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Release
With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life.
Adelaide Crapsey
(1878—1914)
Release
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Crapsey, Adelaide
A Musical
Outside the rain upon the street,
The sky all grim of hue,
Inside, the music–painful sweet,
And yet I heard but you.
As is a thrilling violin,
So is your voice to me,
And still above the other strains,
It sang in ecstasy.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
(1872—1906)
A Musical
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: # Music Archive, *Archive African American Literature, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Dunbar, Paul Laurence, Dunbar, Paul Laurence, Paul Laurence Dunbar
“Once there came a man”
Once there came a man
Who said:
“Range me all men of the world in rows.”
And instantly
There was a terrific clamor among the people
Against being ranged in rows.
There was a loud quarrel, world-wide.
It endured for ages;
And blood was shed
By those who would not stand in rows,
And by those who pined to stand in rows.
Eventually, the man went to death, weeping.
And those who stayed in the bloody scuffle
Knew not the great simplicity.
Stephen Crane
(1871—1900)
“Once there came a man”
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Stephen Crane
Voyages
I
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:
O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
II
—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.
And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
III
Infinite consanguinity it bears—
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands …
IV
Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know,
(from palms to the severe
Chilled albatross’s white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.
All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June—
Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?
In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,—
In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.
V
Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade—
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.
—As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen trackless smile … What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed … “There’s
Nothing like this in the world,” you say,
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.
“—And never to quite understand!” No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.
But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
VI
Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,
Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun’s
Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;
O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix’ breast—
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
—Thy derelict and blinded guest
Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
More savage than the death of kings,
Some splintered garland for the seer.
Beyond siroccos harvesting
The solstice thunders, crept away,
Like a cliff swinging or a sail
Flung into April’s inmost day—
Creation’s blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose—
Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
—Unfolded floating dais before
Which rainbows twine continual hair—
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!
The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.
Hart Crane
(1899—1932)
Voyages
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Crane, Hart, FDM in New York
The Lonely Death
In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.
Adelaide Crapsey
(1878—1914)
The Lonely Death
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Crapsey, Adelaide
Trapped
Well and
If day on day
Follows, and weary year
On year. . and ever days and years. .
Well?
Adelaide Crapsey
(1878—1914)
Trapped
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Crapsey, Adelaide
“Behold, the grave of a wicked man”
Behold, the grave of a wicked man,
And near it, a stern spirit.
There came a drooping maid with violets,
But the spirit grasped her arm.
“No flowers for him,” he said.
The maid wept:
“Ah, I loved him.”
But the spirit, grim and frowning:
“No flowers for him.”
Now, this is it —
If the spirit was just,
Why did the maid weep?
Stephen Crane
(1871—1900)
“Behold, the grave of a wicked man”
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Stephen Crane
Amaze
I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.
Adelaide Crapsey
(1878—1914)
Amaze
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Crapsey, Adelaide
ARK presenteert met de duo-tentoonstelling Schemergebied van Maartje Korstanje en Vince Donders twee beeldhouwers die ieder vanuit een uitgesproken engagement op poëtische wijze reflecteren op de relatie tussen mens en natuur. Hun werk deelt een fascinatie voor processen van transformatie en beweegt zich tussen groei en verval, constructie en destructie, leven en vergankelijkheid.
Maartje Korstanje (Goes, 1982) maakt sculpturen en installaties van veelal natuurlijke materialen zoals klei, karton en textiel. In haar werk onderzoekt zij hoe organische vormen ontstaan, vergaan en opnieuw gestalte aannemen. Haar sculpturen lijken het tastbare eindpunt van een groeiproces — kwetsbaar, maar vitaal en resoneren met het denken rond het symbioceen, waarin samenwerking tussen mens en andere levensvormen centraal staat.
Vince Donders (Tilburg, 1991) construeert installaties van afval en industrieel rest- en constructiemateriaal. Thema’s als overconsumptie, ecologische uitputting en veerkracht vormen zijn uitgangspunt. Zijn werken zijn onheilspellend, dystopisch van aard en balanceren tussen postindustriële archeologie en sciencefiction.
In deze duo-presentatie ontmoeten hun werelden elkaar: beide kunstenaars bewegen zich op het grensvlak van ecologie en verbeelding. Samen creëren zij bij PARK een gelaagde omgeving waarin synthetisch en organisch, heden en toekomst, afbraak en schepping in elkaars verlengde liggen. Hun werk nodigt uit tot reflectie op de rol van de mens binnen een voortdurend veranderende wereld.
SCHEMERGEBIED
tentoonstelling Vince Donders en Maartje Korstanje
21.02.2026 tot 05.04 2026
PARK
Wilhelminapark 53, 5041 ED Tilburg
park(at)park013.nl
Facebook.com/Park013
https://www.instagram.com/park_tilburg/
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive C-D, Archive K-L, Art & Literature News, Exhibition Archive, Maartje Korstanje, Park
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
Paul Laurence Dunbar
(1872—1906)
We Wear the Mask
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: *Archive African American Literature, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Dunbar, Paul Laurence, Dunbar, Paul Laurence, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar
“Once there came a man”
Once there came a man
Who said:
“Range me all men of the world in rows.”
And instantly
There was a terrific clamor among the people
Against being ranged in rows.
There was a loud quarrel, world-wide.
It endured for ages;
And blood was shed
By those who would not stand in rows,
And by those who pined to stand in rows.
Eventually, the man went to death, weeping.
And those who stayed in the bloody scuffle
Knew not the great simplicity.
Stephen Crane
(1871—1900)
“Once there came a man”
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Stephen Crane
Niagara
Seen on a Night in November
How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.
Adelaide Crapsey
(1878—1914)
Niagara
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, Archive C-D, Archive C-D, Crapsey, Adelaide
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