poems of wallace stevens

THE EMPREROR OF ICE-CREAM
by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb,
Let the lamb affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

A POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO
by Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with out bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds below
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

skully girl

all of these little pen and ink sketches have to become either a big drawing or a painting soon. i love my moleskin, but the art has to start living outside of its box soon.

truman capote: breakfast at tiffany's

Late one afternoon, while waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the 42nd Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence. In the end I did neither, but concealed myself some tables away from her in the general reading room, where sh sat behind her dark glasses and a fortress of literature she'd gathered at the desk. She sped from one book to the next, intermittently lingering on a page, always with a frown, as if it were printed upside down. She had a pencil poised above paper--nothing seemed to catch her fancy, still now and then, as though for the hell of it, she made laborious scribblings. Watching her, I remembered a girl I'd known in school, agrind, Mildred Grossman. Mildred: with her moist hair and greasy spectacles, her stained fingers that dissected frogs and carried coffee to picket lines, her flat eyes that only turned toward the stars to estimate their chemical tonnage. Earth and air could not be more opposite than Mildred and Holly, yet in my head they acquired a Siamese twinship, and the thread of thought that had sewn them together ran like this: the average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul--desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, lead to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still gluttonous for everything on it. It would never be different. They would walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left. Such profound observations made me forget where I was; I cam to, startled to find myself in the gloom of the library, suprised all over again to see Holly there. It was after seven, she was freshening her lipstick and perking up her appearance from what she deemed correct for a library to what, by adding a bit of scarf, some earrings, she considered suitable for the Colony. When she'd left, I wandered over to the table where her books remained: they were what I had wanted to see. South by Thunderbird, Byways of Brazil, the Political Mind of Latin America. And so forth.

--Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

the bordello

The Bordello is one of my official favorite places in Los Angeles now. I went to see Miss C. of the Finches sing. She's such a beautiful songbird, and how can any man not instantly fall into an instant crush with her? They all do, even in Berlin they did.

Like many of my friends here, that's where we met. I was dirty and covered in paint and we were in this filthy but wonderful silkscreen print studio, and it was very cold and gray that year and I didn't even realize she was American and that much younger than me until we started talking. Appearances are deceiving! That was a really weird time, and we were thrown into the mix with lots of freaks from all sorts of countries and earnest Germans running the workshop with the loose happiness of part time kindergarden teachers.

That place is still going, run on good will and cheap rent by generous building owners. The whole street corner where it's at is one of those hot nightspots in Berlin that will stop being interesting in a few years, or maybe not. I'm not a horrible snob about these kinds of things, but there's definitely a sense of energy and accomplishment in many places and in other places there is not. That street corner is still going in Berlin long after much of Mitte has died. And it's still the kind of place where if you stand on a corner at four in the morning long enough with some guests from Brazil, a pack of French girls covered in mud will appear and start talking about falling off their bicycles and charm everyone into falling in love with them. It's not the kind of thing many people are looking for, but for those who want to live their life with a degree of magic, it's the kind of thing you treasure forever.

So lovely miss C, here and now in Los Angeles: There was a slight technical problem, and then she went into the most deadpan, hilarious little story about East Coast frat boys on a yacht diving through the innards of a dead whale.

We were in a booth with a glammed-up girl, and as the Bordello used to be, well, a bordello, the womblike hole encouraged us to talk about very racy and saucy topics. How many people would want to listen in on the things we say?

That place is just so feminine and pretty, although I can say that the corsets the waitresses wore were (for me) decidedly not so sexy. I would rather have women like in the paintings on the wall; heavy saucy women with dark hair and heavy make-up and low-cut white blouses.
I can only take one drink at a time; they had midori sours. Those were the only drinks I got used to, I used to order them all the time in Manhattan, but only one. They don't like cocktails so much in Berlin, although it's growing, especially with young yuppie girls.

K. commented that it was astounding how little light all the red chadeliers gave off. I love seeing people in the dark. As I've said before, people look better in the dark, clothed. On the beach and in clothes too revealing, it's lacking in mystery.

All that on the surface, that's what people catch when they're in Los Angeles. That's why you have hole up in the dark here for a few months until you discover all these little secrets: recording studios with basketball courts and old-fashioned microphones and tucked-away parties where everyone looks like they come from Europe and massive tiki bars in the middle of suburbialand full of flourescent fish tanks. That's when it's David Lynchland.

in those years by adrienne rich

In Those Years
by adrienne rich

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I