Two excerpts from Truman Capote's 'Self-Portrait' (1972), published in 'Portraits and Observations'.

"Or is it at long last love?"

'Self-Portrait' [1972] by Truman Capote

Three Pictures

[Written in June 1929.]

The First Picture

It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other. We cannot possibly break out of the frame of the picture by speaking natural words. You see me leaning against the door of the smithy with a horseshoe in my hand and you think as you go by: "How picturesque!" I, seeing you sitting so much at your ease in the car, almost as if you were going to bow to the populace, think what a picture of old luxurious aristocratical England! We are both quite wrong in our judgments no doubt, but that is inevitable.

So now at the turn of the road I saw one of these pictures. It might have been called "The Sailor's Homecoming" or some such title. A fine young sailor carrying a bundle; a girl with her hand on his arm; neighbours gathering round; a cottage garden ablaze with flowers; as one passed one read at the bottom of that picture that the sailor was back from China, and there was a fine spread waiting for him in the parlour; and he had a present for his young wife in his bundle; and she was soon going to bear him their first child. Everything was right and good and as it should be, one felt about that picture.

There was something wholesome and satisfactory in the sight of such happiness; life seemed sweeter and more enviable than before.

So thinking I passed them, filling in the picture as fully, as completely as I could, noticing the colour of her dress, of his eyes, seeing the sandy cat slinking round the cottage door.

For some time the picture floated in my eyes, making most things appear much brighter, warmer, and simpler than usual; and making some things appear foolish; and some things wrong and some things right, and more full of meaning than before. At odd moments during that day and the next the picture returned to one's mind, and one thought with envy, but with kindness, of the happy sailor and his wife; one wondered what they were doing, what they were saying now. The imagination supplied other pictures springing from that first one, a picture of the sailor cutting firewood, drawing water; and they talked about China; and the girl set his present on the chimney-piece where everyone who came could see it; and she sewed at her baby clothes, and all the doors and windows were open into the garden so that the birds were flittering and the bees humming, and Rogers—that was his name—could not say how much to his liking all this was after the China seas. As he smoked his pipe, with his foot in the garden.

'Three Pictures' (The First Picture) by Virginia Woolf

Trying to see the proportional relation
Of one memory to another
One is so strange, and then
To try and see what looms
And doesn’t for the other person
Who was there, it gets stranger,
Especially when you’ve read
His email.
I don’t know how people
Understand their lives, measure
Their sensations against “objective”
Or so-to-speak democratic estimations,
Whether people accept the externality
Of events, “events,” as things
That happen to them. [...]
This is lyric poetry. It has to be. It has
No other hope. What was it
About you and me that made whatever
Happen to us. In New York
Everything fell apart. What I dreaded
And expected.
But still. Tonight
It is dark and the weather is cooler
Than it’s been. It has taken
A while for Fall to break; the global
Warming kept me in summer
Love with you like I was under a
Fermata. [...]
Alain Badiou, on the day
Of his class, said, “Because an event
Is pure rapture, an event disappears
Immediately: it does not exist
Objectively, but only by appearing
And disappearing.” This is both
Precise and vague; it is attractive
I guess. I guess since you and me did not
Disappear immediately, it was
Not pure rapture, not in these
Terms, but my smile
Was real each time I swallowed
Your cum. Getting
Fucked by you was great; I could
Feel it in my organs, but
You didn’t make me go insane
Except for maybe once
Or twice. Actually maybe I am
Being unfair. [...] 
[...] I have no idea
What it feels like to have
A cock. Sometimes I feel
As though I’m getting close
To understanding and then
Something happens to make
Me have no clue again. When Sinan
Fucks me, we lose our individuality
So severely it’s like we’re both
Gasping after an animal that’s his
Cock that is beyond us and I lose
All sense of the world. His cock’s
Not even him, and he’s not him either
And we aren’t anything.
[...]
I am definitely in love with you
As I write this. You are so petty
And superfluous I cannot stand
You. Sinan is definitely
In love with me. I know, because
I saw him tonight. I love
Him too. You are gracious
To accord me the space and time
In which to develop, or to elaborate
Upon, as the French say, these
Extreme emotions I am, despite
The odds and certain lapses,
So capable of feeling.
It was good to slap
Your face and to admit
That your asshole
Made me nervous.
Your eyes had a way
Of going soft and shiny
When you said the really
Tender things. We admitted
It was intimidating
For us both to hear each other describe
People we’ve fucked and been
In love with. I’m proud of what
We accomplished together. Alain Badiou
Ended his class with a reading
Of “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” which
Is an opera by Paul Dukas. You
And me had gone pretty far
By the time this day came, and
Something very fragile in me breaks
When somebody says my name, or
Even a variant of it. I was tired.
I think Badiou discusses “Ariane”
In Being and Event which
I have not read. In class he said
[...] Ariane experiences an Event
That causes her to demand freedom, Badiou
Said, but she is unable to convince anybody
Else, any other women to want freedom; she ends up alone.
[...]
Alone. The end. Badiou narrated
This with emotion and
I cried. Maybe cos I was tired and
That thing about my name or because
I am not heroic or free.
I had missed half of Alain Badiou’s
Lectures messing around with you
On the couch by the fire; in the women’s
Toilets; up on the hill. If this were a suitable parable,
And it isn’t, I would try to tell myself
That those very early mornings in Brooklyn when I sat
Up in your bed feeling wrong and
Got dressed and walked away, I should
Have stayed away cos I don’t need you.
Maybe I don’t need you. But I want
You. Maybe I don’t love you. But
I am getting to know you. Maybe
What made me cry in class was how tired
I was and how sad and hard
It is, and how rare, to undertake an act
That’s truly free, and not just a response
To a confused surge of drives and fears.

