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charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

it’s St Lucy’s day, so you know what that means — time for the best John Donne poem

JOHN DONNE (1572-163I)
A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes, Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the beds-feet life is shrunke, Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh, Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers bee At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse, From dull privations, and leane emptinesse, He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that's good, Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have,
I, by loves limbecke, am the grave Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow To be two Chaosses, when we did show Care to ought else; and often absences Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her) Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
Were I a man, that I were one, I needs must know, I should preferre,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; All, all some properties invest, If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne At this time to the Goat is runne To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all,
Since shee enjoyes her long nights festivall, Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

December 13, 2025 at 12:22 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

not feeling very well today or looking particularly good so apologies for the selfie BUT the lighting in the bathroom made it easier than usual to take a photo where you can see my eye colour & thus my central heterochromia :)

it’s a selfie of me with no glasses on, there’s a beam of light across my face and lighting up my eyes. you can see my eyes are kind of green on the outside with a brown ring around the pupils

December 13, 2025 at 11:42 AM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

Agnes loves chin rubs

December 11, 2025 at 9:42 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

there was a lucie brock-broido poem in the new yorker this week

OF THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE BUT BY ME
What is it I will have left when I leave, little but the milkweed silk, My inky fetishes, my spirit-papers and my urns, like the simpler
Despot in Atghanistan— whose only leavings were a small herd Of mostly still unrusted Land Rovers with linen songbooks holding
All Islamic hymns and some antique Americana (Judy Garland, Andy Williams, Bing),
And just a few blond-gold effigies of self, in the gnarled garden Where he had spent endless hours petting his favorite cow.
The half-life of neptunium is 2.1 million years. My moment Is over-the most velvet of the annuals live far less than a year.
Regarding loss: I had been its isotope From the youngest age. Not momentous,
Just the small bunkers of a child's lack of long-term memory And its greenest lengths of moss. A pet green turtle expired after
The long hot summer of my own short-term amnesia, the drought Of my forgetting to water him while I was away riding spotted ponies
In the South. Every memory is a death, even the sweet ones:
Whatever rabbit eating parsley in the photograph
(I was a-beam with joy) in our unkempt yard-where mint grew
Tall and accidentally-is gone.
But at a certain moment in the middle of the summer dark Standing on the porch in the dotted Swiss of night, if you watch
Almost microscopically, you can perceive the orange daylilies then Begin to grow back after death before your eyes.
In my opinion, I am not scheduled yet to go,
Not anywhere, just now.
—Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018)

December 10, 2025 at 7:10 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

agnes has got a little roman nose i think. little convex curve. very elegant

December 9, 2025 at 11:56 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

here are some more. i am sorry

more ceramic salt and pepper shakers. these are people, but one has a corncob for a head and one is... an onion bulb, a turnip? idk

two figures with upside down strawberries for heads. these ones are the worst yet

these ones are supposedly bugs but really they just look like creepy-cute little figures with giant eyes and big red mouths, and beetle wings. very 1940s animation style

floral piggy bank, with giant eyes and long eyelashes

December 7, 2025 at 5:36 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

accidentally ended up looking at lots of vintage anthropomorphic japanese figurines/ornaments on ebay, having a great time

terrifying ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the size of snails. giant blue eyes, big smiles. unnerving

very kitschy pig figures, two of them snuggling in a fluffy basket. i only know they're pigs because that's what the listing says. looks like two chubby mew figures (from pokemon)

a big green hippo chained to two small green hippos. they all look unhappy, so am i.

little dalmation ceramic figures with weirdly wide heads. like if hey arnold was a vintage dalmation figurine.

December 7, 2025 at 5:31 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

earlier today we did this on the sofa

two photos of a calico cat sitting on top of a blanket that i was snuggled up under

December 5, 2025 at 12:49 AM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

do you think anyone else has attempted to read the twentieth century poet kenneth hopkins’s poetry in the last thirty years. me neither. don’t recommend it. some of it is making me laugh though.

HIS APOLOGY
They say I write of matters out of fashion In poems not of politics but passion;
'Tis not my choice alone, but bounder duty To celebrate Elizabeth and Beauty.

LYING AMONG THE YELLOW FLOWERS
Lying among the yellow flowers
On the green hill
Glowing in the brilliant and increasing
And quivering heat of the day
Was my lover's golden and gracious body.
And I, hesitating in our happiness To pick two daisies to adorn her hair Hearing her cry, too late turned back to see The gorgeous dragon-fly
That lighted on her smooth and sun-hot knee.

