kaleidowhirl

After a slight delay, Cynthia Reynolds has launched her summer issue of kaleidowhirl. The face of the literary journal is graced by a photograph attributed to Reynolds called "Summer Afternoon in a Small Town," and I used the word "graced" deliberately. There could well be a dance of gaudy and garish, sharp edges of glass and light and fuschia. But it's toned down. It's a calm relief, a scene in which the fervent is disciplined.

I'm happy to have The Two Fridas published here, something slightly out of my usual style and a self-satisfying effort. I was immersed in Frida Kahlo at the time I wrote the poem, reading her Diary, along with Herrara's biography, accompanied by an older coffee table book of Frida's life & paintings.

The immersion did me good and drew out parallels between Kahlo, Anais Nin, the spirit of duende and Frederico Lorca. I moved on to Lorca, a Spanish poet of the 20th century, acquiring a proof of his hefty revised, bilingual Collected Poems. I was certain his originals must contain more vitality and fulsomeness than many of the English translations in the collection.

But then, the more I read Lorca, the more I was sure his passion was clipped, contained and transmuted into an Eastern scaffold. So much Imagism. So many haiku-in-waiting. Take this series of short verses from Idyll:

Narcissus.
The smell of you.
And the river bottom.

I want to stay on your banks.
Flower of love.
Narcissus.

Moving across your white eyes
are waves and sleeping fish.
Birds and butterflies
are Japanning in mine.

You so tiny and I large.
Flower of love.
Narcissus.

These frogs - how quick they are!
But they never stop ruffling
the mirror that holds in reflection
your madness and my madness.

Narcissus.
My pain.
And the pain itself.

I hear Issa. And then I hear my own words reflected, and long for the poem that I lost, one of many, called Narcissus Miscast. Here are a few lines that I recall:

Hearing echoes where there is silence
is the edge of madness.