The Aeneid - pg. 355

Savage girl, whom did your lance unhorse,

What victims, first and last,

How many thrown down on the battlefield,

Torn bodies dying? Eunaeus, Clytius' son,

Came first: he faced her with unarmored breast,

And with her shaft of pine she ran him through.

He tumbled, coughing streams of blood, took bites

The Aeneid - pg. 275

But while he clamored,

Volcens' blade, thrust hard, passed through the ribs

And breached the snow-white chest. Euryalus

In death went reeling down,

And blood streamed on his handsome length, his neck

Collapsing let his head fall on his shoulder --

As a bright flower cut by a passing plow

Will droop and wither slowly, or a poppy

Bow its head upon its tired stalk

When overborne by a passing rain.

The Book And The Brotherhood - pg. 554

'Yes. We felt we hadn't looked after them properly, either of them -- but that's superstition. Guilt is one way of attaching a meaning to a death. We want to find a meaning, it lessens the pain.'

DFW

DFW

it's about your face
in the red light: the traces
of last night - warmth,
a forgotten itch, sideways
and slick - it's sadness
really you wear
last night on your eyebrows
warming up to a
memory about a red dress
sighing in your mind
because it's forgotten already
but it's important to you
you try again you say
never the one to let it
rest in your hands
but to throw it all
in red-dawn, red eyes
sighs, mind races
towards forgotten places
and you decide to rest
in its wake under the stars

David Foster Wallace

Rest In Peace.

Terra Nostra - pg. 257

.... the time of one man never coincides perfectly with that of other men; we are separated not only by years but by the unsynchronized and unique rhythm of our lives, my precious Inesilla, my beloved Ines; to live is to be different, only death is identical, only death are we identical;...

...

And you're like the voices
of the earth - the crash
of the bucket in the well,
the song of fire,
the thud of an apple;
gloomy, resigned words
in door after door,
the cry of the  child - 
things that never  pass.
You do not change. You are dark.
You are the closed cellar
with the hard earth floors,
which the child entered
once, his feet bare,
and will always remember.
You are the dark room
one  always remembers,
like the ancient courtyard
where day would break.

Seguramente, es por todas partes el Sr. Bolaño

Death will come and will have your eyes

Death will come and will have your eyes --
this death that accompanies us
from morning till evening, unsleeping,
deaf, like an old remorse
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a suppressed cry, a silence.
That's what you see each morning
when alone with yourself you lean
toward the mirror. O precious hope,
that day we too will know
that you are life and you are nohthingness.

Death has a look for everyone.
Death will come and will have your eyes.
It will like renouncing a vice,
like seeing a dead face,
reappear in the mirror,
like listening to a lip that's shut.
We'll go down into the maelstorm mute.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Oakley Hall

Rest In Peace

April 14th

I am not sure what to say about today. It is Monday again. It was Monday too, nine years ago on this date. The most wretched day of my life: Sun glared, our classes finished, the afternoon at the Hostel#4... I wonder how many people went back to that plot of land in that corner of your city. We were all there. All of your friends... It was good knowing you.

By Night In Chile - pg. 54

..., because everything was foundering, as the poet says, and then I was walking alone through the streets of Santiago, thinking of Alexander III and Urban IV and Boniface VIII, while fresh breeze caressed my face, trying to wake me up properly, but still I cannot have been properly awake, for deep in my brain I could hear the voices of the popes, like the distant screeching of a flock of birds, a clear sign that part of my mind was still dreaming or obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams, that parade ground where the wizened youth is hiding, along with the dead poets who were living then, and who now, against the certainty of imminent oblivion, are erecting a miserable crypt in my cranial vault, building it with their names, their silhouettes cut from black cardboard and the debris of their works, and although the wizened youth is not among them, since in those days he was just a kid from the south, the rainy border-lands, the banks of our nation's mightiest river, the fearsome Bio-Bio, all poets whose works implacable time was demolishing even then, as I walked away from Farewell's house through the Santiago night, and continues to demolish now, as I prop myself up on one elbow, and will go on demolishing when I am gone, that is, when I shall exist no longer or only as a reputation, and my reputation resembling a sunset, as the reputations of others resemble a whale, a bare hill, a boat, a trail of smoke or a labyrinthine city, my reputation like a sunset will contemplate through half-closed eyelids time's little twitch and the devastation it wreaks, time that sweeps over the parade ground like a conjectural breeze, drowning writers in its whirlpools like figures in a painting by Delville, the writers whose books I reviewed, the writers whose work I criticized, the moribund of Chile and America whose voices called out my name, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of us as you walk away from Farewell's house with a dancer's sprightly gait, think of us as your steps lead you into the inexorable Santiago night, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of our ambitions and our hopes, think of our mute, inglorious lot as men and citizens, compatriots and writers, as you penetrate the phantasmagoric folds of time, time that we perceive in three dimensions only, alhtough in fact it has four or maybe five, like the castellated shadow of Sordello, which Sordello? a shadow not even sun can obliterate.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

died yesterday...

SWEET ROUMANIAN TONGUE

Drew down the curse of heaven on her umbrella
furled and smelling of wet cigarettes,
Jo ran off in rain one pitchy night,
one bloody a.m. found her staring, snoring.
“Why do we all stay up so late?” Jo queried.
“Though I don’t stay up so late as my friends.”
She tripped the little bomb of wasps.
They got her.
Tears for Jo, four, each perfect, waspish.
A silver tongue and piss blond hair
decants a funeral oblation for the mouse.
“She was a rare sight, a winning wonder.
Jo cultivates her toothaches elsewhere.”

Song #149

This world is gradually becoming a place
where I do not care to be any more. Can Delmore die?
I don't suppose
in all them years a day went ever by
without a loving thought for him. Welladay.
In the brightness of his promise,

unstained, I saw him thro' the mist of the actual
blazing with insight, warm with gossip
thro' all our Harvard years
when both of us were just becoming known
I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref
and grief too astray for tears.

I imagine you have heard the terrible news,
that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,
in New York: he sang me a song
'I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz
Harms & the child I sing, two parents' torts'
when he was young & gift-strong.

Waqar Bashir

It is fair to say that I tried to recall all the days we spent in our undergraduate school. I did it many times. It's not pretty. It wasn't. I am sick and tired of remembering you. But I love you. If you were alive I might not have cared what you were up to right at this moment. But you live in so many memories. Now. I am thinking about you right now.

Ballad of big nothing...

mofo's been dead for two years already...

RIP: Antonioni, Bergman...

“Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

Monica Vitti's character in Le Notte

Three shots of Jameson

didn't mess up my system last night. Lindsey and Dana wanted to be at HG. It was quiet on the street and inside at the bar. There was a talk of going to the beach and Israel's unique theological problem of not letting the Sinai become geographically obsolete for say, maritime purposes. Murtaza called from the other side, on his way to work. He thought I was lonely. Dard now works in Islamabad. He didn't know which Waqar was I talking about. I don't think anyone of us who were present on that brightly fucked-up spring day have gone back to say 'Hi' to Waqar. Or perhaps that's not surprising given what stuff (Dain wanted to know the word for stuff in Urdu @ the bar: tough question) happened right in front of us which brought on that morning like a bright, fucked-up, tragic in a big way kind of day. It is a shame.