November 27, 2025 at 2:06 AM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

again, not sure i recommend it - extremely brutal and grim. the writing is very good.

O'Garra looked across to Elston.
"Elston! Elston! What are we going to do? We must get out of this. Besides, the place stinks. Perhaps we are on very old ground.
Rotten ground; mashy muddy ground. Christ, the place must be full of these mangy dead."
Elston did not answer. And suddenly O'Garra fell upon him, beating him in the face, and screaming out at the top of his voice:
"Hey. Hey. You lousy son of a bitch. What's your game? Are you trying to make me as rotten as yourself, as cowardly, as lousy? It's you and not this bloody Jerry who is responsible for this. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Jesus Christ Almighty, why don't you answer? Answer. Answer."
The young German cowered in the bottom of the hole, trembling like a leaf. Terror had seized him. His face seemed to take on different colours, now white, now red, now grey, as if Death were already in the offing. Saliva trickled down his chin.
These changes of colour in the face seemed to pass across it like gusts of wind. Gusts of fear, terror, despair. Once only he glanced up at the now distorted features of the half-crazy Irishman, and made as if to cry out. Once again O'Garra spoke to Elston. Then it was that the Englishman opened his eyes, looked across at his mate, and shouted:

November 23, 2025 at 5:08 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

letter from dylan thomas to oswell blakeston, published in ambit in 1966

Dylan Thomas
Letters to Oswell Blakeston
DEAREST mouse my dear, You're awfully lucky, you and the little whisker friends, all smug and slimy. listening to Cocteau and Burns & Allen and Naylor* behind the skirting-board. Nobody ever heard of a Mouse Menace, you are not a national danger, and people write poems about you and call you slinkie and nice and velvet. You'd be safe even in Chicago, where they'd give me a fifth leg. Every year sixteen thousand London brothers and sisters cornered caged and killed. They brought out an act to destroy me in nineteen nineteen, when I was only five years old. But they gave me a Week!
I haven't seen you for so long, not since we spent an evening in not going to the Queen's Hall, and not since I left you, outside the Cafe Rat, very rudely for a sillie. I'm coming back, travelling under the seat all the way, nibbling brown paper, at the beginning of next month. Will you meet me? And this time I'll promise not to be bad: I'll powder my snout and not run after hen-rats. And will you send me some of my fan mail sometimes?
I'm so unpopular these days. Whenever I switch on the wireless, it's an interval. I was abominable about the B.B.C. But I'll get what's coming to me: when I die I'll go to hell, and it's be Rat Week always.
Much love to you, very much, Oswell.
From,
[NOTES: The signature was a drawing of Dylan by himself - drinking and smoking and with his hair running out either side in long wavy lines.
*The records referred to: Cocteau reciting his poetry to jazz, Naylor giving astrological predictions, and Burns and Allen singing "Do you believe me". (Dylan particularly loved the soft shoe dance in this when Gracie said: "We're dancing now, and you can't see the best bit.")]

November 23, 2025 at 1:01 AM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

managed to track down a copy of the Visual Editions version of Tristram Shandy for £15. not bad! condition isn’t perfect but it’s pretty damn good apracticeforeverydaylife.com/projects/the...

a big chunky paperback of the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Lawrence Sterne, introduced by Will Self

November 21, 2025 at 7:41 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

time to sleep, but in spring 1951 max chapman and oswell blakeston published a poem each in poetry quarterly, and they shared a page. oswell’s poem is dedicated to max.

MAX CHAPMAN
Night Passage
Blow horn fringe night
Sound far funnel distances
Crying all roof-ridden fathoms
And the antic triton.
Drift voice the fog ways
Lift water-melon faces
Crying your most mute prows
In the white harbour.
Close creep to sleep sweet conch
Sirene-lilted sheets
Crying all sail for Cythera
And your salt-sweet yesterdays.

OSWELL BLAKESTON
The Eagle (for M.C.)
Once more
To hurl my dying falcon at your door
So through the falling shadow
Your white tomorrow.
Points of departure, aching haunt Of gildered eyrie above wingless hunt,
Still memory bonds me with a lease that reads Now your compassion is my hired-bird's dreams.
Do I not owe you more than soul can choke, Your ribbed chasms, feathered looks?
Then climb to praise the hooded air you crush To spare the sparrow in his bare ambush.

November 21, 2025 at 1:32 AM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

here’s another by Silvia Dobson. think a lot of this poetry is pretty fine. someone could do worse than finding out who is the executor of these writers’ estates (i know at least Oswell must have someone, he’s had stories reprinted recently) and republishing some of their poetry.

