Study of a Woman

"Study of a Woman: The emotion of Beauty (or the shell of it) experienced"

or

"On beholding a certain uncommonly handsome woman, widely known, yet here unnamed; a study of her, and the concomitant emotions thereupon felt"

[Written ex tempore one night.]

Why do these feelings come when I see you?—you, who are someone, a woman, who I say is uncharacteristic of womankind in your allure and classic features. (But are you Beautiful? does what I feel allow for this qualification, this aesthetic valuation? or is this sham as you are a stranger to me and I to you?)

But I do not know you.

Few amongst your sisters have I found and do I find to be like you: with your looks, of your looks (but the question tears: is it just appearance?).

But I do not know you—And you do not know me.

I see you, but from a world-distance away. And because of this great thing I see you as you are framed as portrait—are you hung as yourself? is this really you?—and I view you with the invisible disconnection acting as voyeuristic mask. Do I see you? would your face and looks and features and the yearning and the enchantment wash away were I to place my cold hand on what I wish to be a warm face?

But I do not know you—And you do not know me.

Why do these feelings come when I see you?—could it be that I long for someone like you?: whose sweet visage (that drives poets and master artists to madness!) touches and stirs something that is at my very core: whose character and personality (which I only know vicariously) evokes the greatest unassuageable and poignant affection and amorousness in me.

You dizzying woman; you high woman; you all-woman; you woman's woman; you: Woman. But!: woman-but-not-woman; instead,

Self!

Outwith Me and my Self—You Are a Self in all your glory, and this makes your splendour, and your mystery, resound within me as esoteric symphony upon a cavern-domed crystal lake! Surely then you are Beautiful! and so let my yearning and burning tax me on, for it whets Beauty—yours—to pierce me with such sublimity and rose-thorn proficiency!

Why do I feel this way?: because what is also engendered with all this, but diademed and laureate:

Love

—the capacity (the capacity) to Love!

And so I now look at you, E——, and I have, at the last, resolved why these feelings rise when I behold you:

I do not know you—will never know you—nor you me; but within me there is an inexplicable, ineffable Will to Love,
a will to love you, you whom I do not know—
(I could love you: how inimitable that is!)—

and so these feelings come because I, ready, wait for the one whom
with fullest measure
I Will Love.

M.M. — Aprilis MMX; edited Iulius MMX, Februarius MMXI

Hymn I

Glory unto Thee
Who dreamest eternally
In the darkest Abyss,
Where only the Few darest
Trespass and tread into.

Thou art the Nameless;
Thou art the Formless;
Thou art the Hidden Torch;
Great Bringer of Light.

Without mine eyes
Yet wide-eyed do I behold Thee,
Father of Illumination,
With coruscating sword in hand
Slashing away Fear from my Path.

I, freed from all Resistance, transcend
Into Thy garden of proscribed Love
And stand in awe before Thee,
Mother of Truth, Destroyer of Lies;
Gravid with Chaos in Thy womb.

M.M. — Martius MMX; Junius MMXI

Words for a Picture IV

To be read alongside 67954 by aleksandra88.

Although the paragon of carnality and great conqueror,
and even now seemingly held highest in all her splendour;
still she waited for bliss in just a kiss,
or for the Sun to fall on her just the same.

M.M. — November MMXI

Poem XXI - "When Beauty came"

When Beauty came
she precipitated the sack of city and soul.
When she descended from her throne
she stepped upon our paper-hearts.

When Beauty came from the sea
he flooded us in his titillating nausea;
the sight of him threw us into delirium
and a ravening bloodlust overcame reason.

Man devoured man, and woman too.
In a great display of ecstasy
our world turned murderous fantasy,
and ravaged lay the love we slew.

When Beauty came to me
I dared to caress her alabaster face,
only to be caught in his fatal embrace;
and down I did fall to the hard earth.

When Beauty came,
none were left the same.
We would have given our all
but Beauty only came to steal our souls.

M.M. — Februarius MMX; Aprilis, September, November MMXI

Words for a Picture III

To be read alongside 654573433 by aleksandra88.

