Angels and Corsets

Warning: I haven't read this whole essay, but I liked the photo so much, and it spoke to me so deeply of the whole 'tangled swan' ethos, that I had to reproduce it here. Seems only fair to include the article, too, which I will read later today with my tea.

For photo credits, please see the Poetry Society of America's website.

Anthologies and feminisms: are we having a moment or what?

Leda and Lucille Clifton (1936 - 20100

[from Lucille Clifton's The Book of Light, Copper Canyon, 1993]

leda 1

there is nothing luminous
about this.
they took my children.
i live alone in the backside
of the village.
my mother moved
to another town. my father
follows me around the well,
his thick lips slavering,
and at night my dreams are full
of the cursing of me
fucking god fucking me.


leda 2

a note on visitations

sometimes another star chooses.
the ones coming in from the east
are dagger-fingered men,
princes of no known kingdom.
the animals are raised up in their stalls
battering the stable door.
sometimes it all goes badly;
the inn is strewn with feathers,
the old husband suspicious,
and the fur between her thighs
is the only shining thing.


leda 3

a personal note (re: visitations)

always pyrotechnics;
stars spinning into phalluses
of light, serpents promising
sweetness, their forked tongues
thick and erect, patriarchs of bird
exposing themselves in the air.
this skin is sick with loneliness.
You want what a man wants,
next time come as a man
or don't come.

The Book of Light

l.c. r.i.p.

Clothes of Stiched Photos

Kudos again to Accidental Mysteries for finding some beautiful art, so meaningful, so lovely, so weird. I'm posting this to all three of my blogs (here, Laundry Songs, and Twirlyword Poems In Motion) because this artist really touches all parts of my mind/being. It's clothes! It's poetry!! It's crazy (and think of what Agnes Richter would have thought if she had seen these....)

Jane Waggoner Deschner

work with found photographs

Leda and the Swan

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?