Which once had been meadow

Lucas and I were talking about transporting books--he from his room to his studio--how one can feel incomplete without the books they are composed of. I've decided to harmonize a chord from Zukofsky, writing in the books I am writing with words from. 


In his introduction to New Direction's edition on "A", Barry Ahearn writes: Milton was the first person to use space in the modern sense, meaning cosmos; Milton was able to think of space exploration, in Paradise Lost, vis a vis the invention of the telescope. Space travel as descendant of incandescence--eg. looking at the moons of Jupiter, Dante descending the underworld with Virgil, all my friends moving to places where I have to write them to spend time together; eg. Ann Jäderlund: "There is a meadow in the meadow's beautiful flesh." I previously blogged about my friends, and then I blogged about missing my friends, and then I did not have anything to write about. The conclusion is that I am incomplete without my friends. The conclusion is: I want to travel to the meadows of flesh, but for now I can only read at my desk. 


On my desk is Jäderlund's Which once had been meadow (tr. Johannes Göransson), an eros-cum-thanatos treatise. Life force is decomposition--and these poems serve as rosetta stone. Each poem is the surface of evidence, carved in the recomposition of trees from composition of trees; "Today you died as if yesterday," Jäderlund writes in "Mine". One will rot out of their fluids until they are a "leather gullet"--in "Midsummer Night's Dream"; and eventually the "black flies" no longer have a home hovering your meat hull, at which point your flesh, post-rotten, is just a "skeleton of wood and evil." At which point, Puck will walk right of you and make a renewal, "burst the entire cluster"--you are just atoms and energy, the sweetness sucked out from flowers; prepare for another "painful journey." 


Its a good book. Leila was telling me how she likes the snow in Swedish poetry. I think I like the blood. I could see myself as a vampire. I read Lucas a poem from this collection--he didn't seem impressed. He might be too analytic. 

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