https://verse.press/poem/trying-to-see-the-proportional-relation-5263585844513633905

[Trying to see the proportional relation] by Ariana Reines

Three Pictures

[Written in June 1929.]

The Second Picture

In the middle of the night a loud cry rang through the village. Then there was a sound of something scuffling; and then dead silence. All that could be seen out of the window was the branch of lilac tree hanging motionless and ponderous across the road. It was a hot still night. There was no moon. The cry made everything seem ominous. Who had cried? Why had she cried? It was a woman's voice, made by some extremity of feeling almost sexless, almost expressionless. It was as if human nature had cried out against some iniquity, some inexpressible horror. There was dead silence. The stars shone perfectly steadily. The fields lay still. The trees were motionless. Yet all seemed guilty, convicted, ominous. One felt that something ought to be done. Some light ought to appear tossing, moving agitatedly. Someone ought to come running down the road. There should be lights in the cottage windows. And then perhaps another cry, but less sexless, less wordless, comforted, appeased. But no light came. No feet were heard. There was no second cry. The first had been swallowed up, and there was dead silence.

One lay in the dark listening intently. It had been merely a voice. There was nothing to connect it with. No picture of any sort came to interpret it, to make it intelligible to the mind. But as the dark arose at last all one saw was an obscure human form, almost without shape, raising a gigantic arm in vain against some overwhelming iniquity.

'Three Pictures' (The Second Picture) by Virginia Woolf

"May Dye married and now her name is May Linger of Oneco, Florida but when I knew May Dye her name was May Dye of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was 8 and I was 8 and we sure did do weird things and we knew we did weird things and that is the way we wanted to do things.

In the summertime we figured that there were 293 ways of changing a dollar and that is what we did in the summertime and the drugstores and dimestores sure hated us and
that is what we wanted them to do and that is what they did. We enjoyed it. May read, she knew how to read, that a bird's feather..."

Image: 'Three Pansies' (Joe Brainard, 1967)

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/486945

'May Dye' by Joe Brainard

Three Pictures

[Written in June 1929.]

