no room even for a black hole. And God reads.

Empty House (8)

2009-06-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

Beth Dow

Soon, but not yet, the incremental creaking of hinges, the end of molecular bonding, release of form: shapelessness in the door frame, soon.

Empty House (7)

2009-06-07T23:57:00.000-07:00

Vincent Desidero

That characteristic turbulence, elemental disturbance in the aether, the tureen vibrating on the sideboard invisibly in the vacant hallway.

Empty House (6)

2009-06-06T23:00:00.001-07:00

Rod McRae

A crack at the center, where even the intelligence of cockroaches was tested: rain eroded the foundation and a simple domesticity entered.

Empty House (5)

2009-06-06T22:00:00.000-07:00

Andy Smylie

The cleaning finally ended. If there were beds, they would never be made; dishes would stay stained in eternity, and gravity be abolished.

Empty House (4)

2009-06-06T13:10:00.001-07:00

Bibliodessey

After the journey, months of wandering through landscapes of bone and salt, we came at last to prairie, a rotting expanse of Persian carpet.

Empty House (3)

2009-06-06T11:10:00.001-07:00

Empty Room

In a bathroom drawer there are artifacts: molecules of talcum, dried smear of cat's blood, a lingering odor of unidentifiable ointment.

Empty House (2)

2009-06-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

CanisLupusMoon

A wind in the desolation of the closet, incremental movement like the shifting of tectonic plates, while in the wall a mouse skull settles.

Empty House (1)

2009-06-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

Wendy Burton

Silence in the house, people gone out, cats sleeping, leafblowers put away, the half life of the crawl space ticking down toward zero.

Schematic (7)

2009-05-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

divorce cake

The train enters the tunnel, great piston breaches the oily cylinder, clockwork tide driven to foam on the rocks, and the marriage is over.

Schematic (6)

2009-05-21T16:44:00.000-07:00

Collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing

A rat in the dark attic at midnight, bolt-cutter teeth incising insulation. Black wire, red wire. A spark. The pianist's hands stop playing.

Schematic (5)

2009-05-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

Walter Anderson

Wreckage washed ashore, fragments of fuselage and cowling, seat backs, oxygen masks, and hermit crabs remade themselves of metal and bone.

Schematic (4)

2009-05-18T14:59:00.001-07:00

Da Vinci

Under the hood where gear meshes integer, in the hamster wheel of the heart, a singularity appears, an homunculus, a social security number.

Schematic (3)

2009-05-18T11:27:00.001-07:00

Space Elevator

The elevator kept trembling: the mechanism out of key: but the riders held their eyes fixed on the dial, the reassuring arbitrary numbers.

Schematic (2)

2009-05-18T10:20:00.001-07:00

19th Century Automaton Dancer

The steel ratchet in the wind: she felt it against her corneas, pressing precisely into the metric eye sockets, turning, tightening.

Schematic (1)

2009-05-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

19th century pregnant doll

Inside the machine is another machine which refers to the machine enclosing it. So he touches her hand, and the image of a child emerges.

Interrogations (9)

2009-05-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

illuminated ms, hat tip Bibliodyssey

That singular point on the continuum from which time reads like an inscribed transparency: just ahead, the hospital bed, the miraculous IV.

Interrogations (8)

2009-05-16T15:07:00.000-07:00

Sassanid king Khosrau II (591-628 CE) mounted on his favorite charger, Shabdiz

Horses in a meadow over strata of loess and limestone, reflections limned through the meniscus of earth by fossilized skeletons of dolphins.

Interrogations (7)

2009-05-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

Falling

In pinewoods at midnight the trapped weasel gnawing its own leg stops to consider its bitter self-taste.

Interrogations (6)

2009-05-16T00:25:00.001-07:00

Dying, by then, seemed normal to her, a breath and another breath and nothing, a stone dropped in water continuing in water to be a stone.

Falling Through Time

Interrogations (5)

2009-05-16T00:10:00.000-07:00

19th Century Engraving, Unattributed

They sat on the bridge rail drinking wine in starlight, watching for meteors to etch their glass-cutter lineage into what passed for future.

