Poem of Pigmalion
January 2022
To replenish my drowsy lamp,
From the hills pick I the nuts of the pine
May their oil keep it over this night?
And my vanity and desire extend.
I would never pray in the temple of Aphrodite,
Beg her to fabricate the miracles from the deceased.
Nor like Jove his wife from the vault of nothingness returned
I hide thee in my garden, out of which overgrow the wild land.
A ghost I dream I craven to see,
Like a scholar at her frenzy, a traveler his mirage
A visible wound this spirit can leave me
An open gore with the blood I cannot stanch.
But nobody answers my calls.
Nothing alive around me, chairs or desks,
The walls have no ears, shivering stars not blinking eyes be
Dead stillness, glittering fetters, fixed by my uncreative language.
It’s such an old fashion, use personification in poetry
For objects and natures have no wills,
Which we know very well,
Yet we think we possess such ourselves.
Crowds in the past with the spirits dance,
Now the poet holds the skull and whisper into dry eyes.
Haunt me- haunt me you knave!
“There is nothing outside the cave.”
I embrace the stars of entropy,
Circle tip toe at the chaos like gulls skim the sea
On moonlit cliffs, let go of eagles
That time a prophet tuned and I listened,
Where snake bites its tail:
This world will return, and return eternally.
The heaviness, the stillness,
How it mosses my existence!
Yet that dusk of intertwining shades, you ascend
Over the stone statues of dying idols, cracks appear.
I touch the warm flesh of living men,
Though my true lover be the floral twilight.
How beauteous those living beings are, sleek and nimble!
While thy lips cold on my canvas, my brush trembles.
Thy smile is so tender, crafty curve of marble
Like last drop of apple wine at harvest-
Thy eyes of ivory and gold, waiting to be sold.
But thus and so, selflessly can I love thee.
My desire is a dry swamp palely lit,
Could it still kiss moon’s cryptic – immortal ink?
With a single pen I built my rail.
Each line a sleeper, so sound they whisper,
In deep dreams, leading my trail.
Woods burn behind us,
Cosmetic wheels of galaxies overthrown
The flaming ashes distort the air.
Like a snail I crawl with the weight
Of that tower I trap my soul in-
Mountainous cedars, rocky shadows and blown branches
They fall on my face, one after another,
Stumbled, I, with my clubbed foot.
Thou gazed at me in the rattle,
Exhausted, baffled, I lean my forehead at the glass
Such pyramid for pilgrims, as always,
Horizontally, silently, thoughtfully.
The flow of oblivion, in Styx’ rill I take water.
Wash away the taints on thy portrait,
And to the ocean I throw it.
Drown to the hunting fish- no, not deep enough-
To the mud to the clay the bed it must sink,
Only then, can it touch
The radiant reflection of the whole universe.
—-
As a student of politics, lover of literature, and asian traveller in Europe, August would label herself as a “hopeless Romanticist”. Constant limbo and theatricality are her ultimate identities. Life is to practice arts, and the existence of fetters is the meaning of her ongoing fight. She loves using mythology, metaphors, and synesthesia to broaden the possibility of description.
The Poem Of Pigmalion is an outcry. What remains to be described in this age? Which words have not been used by the ancients, and which phenomenon has not been deciphered by science? “I want a hope in this disquieting world. But not a hope of the future, for future is a unpredictable matter. I want a hope like an aura casts upon every mundane thing. And vested in such aura, everything is re-connected and re-built.”