The Third Picture

The fine weather remained unbroken. Had it not been for that single cry in the night one would have felt that the earth had put into harbour; that life had ceased to drive before the wind; that it had reached some quiet cove and there lay anchored, hardly moving, on the quiet waters. But the sound persisted. Wherever one went, it might be for a long walk up into the hills, something seemed to turn uneasily beneath the surface, making the peace, the stability all round one seem a little unreal. There were the sheep clustered on the side of the hill; the valley broke in long tapering waves like the fall of smooth waters. One came on solitary farmhouses. The puppy rolled in the yard. The butterflies gambolled over the gorse. All was as quiet, as safe could be. Yet, one kept thinking, a cry had rent it; all this beauty had been an accomplice that night; had consented; to remain calm, to be still beautiful; at any moment it might be sundered again. This goodness, this safety were only on the surface.

And then to cheer oneself out of this apprehensive mood one turned to the picture of the sailor's homecoming. One saw it all over again producing various little details—the blue colour of her dress, the shadow that fell from the yellow flowering tree—that one had not used before. So they had stood at the cottage door, he with his bundle on his back, she just lightly touching his sleeve with her hand. And a sandy cat had slunk round the door. Thus gradually going over the picture in every detail, one persuaded oneself by degrees that it was far more likely that this calm and content and good will lay beneath the surface than anything treacherous, sinister. The sheep grazing, the waves of the valley, the farmhouse, the puppy, the dancing butterflies were in fact like that all through. And so one turned back home, with one's mind fixed on the sailor and his wife, making up picture after picture of them so that one picture after another of happiness and satisfaction might be laid over that unrest, that hideous cry, until it was crushed and silenced by their pressure out of existence.

Here at last was the village, and the churchyard through which one must pass; and the usual thought came, as one entered it, of the peacefulness of the place, with its shady yews, its rubbed tombstones, its nameless graves. Death is cheerful here, one felt. Indeed, look at that picture! A man was digging a grave, and children were picnicking at the side of it while he worked. As the shovels of yellow earth were thrown up, the children were sprawling about eating bread and jam and drinking milk out of large mugs. The gravedigger's wife, a fat fair woman, had propped herself against a tombstone and spread her apron on the grass by the open grave to serve as a tea-table. Some lumps of clay had fallen among the tea things. Who was going to be buried, I asked. Had old Mr. Dodson died at last? "Oh! no. It's for young Rogers, the sailor," the woman answered, staring at me. "He died two nights ago, of some foreign fever. Didn't you hear his wife?" She rushed into the road and cried out..."Here, Tommy, you're all covered with earth!"

What a picture it made!

'Three Pictures' (The Third Picture) by Virginia Woolf

'I Wish I Want I Need' (2001)
by Gail Mazur

The black kitten cries at her bowl
meek meek and the gray one glowers
from the windowsill. My hand on the can
to serve them. First day of spring.
Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours
through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday.
What she wanted was that ride with me—
shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances,
1930, 1958, 1970.
How cruel the world has been to her,
how uncanny she’s survived it.
In her bag, a birthday card
from “my Nemesis,” signed Sincerely
with love—“Why is she doing this to me?”
she demands, “She hates me.”
“Maybe
she loves you” is and isn’t what Mother
wants to hear, maybe after sixty years
the connection might as well be love.
Might well be love, I don’t say—
I won’t spoil her birthday,
my implacable mother.
In Byfield,
in the snowstorm, we bought things
at an antiques mall, she a miniature
Sunbonnet Baby creamer and saucer—
a bargain!—I, a chrome ice bucket
stamped with penguins, with Bakelite handles.
I wanted it, I had one just like it
at home. Sometimes I think the only thing
I’m sure I want is what I have.

“What do you wish for?” I asked
a friend, I was so curious to know
how he’d formulate a wish, to know
if there is a formula. His list
was deliciously simple, my friend
the hedonist: a penthouse with a concierge,
“wonderful food,” months in Mexico,
good movies . . . .

Last night, you and I
watched “The Way We Were” and I cried—
I always do—for the wanting in it,
and the losing. “It’s a great movie,”
I said, to justify my tears. I wish
you were more like me. Streisand and Redford,
so opposite it’s emblematic, almost
a cliché. Each wants or needs the other
to change, so the pushy Jewish lefty,
Barbara, should be quiet, accommodating,
and the accommodating, handsome, laid-back
“nice gentile boy” should agree with her
that people are their principles.
He thinks people can relax a little,
be happy. If only
they could both become
nothing, they can stay together.