Interrogations (4)

2009-05-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

Leonardo da Vinci

She pauses on the bridge and looks down. Something about the way water moves, about light. But the child pulls her skirt, crying time, time.

Interrogations (3)

2009-05-15T15:41:00.001-07:00

Aminesh Ray

The old woman in the wheelchair watched raindrops inscribe the window. She read its poem to her blind friend, who mumbled protest: too fast.

Interrogations (2)

2009-05-15T14:52:00.001-07:00

Larry Landolfi, Milky Way

At dawn the astronomer closed his dome. The morning star incised the horizon with a smell of lilies and a circle of blood on the eyepiece.

Interrogations (1)

2009-05-15T13:09:00.000-07:00

Giles Penny http://bit.ly/Z9QOg?r=td

At dinner, he sat silent, staring at his plate while the others chatted--a ringing in his ears, a gray aura around the chop, sulfurous mist.

Singularities (9)

2009-04-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

Mary Jo Aardsma

One moment under the steel sky a falcon gyred, then stalled in his striding on a ripple in the locus: then a spray of neutrinos: then void.

Singularities (8)

2009-04-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

Harry Clarke

The vortex on the pond where the water strider had been was the sign not of the something that took it but of the nothing that did not.

Singularities (7)

2009-04-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

Alon A

The carnival of apocatastasis rolls into the galaxy not an eon too soon, setting up its canopy over the abyss so the sun can go out dancing.

Singularities (6)

2009-04-06T17:35:00.000-07:00

Cabinet of Wonders

We went to doctors; we went to priests; we ate strange powders, drank potions, fasted. When we died, our fever modulated into the key of sulphur.

Singularities (5)

2009-04-05T22:26:00.000-07:00

Pompeii Dog

A nameless light in the night sky; the animal howls, gnaws his chain, and dies, not knowing the loss of the word "dog," the name "Pompeii."

Singularities (4)

2009-04-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

Henry Fuseli

When the monkey she'd let in her bed revealed himself, she saw the problem with the Great Chain of Being was not the being, but the chain.

Singularities (3)

2009-04-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

audkawa

The grandmother told a story as they walked, of a girl walking with her grandmother into the forest where a wolf and a girl told a story.

Singularities (2)

2009-04-05T17:45:00.000-07:00

Cornell Tilly

The labyrinth of gravity solved simply by converting string theory to thread, she slew the minotaur of density and floated out of history.

Singularities (1)

2009-04-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

Mike Worrall

The work was done in her tiny garden dark with the shadow of an office building that lay over her peonies like a bruise or an event horizon.

Canon (8)

2009-04-01T19:23:00.000-07:00

The steps of death

The slaves brought stones from a quarry; they were made to shape them, pile them up, and ascend, blindfold, the stairway of their own sweat.

Canon (7)

2009-04-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

Kristin Bjornerud

They wrote a wall in the forest; ages they raised it, letter by letter, and in the end they stood behind it, but the enemy was illiterate.

Canon (6)

2009-04-01T18:11:00.001-07:00

Elaine Ling

All she found was vital, anything en masse a collection. After years, from the massed material (string, paper, dust), the house mutated.

Canon (5)

2009-04-01T15:58:00.001-07:00

Theodoor Galle

She was reading a book on the bus: soldiers, betrayals, executions; it absorbed her as the bullet smashed the window just before her stop.

Canon (4)

2009-04-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

Caspar Plautius

He might have slept, but the thump of blades on wood startled him, and the muffled screams ahead, and the fighting not to lose his place in line.

Canon (3)

2009-04-01T14:55:00.000-07:00

Filippo Morghen

What he had constructed contained all the necessary elements for levitation, but his ascension was thwarted by an opaque cloud of words.

Canon (2)

2009-04-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

Andrea Dezso

On a shelf above the Ark, where a cherub, deploying tamed cyclones, supervised the dusting, God set his beloved collection of shrunken heads.

Canon

2009-04-01T10:50:00.001-07:00

John Aldridge

Moonlight through the harp cast a shadow of the angel gathering poems from the desktop, sucking their souls through to Poetry.

