Marriage

Detail from "Madonna and Child"

The wind proposed to the snow. The snow and the wind plighted their troth, and a frost-fingered ship probed the pack-ice of their love. A bowsprit probed their season of intimacy.

Happiness is frozen in the froth of a cloud; it’s a light which freezes, then cracks. It’s a thicket of lilies infested with violet snakes, gliding between twilight and the sea, gliding across the blood-red lawns of twilight.

The whip cracks, streaking the snow of your first love. The wild beast falls asleep in a blood-streaked orchid.


– Maurice Blanchard


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He said: my hoarse lips pant spotted
panthers who sing
sweeter than bellbirds in the bush
or the blood-streaked bulls of storm cumulus
He said:
Inside me I’ve got
steep salt waves
breaking over (so dainty) feast-day flowers
He called Our Lady
a little girl with a basket of vegetables
He said: Then he said:
I’m a poppy
clashing at dawn with pale blue animals


– Jacques Baron