ruined valentine
I’m not writing anymore about love, but I did make a Valentine. My valentine has ruins in it. Owl tells me there’s a fetishism for ruins called “ruin porn”. Amidst the outer-world’s compulsion towards youth, development and progress, there is a counter-fascination with what has fallen apart somewhere so unprofitable it is allowed to remain-an aesthetics of inevitable capitulation, a poetics of collapse. The stones that have crumbled, the rotting curtains, the empty rooms, the sunken roofs, all, all are ephemeral garlands upon absence. Absence: the presence of what is no longer present remains, a meta-monument to impermanence.
my valentine has a hole in it
This valentine reminds me of an early conversation with the black swan:
…Is there a love otherwise made? Of stone?
Its architecture, yes, toppled in weeds,
though an entablature on slipped columns
remains to frame the inorderable sky.I could think: Marking a grave. Or
Its austere grace! What time cracks falls away
to reveal a more essential beauty.The ruins memorialize themselves.
Two might still walk among them hand in hand.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Let love, in its ruin, grace forgotten spaces, defy the spirit of our age which points, it would appear, only to annihilation. Its shrill, destructive euphoria spares no room for soul-deepening ruins, lovely and bittersweet.
Happy Valentine’s Day! May your love exemplify grace.
–The Odalisque
conversations with birds: the hawk despises youth
I want what will be beautiful in ruin
whose skin, like wax, melts towards a core flame
whose pleasing balance cracks like a Kouros’
whose eye sockets are packed with black poultice
the tap tap of Oedipus’ gnarled stick
his daughter is not half so beautiful
the gods blushed grapes are not so beautiful
beneath flesh pulp find but three smooth seeds
sweet potential youth
I want beauty actualized
not in-spite-of
because of time
the knotted root wrought in harsh soil
the scant juice prized aged
conversations with birds: the swan drifts
(the swan drifts over the reflection of real ruins around which an architect has arranged lake and trees:)
I am not pure enough to believe in
love, its archaic masquerade. I am
not pure enough to believe its silken
cords won’t fray but
Is there a love otherwise made? Of stone?
Its architecture, yes, toppled in weeds,
though an entablature on slipped columns
remains to frame the inorderable sky.
I could think: Marking a grave. Or
Its austere grace! What time cracks falls away
to reveal a more essential beauty.
The ruins memorialize themselves.
Two might still walk among them hand in hand.
I am the odalisque who lives in an obelisk. I converse with birds.