Penultimate

2009-03-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

Alberto Savinio

Once we imploded the world enlarged, eroding every trace that anything had vanished, rain reclaiming our very atoms the better not to mourn us.

Civilians

2009-03-30T18:11:00.001-07:00

Xul Solar

We were carrying bags from the grocer, polishing hammers, playing cards, dreaming of lost bodies, when the effacing brilliance distracted us.

A Cloud of Dust

2009-03-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

Abraham Bosse

Impossible not to forget the beautiful men, the children clever at their books, women full of wisdom, dead, my own body vaporized, my nation.

A Living

2009-03-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Judith Schaechter

Before they burned the bodies, they killed them; before they killed them they tortured them; before they tortured them, they gave them jobs.

Post

2009-03-30T13:05:00.001-07:00

Crispin de Passe (1564-1637)

The lovers dressed, pulling underwear from under the chaise, stockings from the mantle, fur from bushes, hiding their feelers, hooves, horns.

Quitting Time

2009-03-30T12:12:00.001-07:00

Giacomo Brunelli

The final radiance arrives: everyone ossifies, tipping statues undercut by erosion, skeletons in derelict museums punching out, departing.

Knights of the Golden Dawn

2009-03-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

Jaroš Griemiller of Třebsko

Under the bridge, the alchemy of sunrise is failing in its ancient transmutation, carbon dioxide and mercury sloughing off molecules of shit.

Day Labor

2009-03-30T10:28:00.001-07:00

photo by Abdalrahem Alarjan

They threw the bodies down the stairs, opened the warehouse door, rolled them inside, where the dead were logging hours on the loading dock.

Morning Executions

2009-03-30T09:45:00.001-07:00

Charles-Frédéric Soehnée

It was like a hanging: being marched along streets with others, through great institutional doors, up stairs, to a desk, the groaning inbox.

Aptitude

2009-03-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

A box of coins: One my fate, one my face, the others counterfeit. I close my eyes, reach in, choose: wrong, yes, but so it had been written.

It's A Living

2009-03-29T21:12:00.001-07:00

The slum in the heart of the flower, alley in the slum, door in the alley: in a grimy room, the homunculus sits, crippled, selling a flower.

On Break

2009-03-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

Walking the shining hallway to the toilet, the busboy tripped over a marble head with a disgusted face, a patron who refused to leave a tip.

Michelin 3 Stars

2009-03-29T14:28:00.001-07:00

Claudia X. Valdes. Tests. Suite of 12 watercolors on paper, 2006. 11 x 16 in. each.

Entropy broke through the cafe window, tipping a dish of cornichon, blinding the waiter with its radiation, emptying the diners' wallets.

It's Really a Simple Operation, Jig, They Just Let the Air In and Then it's All Perfectly Natural

2009-03-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

As he went under anesthesia, the stockbroker dreamed the money he'd stolen had written itself into a poem, and the poem into an epitaph.

Evolution of Faith

2009-03-28T23:45:00.001-07:00

No one believed in demons, which made the exorcism a great success: there was dance, drink, and the guest of honor bleeding from the mouth.

Signing the Lien

2009-03-28T20:13:00.001-07:00

Signing the lien, he felt a twinge in his abdomen, as if someone were writing his own name on his belly with a pen of white phosphorus.

Cleaning Day

2009-03-28T19:51:00.001-07:00

We knew it was the day they clean the crematorium, but we pretended to be surprised that the rain smelled of ointment, hair oil, and lymph.

The Man with a Headache

2009-03-28T19:45:00.001-07:00

The man with a headache reached into his mind and extracted a bit of shrapnel, which, examined, was the clone of a passage from Bach.

Sprawl

2009-03-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

The space where reader meets poem is a wrecked zone in the ruin of cultural memory, in the ghetto on the south side of the medulla oblongata.

Sprawl

The Centrifuge of the Muse

2009-03-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

To extract the enzyme that carries the poem from the mind of the reader to the mind of the body politic requires the centrifuge of the muse.

Black Square

Strand

2009-03-23T15:46:00.000-07:00

Poetry is one strand spun in the double helix of the DNA of the body politic; each poem is a molecule thereof.

Clark Little's wave photographs.