All her wishing and wanting and needing
won’t make that happen. She marches
against the Nazis, the Blacklist, the bomb,
through the movie decades, and he doesn’t
want to be a great unpopular novelist,
so he writes badly for movies,
and later, television.
At the end
(it’s the early ’60s), when they meet again
in front of the Plaza, his look—the blank
Redford quizzicality I’ve learned
is his whole expressive repertoire—
seems to ask, “Why? Why did I love you?
Why do I still? Why aren’t you
like me?”
And because the director’s
a liberal, Streisand’s the wiser one,
more human than Redford—she’s leafletting,
to ban the bomb, in the ’70s she’ll be
Another Mother for Peace—the way
she wriggles her sensual mouth
(a mannerism that’s become familiar
in the years since this movie was new)
I know she loves him or at least yearns
for him, still wants him, which is more
piercing, more selfish.
This morning, my throat
is constricted, my head aches, I’m always
like this, this movie reminds me you don’t get
what you want, even if you’re not weak,
or mean, or criminal. I wish I didn’t
believe that message so utterly. Today
I need to believe something more useful,
more positive.
Once, when I was a child,
my mother lied to me. Maybe that day
I was too demanding, more likely I needed
consolation—my schoolmates so lucky,
so confident, so gentile. Either
she meant to reassure me, or—more likely—
to instruct when she said (she couldn’t have
believed it, the ’40s had happened)
that the meek inherit the earth. That was
lesson one of our course in resignation.
My little mother,
little kitten,
be patient, I’m trying, it’s for you
I’m opening this can of worms,
for you I’m opening this can of food.

'I Wish I Want I Need' by Gail Mazur

THE WRONG KIND OF INSURANCE

I teach in a high school
And see the nurses in some of the hospitals,
And if all teachers are like that
Maybe I can give you a buzz some day,
Maybe we can get together for lunch or coffee or something

The white marble statues in the auditorium
Are colder to the touch than the rain that falls
Past the post-office inscription about rain or snow
Or gloom of night. I think
About what these archaic meanings mean,
That unfurl like a rope ladder down through history,
To fall at our feet like crocuses.

All of our lives is a rebus
Of little wooden animals painted shy,
Terrific colors, magnificent and horrible,
Close together. The message is learned
The way light at the edge of a beach in autumn is learned
The seasons are superimposed.
In New York we have winter in August
As they do in Argentina and Australia.
Spring is leafy and cold, autumn pale and dry.
And changes build up
Forever, like birds released into the light
Of an august sky, falling away forever
To define the handful of things we know for sure,
Followed by musical evenings

Yes, friends, these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes
Are, as you have guessed, merely stage machinery,
And the funny thing is it knows we know
About it and stillwants us to go on believing
In what it so unskillfully imitates, and wants
To be loved not for that but for itself:
The murky atmosphere of a park, tattered
Foliage, wise old treetrunks, rainbow tissue-paper wadded
Clouds down near where the perspective
Intersects the sunset, so we may know
We too are somehow impossible, formed of so many different things,
Too many to make sense to anybody.
We straggle on as quotients hard-to-combine
Ingredients, and what continues
Does so with our participation and consent.

Try milk of tears, but it is not the same,
The dandelions will have to know why, and your comic
Dirge routine will be lost on the unfolding sheaves
Of the wind, a lucky one, though it will carry you
Too far, to some manageable, cold, open
Shore of sorrows you expected to reach,
Then leave behind.
                                 Thus, friend, this distilled,
Dispersed musk of moving around, the product
Of leaf after transparent leaf, of too many
Comings and goings, visitors at all hours.
                                                          Each night 
Is trifoliate, strange to the touch.

