home
intro

progressive insanities of
    a pioneer

vintergatan

triumf att finnas till...

who knows if the moon's
    a balloon

a valediction

being to timelessness
    as it's to time

shall I compare thee
    to a summer's day

the cubist break-up
    (verses 7 and 12)

excerpts from
    this compost

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Poems and short stories ©   by Arno and Anna unless differently stated (Disclaimer).

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish halth you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd.
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person — yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The ban bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches...

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no chat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues.
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever...

That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses...
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.