Ruins

2009-03-22T23:17:00.000-07:00

The space where reader meets poem is a wrecked zone in the ruin of cultural memory, in the ghetto on the south side of the medulla oblongata.

New England Ruins

Rent-A-Ghost

2009-03-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

Between Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen" and Milosz's "What good is a poetry that does not change nations" walk the ghosts of all poems.

Rent-A-Ghost

Extremophile

2009-03-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

The fact of the poem is a microscopic entity in the upper atmosphere, only discoverable by a superlight vehicle soaked in liquid neon.

Scientists in India seek, and discover, extremophiles.

Eruption

2009-03-22T22:08:00.000-07:00

The dream of the poem is of an explosion creating unalterable change in its environment; what good is a poetry that does not change geology?

See incredible photographs of undersea volcanic eruption near Tonga.

We Like to Pile Things Up

2009-03-22T11:37:00.001-07:00

The human tendency to make piles of things does not differentiate us from our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom but reveals our oneness with them. If there are any differences about the human tendency to place a small stone on a larger stone, they reside first in our tendency to feel guilty about having done so (see the Tower of Babel); second in our interest (obsession), and our potential delight, in observing the result of our labors (hey, wouldja look at that!); and finally, in our competitiveness about the result (mine is bigger than yours).

I would argue that a large percentage of all human activity comes somewhere under the heading of piling things up and reacting to the product. Dr. Johnson's "No man would have wished it longer" is another way of saying "Just don't make it any bigger" while admiring the magnitude of the thing. Milton had no more desire to restrain himself than Dickens or Whitman or John Irving; Dickinson's corpus is an enormous pile of pebbles, all of which are startlingly uniform (sometimes making a gigantic heap of very tiny things is the most startling project of all).

We could likely make a system of psychological typing out of the nature of the piles an individual creates and cherishes (or hates). Do magazine editors secretly love their so-called "slush piles" because the magnitude of them is a badge of importance? If an artist makes endless drawings of the same subject, is it because she is trying to get the lines right, or because the accrual of images is a sure sign of her industry? Do you have heaps of dirty clothes in your bedroom, or stacks of folded laundry? Why is Scrooge McDuck so fond of going into his vault and sitting on his money?

And where does the recent financial bubble, and its implosion, fit into this theory? It gives some of us so much satisfaction to make great heaps of imaginary money that we are willing to sacrifice reason to achieve the seeming of the thing.

We have, maybe, just witnessed the fall of our fiscal Tower of Babel.

RIP Marjorie Grene

2009-03-22T09:33:00.001-07:00

The Los Angeles Times today publishes an obituary of the philosopher Marjorie Grene, at the age of 98. A student of Whitehead's, Heidegger's, and Jaspers's, she was an important and idiosyncratic presence in philosophic circles for seven decades. Though she made important contributions to the then-emergent field of existentialism, she is best known for founding the and doing seminal work in the philosophy of biology. Her work was included in the highly prestigious Library of Living Philosophers series. Fired from the University of Chicago in 1944, she went into voluntary academic exile, working as a farmer in the US and later in Ireland; eventually she settled at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA.

Beer Into Water: A Sunday Morning Meditation

2009-03-22T08:45:00.001-07:00

Over on Front Porch Republic, Susan McWilliams laments the national drift from beer to bottled water. She writes:

The news is dreadful: According to the Census, since 2006 we have been living in a republic where, for the first time in the history of the republic, Americans drink more bottled water than we drank beer.
Why is this important? It’s important because beer is a socially oriented beverage, and bottled water is a privately oriented one.

From an environmentalist point of view, the trend is disastrous as well: mountains of beer cans are more beautiful under a sunset than mountains of plastic water bottles. And if all beer drinkers used glass bottles, America would be the utopia we always dreamed of.
Fight this trend. Throw away your Evian, stock up on Budweiser, get sociable! I suggest the back seat of a large American car is a good place to start.

Salt Art

2009-03-22T00:45:00.001-07:00

At the end of the world an empty beach, empty sea, empty wind, flat, lifeless, leaving nothing behind but its poisonous etching of salt.

Salt art by Motoi Yamamoto.