Antipodal Dwelling by Aimé Césaire

Crucible in which is born the world hair humus of the first earth

hair first worry stone

when the rain shall be the thread with which bit by bit the world undoes itself

when the sun shall be a spider in which to lose ourselves one by one

when the sea shall be an octopus to spit our hopes at us in our faces

when the moon shall uncoil and will unroll for us its long serpent body

when the volcano shall shake its wrinkled pachyderm body

when the wind shall no longer blow because we have forgotten to strike the wind stones

when the stones shall cease to speak for having preached too much in the desert

(entangling my veins an entire forest down to its lowest branches

entangling my veins completely the water and the regime of faithful fires

entangling that from the bottom shall dash waterlilies in my face and my blood

of redemption and my shoulders slipping better than any knots

entangling

a drop of water in the precious alembic of water tables that shall go to the window and
cry out in Esperanto that the weather is fine poorly heard by the volutes scored by our bitterest spit)

a drop of fire in the throat without risk of wind

firefly and water I shall assemble myself in little drops of water of fire too beautiful for any other architect

dwelling made of water glimpsed upon waking

dwelling made of rumpled perfumes

dwelling made of spangled sleep

dwelling made of swelled chests stretched out of benumbed lizards

strength lines me up on the shadowless meridian

pythons crews of catastrophes unnatural brothers of my longitude

roads raise themselves to the height of green-eyed female gnomes intersected with

prayers taking aim at us on the footbridge of the malfunctioning compass sky

dwelling made of a laying-on of palms of hands

dwelling made of red cheetah eyes

dwelling made of a rain of shells of sand

the revolver shots give me a halo too vast this time for my head which arrives via portage in spare parts

In a Grove by Philip Lamantia

Ulysses on water

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

– from Ulysses, Chapter 17