The Luz Azul Wild China Blues

                           “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
                            by the false azure in the windowpane...”

                                                             Vladimir Nabokov

Just between me and you

is it possible to find a language

of but one word—like blue:

the blue of sky?

the egg of a robin that wings red and gray

across its space?

the unseen face of a blue moon bounding month

or season or seen rising above a land of volcanoes

spewing ashes of a long dying poetry?

coming out of the blue, suddenly,

blue-eyed boy talking a blue streak,

shooting pigeons

  onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

blue in the face like blood or ribbons,

collared blue, dressed to the nines in blue velvet?

a bolt, like a note microtonally out of pitch

from a bent string or double-reeded aulos or bagpipe

or klezmorim or wailing Arab flutters in quartertones?

or is it the blue flower--die blaue Blume—unreachable

in its infinity of passions and desires like bluebirds of wandering to and fro

youth?

Is it a rose blue from dye injected into its bark?

Sacré dieu! Sacrebleu! Morbleu! Par le sang de bleu! 

Is that the artifice of Victor Hugo's L’art c’est l’azure

or of Ruben Dario's reverie—Homeric, Hellenic—of prose and poetry

bounded by the River Ocean and circling an ancient world--of Este azul es lo mío?

Is it Oscar Wilde and  My Blue China?

Era su príncipe azul.

¿No te he dicho

que el azul no hay que tocar?

Why not and even if forgot or shallowly begot

why not too blue Berbers--circum cellas euntes—to wit, Donatist Circumcellions

wandering among North African Roman peasants, cancelling debt, anathematizing property

and slavery, prizing martyrdom, rightly turning the world upside down?

Blue-veined white skin and the wedding of something borrowed, something blue

(at high interest)?

Nel blu dipinto di blu?

Into the wild blue yonder?

The girl with the blue dress ON—Swedish ¾ and Jenny Lind, and when, exactly, does it come OFF?

Blue Christmas—Elvis lives!

Prussian blue? Electric blue? Blueprints? Blueberries? Blueflies? Bluebeards? Bluecoats? Blueballs?

Bluenose? Bluefin? Bluegills? Bluebells? Bluegrass? Blueing (bang!)? Bluet?

Bluestockings, true blue.

Bloody blue murder, skies and seas and streets filled with boys in blue and swearing, blue laws, blue chip robber barons,

Wittgenstein's Blue Book and very unfinal rhapsody:

This is a pencil, this is round, this is wood, this is one, this is hard...but:

this is not yellow—this is blues,

this is blue.

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa December 29, 2016 Granada, Nicaragua

Poetry Generators, Stylometry & I Corinthians 13

                      “Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado.”*

                                                                     Juan Ramón Jiménez

Typically one hopes

to explain as much

variation as possible.

We look for snapshots:

                                    Night rises on a great crow wing

                                    bearing the half-lifed moon....

Once functorial, however,

multidimensionality is underrepresented:

                                   glows like an apricot

                                   blossoms salacious as a tiger lily

Thus and so one explanation

of many things goes astray:

                                   asphodel

                                   sandal beams

                                   tears of honey

If this seems to do the trick, it is strictly a trick

of triadic line.

Therefore let us say

in variable syllables

there may be untold many

in each with his, her, or its own ways:

                                  lyre-voiced

                                  last moan of spring

                                  breast to breast as one

In conclusion, then--Who authored I Corinthians 13?

Ultimately Corinthians, for without them

no Corinth

no column

no bronze

or isthmus

no pink

no spirit

no epistles

no echoing horn

no clashing cymbal

& also no rash formulas and answers off the scale.

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa      November 2, 2016     Granada, Nicaragua

_____________________________________________________

N.B.: *”If they give you ruled paper, write on the other side.” Interestingly

enough a very similar quotation is often attributed to William Carlos Williams,

“If they give you lined paper, write the other way”. There can be little or no doubt

that if Williams said this, he got it from Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet

who won the Nobel Prize in 1956 and after the Spanish Civil War taught at the

University of Puerto Rico. In fact, Williams, who was Spanish on his mother's

side, with ties to both Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York

City, was physically in Puerto Rico in 1956 when Ramón Jiménez won the prize,

though he never mentions meeting or otherwise knowing him. Williams in Puerto

Rico was close to the poet Luis Palés Matos, several of whose poems he imitated

and one of whose works he translated into English. It is inconceivable that

he did not hear about and read works of Ramón Jiménez, either in New York City

or Puerto Rico.