'The Wrong Kind of Insurance' by John Ashbery

LA GRAN SALINA

La locomotora ilumina la sal inmensa,
los bloques de sal de los costados,
yuyos mezclados con sal que crecen
          entre las vías.
Yo vacilo....
y callo....
porque estoy pensando en los trenes de carga
que pasan de noche por la Gran Salina.
La palabra misterio hay que aplastarla
como se aplasta una pulga,
entre los dos pulgares.
La palabra misterio ya no explica nada.
(El misterio es nada y la nada no se explica
        por sí misma.)
Habría que reemplazar la palabra misterio
(al menos por hoy, al menos por este
       “poema”)
por lo que yo siento cuando pienso en los
       trenes de carga
que pasan de noche por la Gran Salina.
La pera trepida en el plato.
La miel se despereza en el frasco cerrado,
para desesperación de las moscas que la acechan posadas en el vidrio.
Pero yo no me explico
y hasta ahora nadie ha podido explicarme
por qué me sorprendo pensando
en la Gran Salina.
El hombre de chaleco del salón comedor
se ha quitado los anteojos.
Los anteojos trepidan sobre el mantel de la
        mesa tendida.
Todo trepida,
todo se estremece,
en el tren que pasa a mediodía por
        la Gran Salina.
Yo me he sorprendido mirando
la sombra del avión que pasa por
        la Gran Salina.
Pero eso no explica nada.
Es como una gota que se evapora enseguida.
Hay que distraerse, dicen.
Hay que distraerse mirando y recordando
para tapar el sueño
de la Gran Salina.
Un piano colgado como una araña del hilo
se ha detenido entre los pisos doce y trece...
Un camión pasa cargado
        de ventiladores de pie
que mueven alegremente sus hélices.
En 1948, en Salta,
fuimos de noche a cazar vizcachas y ranas,
y la conversación se apagó con el fuego del
        asado,
abrumados como estábamos por el cielo negro
        y estrellado.
Nerviosamente encendíamos y apagábamos
        las linternas
hasta quedarnos sin pilas.
Tampoco puedo explicarme por qué sueño
       con pilas de linternas,
con pilas para radios a transistores.
Ni por qué sueño con lamparitas de luz,
delicadamente guardadas en sus cajas
       respectivas.
Ni por qué me sorprendo mirando el
       filamento roto
de una lamparita quemada.
Nunca he visto...
nunca he podido imaginarme
la lluvia cayendo sobre la Gran Salina.
Yo no tengo objetivos pero me gusta
       objetivar.
Desde chico intenté cortar una gota de agua
       en dos
(con una tijera).
Aún hoy intento,
apartando las cosas de la mesa
o ahuyentando amigos,
imitar, imaginarme, la lluvia sobre la
      Gran Salina.
Tomo una plancha caliente y le salpico gotas
      de agua.
Pero aunque pueda imaginarme todo,
nunca podré imaginarme
el olor a salina mojada.
Anoche llegué a mi casa a las tres de la
      mañana.
En la oscuridad, tropecé con un mueble...
y allí nomás me quedé pensando
en lo que no quería pensar...
en lo que creía bien olvidado!
Pero en realidad me estaba escapando
del sueño estremecedor de la Gran Salina.
Y ahora me interrogo a mí mismo
como si estuviera preso y declarara:
La Gran Salina o Salina Grande
está situada al norte de Córdoba,
cerca (o dentro, no recuerdo)
del límite con Santiago del Estero.
Estoy mirando el mapa...
pero esto no explica nada.
La caja de fósforos queda vacía
a las cuatro de la mañana
y yo me palpo a mí mismo, desesperado,
con el cigarrillo en la boca...
Habría que inventar el fuego, pensarían
      algunos.
Yo en cambio pienso en los reflejos del tren
que pasa de noche junto al río Salado.
No puedo dormir cuando viajando de noche
sé que tengo a mi derecha
el río Salado.
Paro aún así sigo escapando del gran
      misterio...
del misterio de la sal inagotable de la
      Gran Salina.
Recuerdo cuando arrojábamos impunemente
      naranjas chupadas
al espejo ciego y enceguecedor de la
     Gran Salina.
[...]

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/ricardo-zelarayan-the-great-salt-flats/spanish/ 

'La Gran Salina' por Ricardo Zelarayán

28
"Raining here, too. But we can use it."

Camilo Falla

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