[Excerpt from an unfinished work:]

For many a faded autumn did this stately Penelope wait,
    though pining in heart, wasting in body, dimming in mind.
Was it not She who attended, till insipid day grew late,
    that point that consorted with the sea, both so unkind?

M.M. — November MMXI

Words for a Picture II

To be read alongside Solar Passage by Greg Martin (sirgerg).

The face of the god.

M.M. — September MMXI

Poem XX - Gothic

In the midst of night, out on the moor,
shadows were stirring at my coming.

There, caught in the restless mourning wind,
the moon illumined all with its leering lidless eye.
With trepidation engendered and a weakness coming over me,

                        I set forth further into the dark.

Along my way I met, coldly, fiends of my past and present,
their hands lunging towards my neck; they were numberless,
        a ruthless swarm merciless in their onslaught.

But only one would I truly see:
              her cloaked spectre in the moonlit gloom, flitting within the mist.

Once upon a fadeless time I had her;
                                    she was rapt by the lavish love in which we lived.

    But our eldritch flame burnt too fiercely and we lost ourselves in the giddying decadence,
                                                 lost to time and its tendrils that took everything
                                                 slowly away.

Here in the wasteland
               nothing seemed truer, more honest and forthright,
than the bereavement I felt—
        than the dreariness pervading the heath and my soul.

M.M. — November MMX; Februarius, Maius–Iunius, September MMXI

Ex Tempore V / Aubade III

Lines written in an effusion aboard an early-morning train travelling from Glasgow to Carlisle on 15th September; "fulfilled and refined" after the experience.

I see a great fire!, there, to the east.
An amber-red glow with a latent immensity is slowly ascending.
The kingdom of deep, dark night is but a remnant,
its trace nearly subsumed in the fire and growing azure of the sky.

But now, before me: the mists rise over the pastures and rolling hills, and about the cold, silent trees.
Streams and creeks themselves seem to rise with the mist.
How thick it is, the incandescent lights of man shining so weakly within it.
—They come not even close to matching the fire's likeness!

In the distance: the kindling fire grows ever mightier!
And the clouds: they hail the coming of the imperial thing;
they are filled with an orange and red and—colour indescribable!, the very colour of Creation!

Is this Beauty?
Is that great fire and ancient thing also in me?

Here in this carriage do I feel the morning-chill outside that must eventually die?—in the greatest of births!
—the most fiery and most awful of advents!

The dull gold stretches now,
flung across the appearing firmament by the streaming clouds.
Surely this light is the herald of wonder—of all life—
recalling the earliest of days—earliest time—
when its rays struck the young earth and all those things that crawled or swam, which are long gone.
Those things rose in consequence of this fire that is now all-consuming and inexorable....

And at last!—the blinding rays break through the mist and clouds
and in triumph they parade!, displaying themselves so admirably.
The sky, the earth, the denizens below: they are now truly awakened.

At last! the Orb of eternal power, that I dare grasp and fit in my hand, begins its reign.
The Fire! the Light!—fierce, bright, beautiful!

Majesty Sun!, You are risen!

M.M. — September MMXI; edited September-October MMXI

Song IV

Inspired by the style of A. A. Nemtheanga of Primordial.

Know that I have always chosen well
Neither glory of Heaven nor savage fury of Hell
I have made my home on every welcoming shore
Broken bread with holy men
And lain with the most loving whore

Tell me what love can teach that hate cannot
Tell me that the wonder in life is absent in death

You see me as the serpent-fiend
Sporting his forked tongue of malignity
You say that my words taste of such acridity
But I see a decaying world so lost
The man-child blindly wanders, so lost

So give me the day
And I shall show you the darkest night
Give me my peace
And watch my war flaunt its terrible might

Though I know not where it is I will be lead
Come step on this broken path that I tread
Watch with me the setting of an ageless sun
The rising of the moon, under which I run

I hail the majestic unknown
And I will go, I will go
I will go even knowing that I must go alone

M.M. — Augustus-September MMXI

Words for a Picture I

To be read alongside 57921 by aleksandra88.

Her elegant clasping that feigns an intention barely impedes the emanation of her fantasy:
Her thoughts are uncaged; her reverie seeps through, into the world.

M.M. — September MMXI