Above the Tree Line

                         "Cada vez que abro los labios
                         Inundo de nubes el vacío."*

                                              Vicente Huidobro

Cold bitter roll

out of the sleeping bag,

flash of fire and a cigarette

frantically inhaled,

warm perch and hot coffee

in the golden morning sun--

                         nicotine, caffeine & bright light:

the animal arctic and addicted,

billowing with vapor,

ends another Ice Age night....

E. A. Costa

___________________________________________________

N.B.: * "Every time I open my lips, I flood the void with clouds."

The Purple Cloud Of Gentle Doom (Mementos of a Polytonic)

                     “...and beneath the flag, stretched right across the house,
                      was the thing which spelled, letter by letter, in letters of light:
                      and it spelled two words, deliberately, coming to the end,
                      and going back to recommence: Drink ROBORAL"* 
                                                                                                          
                                                                                                     M.P. Shiel

Canoes:

canoes

aloes

foes

archfoes

floes

felloes

does

hoes

joes

roes

sloes

hammertoes

tippytoes

snowshoes

gumshoes

horseshoes

overshoes

& shoes

but stilletoes emphatically stilletoes even as high-heeled blues.

Undergoes:

oboes

buboes

heroes

antiheroes

superheroes

tomatoes

potatoes

throes & woes

but undoes noes and yoes.

Foregoes no-go's so:

haloes

hoboes

zeroes

viragoes

gigoloes

mottoes

flamingoes

tornadoes

tuxedoes

tobaccoes

piccoloes

buckoes

(which looks too much like backhoes in them thar hills)

bravadoes

renegadoes

desperadoes

commandoes

filibusteroes

magnificoes &

manifestoes

Yet echoes with echoes or echos, vetoes vetoes and never banjos banjoes.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,

when was the Great Vowel Shift

& should there be a comma before the and?

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa     October 24, 2016   Granada, Nicaragua

____________________________________________________________

N.B.: *Alise Bulfin, “'One Planet, One Inhabitant': Mass Extermination In M. P. Shiel's

Purple Cloud" suggests plausibly  Roboral—otherwise unknown apparently--was some 

“fraudulent tonic”. It might be pointed out that Shiel was a Socialist and the name is an

anagram of “laboro”, “I work” in Latin, which works either in regard to Shiels or to some

contemporary patent medicine peddler having the very name of the tonic avowing that it works.

NW x NW: Antiode to Alfred Hitchcock

                                   
                                      "In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
                                      Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
                                      Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
                                      We shall encounter, counting, face to face...."

                                                                                 Stanislaw Lem

Every image arises from a field

of possibility and having risen,

rises another field between

meaning and unmeaning:

       Two in and out of twilight

       hand in hand, dark and bright

       in the ballet of left and right...

               tragedy & comedy

               laughing and crying chiasmically.

Is the fruited field polysemous?

                               jupe de jeter

                              à travers de l'espace  

                              jupe à jeter

                              tutu-à-terre

As things stand aren't all worlds

AMBIGUONS winging through two

or more images at the same time?

What a post-predicament:

               flying planes can be dangerous: rat-tat-tat

              the jet strafes North by Northwest: pan-pan cul-cul

              it is a Naval Factory N3N Canary crop sprayer

              with four on the floor by Rolls Royce

              Cary escapes with a prayer and a little shrapnel

              in the κεῖσθαι of his featherduster

              the pilot a marine from Quantico

              is convicted of being viciously orange

              locust run amok

              no wheat or maize are sown or grown

              what can a poor poet do except plant potatoes?

..............................................................................Q.E.D.

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa       October 23, 2016     Granada, Nicaragua
____________________________________________________
N.B.: κεῖσθαι: the lie, being in a position (Aristotle)

Dreams Of War Among Orangutans

                             “En ces temps difficiles, il convient d'accorder notre mépris

                             avec parcimonie, tant nombreux sont les nécessiteux.”

                                                                                                  Chateaubriand

Let scientists tell in precisest terms where

reside dreams of war among Orangutans

and what kind of war it is:

Is it war to control bananas,

food of the wise, by the likes

of Great Ape United Fruit?

