table alight

St George's Hall at Windsor Castle in England. Drawing by Joseph Nash, published 1848. (from the Windsor Castle Wikipedia page)

transcribed from www.frankohara.org:

POEM

Some days I feel that I exude a fine dust
like that attributed to Pylades in the famous
Chronica nera areopagitica when it was found

and it's because an excavationist has
reached the inner chamber of my heart
and rustled the paper bearing your name

I don't like that stranger sneezing over our love

from Balzac's Cousin Bette (1846), Chapter XXI (in which Honoré kicks your ass):

Mental work, labor in the higher regions of the mind, is one of the most strenuous kinds of human effort. The quality that above all deserves the greatest glory in art--and by that word we must include all the creations of the mind--is courage; courage of a kind which common minds have no conception, and which perhaps is here described for the first time. Under the terrible stress of poverty, and kept by Bette rather like a horse in blinkers, unable to look to the right or to the left, spurred on by that hard old maid, Necessity personified, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born poet and dreamer, had proceeded from conception to execution, leaping over the abyss that divides these two hemispheres of art without even noticing it. To plan, dream, and imagine fine works is a pleasant occupation to be sure. It is like smoking magic cigars, like leading the life of a courtesan who pleases only herself. The work is then envisaged in all the grace of infancy, in the wild delight of its conception, in fragrant flowerlike beauty, with the ripe juices of the fruit savored in anticipation. Such are the pleasures of invention in the imagination. The man who can explain his design in words passes for an extraordinary man. All artists and writers possess this faculty. But to produce, to bring to birth, to bring up the infant work with labor, to put it to bed full-fed with milk, to take it up again every morning with inexhaustible maternal love, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in lovely garments that it tears up again and again; never to be discouraged by the convulsions of this mad life, and to make of it a living masterpiece that speaks to all eyes in sculpture, or to all minds in literature, to all memories in painting, to all hearts in music--that is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to obey the mind. And the creative moments of the mind do not come to order. These, like the moments of love, are discontinuous.

(translation copyright Kathleen Raine)