AMBULANCE DRIVER
Cover me now with cobwebs and clemency.
The clear sky has stolen my sense :-horizon after horizon, wheat in vast green lakes,
sun that shakes the scent from lime flowers, wind that closes the plain to a snarling malison of dust.
I must forget.
The freight of the past is too heavy.
Movement had taken us through glare of mid-day heat, through thickets of cork trees, through lonely villages
where peasants still beat their corn with flails, where tanks clutter the ditches, monsters out of tune with the moon-eyed oxen in the fields St. Francis blest.

From Bari to Benevento the mule carts impeded us.
Clover swooned in placid crimson.
Over the Apennines went clouds clenched to thunder.
Under blown bridges lay derelict litter of war.
Again and again we saw graves with wooden crosses;
and the unknown dead, choir to uncertainty, caught and troubled our hearts.
Capua, Cassino, Frosinone.
Now we are taught the agony, the deprivation.
Only mountains hold tranquillity.
Old towns are gone.
We who came blithely from the south have found grotesque mounds of stone, where time could claim the same churches, barns and inns, farmsteads, fair mansions,
Road is to Rome.
We are not pilgrims but somnambulists.
St. Peter's dome is set in a pool of quiet, but we must pass the cool blond Tiber, down the straight convoy route, down the dark way, coil, loop and bend, stretching beyond the day towards night's mystery.
We drive to where the battle-line is set, to get torn men, to fetch shell splintered soldiers, to drag from hell of pain,
those who may never love their youth again.
livest me of feelinall of insensibility,
The freight of the present is too heavy.
I must forget.

November 20, 2025 at 5:38 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

also some poems in here by Silvia Dobson, lesbian poet and sometime lover of HD.

TO NOEL, KILLED IN AN AIR-RAID
I had better have loved a flower or a young larch tree.
—Her hair in the sunlight catches gold and the curve of her cheek is birds' fight suddenly stilled.
Stilled too
is her eyes' bright fervour, and the glint of her hands which wavered ever astray.-
No one can say
that in death she is not beautiful;
yet
I had better have loved a flower or a tree.

November 20, 2025 at 5:32 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

but i think the work by Oswell and Max is the best in here. here’s a couple more

IN SECRET
Honey bird lures on the hunters and Tricks them to tree of a snake, So that the bees busy may build wax Chapel for bow of the God:
Bow stringed with taut line of bees For that His arrow may sting less
Sweet.
SLIGHT TORSO
See how the flesh is blown
Like silent morning snow across the crevices of bone.
Then see below the gull-wing bone
Shoulder to shoulder flown
A boy's landscape.
His belly is a gently drifted dune Which, under some passing moon,
A spirit dented
With a single footstep printed,
That no wind has deleted.
Or see it as a manuscript under-scored Pure gold or gold that tarnish mellows, Haloes.

November 20, 2025 at 5:21 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

looking at a poetry anthology from 1947 at the British Library, obscure enough that I had to ask them to cut some of the pages (!)

here’s a poem by Oswell Blakeston and Max Chapman, artists and writers who were pretty much a lifelong couple

MEMO
I have been asked to remember young eyes of a sailor in France
You gave your lashes to your dear friends
I have been asked to remember white nights in cafés the little cafés
May all your drinks come true
I have been asked to remember Tomorrow to wonder if ever we may no longer
Be cast into prison for jail breaking
I have been asked to remember one town's death or long division victory and I would remember my secret compositor his news
That any human hand may set the headlines of a heart

November 20, 2025 at 5:10 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

that second one uploaded with weird sound so here it is again, hopefully silent this time. wait for it…

November 19, 2025 at 12:16 AM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

anyway who wants to see the cat’s favourite game

November 18, 2025 at 10:38 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

very excited to finally have my hands on this @kellylink.bsky.social

The people in the castle, selected strange stories by Joan Aiken, paperback with an illustration of a castle on a little hill on the front. In the top left corner it reads: "A best-of collection
- with an introduction by Kelly Link - by the late British master of supernatural fiction and children's literature."
Washington Post Notable Books

November 18, 2025 at 10:17 PM

charlotte

@tambourine.bsky.social

i am something like 5’6-5’7 depending on who’s measuring me and am not used to ordering short sizes but? maybe that’s the way forward? anyway, jumpsuit with a tassel rope thing from a dress rather than the terrible belt