Is it war to monopolize the best routes

for brachiating through branches

of jungle and over the shortest airlanes

between trees to trapeze across?

Is it religious war or war to colonize and exploit?

Is it nuclear war, chemical war, economic war?

Is it a war of terror? Is it racist or genocidal?

Is it war for profit or war for the sake of war?

Is it no war at all but a still sullen nightmare

of a long-armed guerilla blowing strawberries

at under and over men logging, mining, and burning

the small green planet of just another less than human,

more than human forest kind?

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa   October 11, 2016  Granada, Nicaragua

Haiku Informaticus/ Haikú informático

This is no window.

This is a computer screen.

Behind you—the world.

E. A. Costa

Haikú informático

Esto no es ninguna ventana.

Esto es el monitor del ordenador.

Detrás tuyo—está el mundo.

Tr. EAC

E. A. Costa     October 13, 2016    Granada, Nicaragua

Antinicanor

                             "Qué es un antipoeta...

                                     un pequeño burgués?

                                     un charlatán?

                                     un dios?

                                     un inocente?
                                     un aldeano de Santiago de Chile?"*

                                                                 Nicanor Parra

I do not say that Nicanor Parra is not my mistress

or that when he walks, alive or dead, he treads not on earth

but in an otherwise empty set of air.

I do not say he is not a venomed dyssocratic serpent of wily irony,

like Kierkegaard, slithering on null feet and zero reason.

I do not say that he is not a poet nor antipoet, nor bard nor antibard,

nor self-styled porcupine from inner space.

I do not say that he is not an ersatz and belated Marcel Duchamp--

blind, retarded, and at least a hundred years behind the times.

I do not say that he is not an imbecile or that he had nothing more to say

after poetry or antipoetry or unpoetry left him uninspired in 1962.

I do not say that his Ars Poetique is not a Reader's Digest abridgment

mocking Paul Verlaine, ignorant of Horace and envious of Vicente Huidobro.

I do not say his antiverses or unverses or contraverses do not equal

pettier ones of Jorge Luis Borges or that physics by rote does not match the other's fiction.

I do not say he is not an adolescent poet advising himself that

in poetry null and void and not at all anything goes.

I do not say that he never leaves a blank page better off from having soiled it

or that he was not unutterably persevering and reactionary in his beshitting.

I do not say he is innumerate and cannot multiply the word imaginary

times 25 in 27 lines to the unplayed melody of the Beatles' Nowhere Man.

I do not say that he is not too bright nor excessively stupid nor that he did not

get on well with Mrs. Nixon.

I do not say that he does not consider Augusto Pinochet, 

taking tea with Margaret Thatcher, the savior of his country.

I do not say that, strictly logically, an ironic double-dealing retraction

cannot not be, like papal infallibility, retracted or unretracted.

I do not say that he is not the Chile that has fallen and still can't get up.

Yet his lips are not lascivious coral nor does he reek of finest balsamic

vinegar, nor is he Ezra Pound.

After all, he was on the so-called winning side.

Is he not then merely a traducer of Shakespeare and his life's lazy antioutput,

fat and apophatic, no more than the down and dirty mimesis of Sonnet 130?

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa October 1, 2016 Granada, Nicaragua

______________________________________________

N.B.: *"What is an antipoet? A petit bourgeois?A charlatan?

A god? A naïf? A villager of Santiago de Chile?"

The New Phorcydes

                                     
                                     τυρὸς δ᾽ οὐ λείπει μ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἐν θέρει οὔτ᾽ ἐν ὀπώρᾳ,
                                     ὐ χειμῶνος ἄκρω: ταρσοὶ δ᾽ ὑπεραχθέες αἰεί.*

                                                                                              Theocritus

You sit in a hall

of columns and arcades

sunlight streaming

from an open garden

to one side.

Close an eye.

You no longer sit

in a hall, now become

but a point of view.

So the world of photographs

and film and video and cell-phone

selfies:

half of you disappears

and the other half becomes Cyclops

and shares the world with others

as the Graeae share one tooth and one eye.

Aye, pass the tooth, please,

smile and blindly have at Cyclopean cheese.

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa  September 24, 2016  Granada, Nicaragua
________________________________________________
N.B.:*Theocritus , Idylls. 11.36: "I never lack cheese, Summer or
Fall, and even in the dead of Winter--the  racks are always
full.")