We have moved

This weblog has moved to:


http://www.vlinder-01.dds.nl/cdr/index.htm

Monsoon Notebook (III)

Painting: "Untitled Blues" -2007-
by Carolyn Coalson - click on picture to enlarge

"A School exercise book. I write this at the desk of calamander looking out of the windows into dry black night.
"Thanikama". "Aloneness". Birdless. The sound of an animal passing through the garden. Midnight and noon and dawn and dusk are the hours of danger, susceptibility to the "grahayas "____ planetary spirits of malignant character. Avoid eating certain foods in lonely places, the devil will smell you out. Carry some metal.
An iron heart. Do not step on bone or hair or human ash.

Sweat down my back. The fan pauses then begins again. At midnight this hand is the only thing moving. As discreetly and carefully as whatever animals in the garden fold brown leaves into their mouths, visit the drain for water, or scale the broken
glass that crowns the walls. Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing.

The garden a few feet away is suddenly under the fist of a downpour. Within half a second an easy dry night is filled with the noise of rain on tin, cement and earth__waking others slowly in the house. But I actually saw it, looking out into the blackness, saw the white downpour (reflected off the room's light) falling like an object past the window. And now the dust that has been there for months is bounced off the earth and pours, the smell of it, into the room.

I get up, walk to the night, and breathe it in ___the dust, the tactile smell of wetness, oxygen now being pounded into the ground so it is difficult to breathe.


Michael Ondaatje
from "Running in the Family"
Copyright 1982


*Philip Michael Ondaatje, (born 12 September 1943 in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka to a family of Dutch-Tamil_Sinhalese-Portuguese origin) is a Sri Lankan Canadian novelist and poet, perhaps best known for his Booker Prize winning novel adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film; "The English Patient".
Source: Wikipedia

For more info about art today in Sri Lanka:
Click Here

Little Viennese Waltz by Frederico García Lorca & Take This Walz by Leonard Cohen

Little Viennese Waltz

In Vienna there are ten little girls
a shoulder for death to cry on
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself, of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death
down the melancholy hallway,
in the iris's dark garret,
in our bed that was once the moon's bed,
and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz

In Vienna there are four mirrors
in which your mouth and the echoes play.
There is a death for piano
that paints the little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.

Aye, ay, ay, ay!
Take this waltz that dies in my arms.

Because I love you, I love you, my love,
in the attic where children play,
dreaming ancient lights of Hungary
through the noise, the balmy afternoon,
seeing sheep and irises of snow
through the dark silence of your forehead.

Ay, ay, ay ay!
Take this "I will always love you" waltz.

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons

Frederico García Lorca

_________________________________________


Take This Waltz
(After Lorca)

To listen to Leonard Cohen's "TAKE THIS WALTZ"
Click Here

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry.
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows.
There's a tree where the doves go to die.
There's a piece that was torn from the morning,
and it hangs in the Gallery of Frost --
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.

I want you, I want you, I want you
on a chair with a dead magazine.
In the cave at the tip of the lily,
in some hallway where love's never been.
On a bed where the moon has been sweating,
in a cry filled with footsteps and sand --
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take its broken waist in your hand.

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
with its very own breath
of brandy and death,
dragging its tail in the sea.

There's a concert hall in Vienna
where your mouth had a thousand reviews.
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking,
they've been sentenced to death by the blues.
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
with a garland of freshly cut tears?
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz, it's been dying for years.

There's an attic where children are playing,
where I've got to lie down with you soon,
in a dream of Hungarian lanterns,
in the mist of some sweet afternoon.
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow,
all your sheep and your lilies of snow --
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
with its "I'll never forget you, you know!"

And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
to the pools that you lift on your wrist --
O my love, O my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
it's yours now. It's all that there is.

Leonard Cohen
-I'm Your Man and Stranger Music-
Copyright © 1988 by Leonard Cohen
and Sony/ATV Music Publishing Canada Company
Copyright © 1993 by Leonard Cohen
and Leonard Cohen Stranger Music

*Federico García Lorca (June 5 1898 - August 19 1936, born into a family of minor, but wealthy, landowners in the small village Fuente Vaqueros, Granada) was a Spanish poet and dramatist, also remembered as a painter, pianist, and composer. He was killed by Nationalist partisans at the age of 38 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

**Leonard Norman Cohen (born September 21 1934, to a middle-class Jewish family of Polish-Lithuanian ancestry in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour.

Source: Wikipedia

Introduction

We started this blog because we wanted to combine the poems and prose and music we love, with pictures of paintings, architecture, sculptures and other art we love.

We hope to create something beautiful together!

Elenor & Carolyn