August spits and holds

[rayheinrich]

Ok, to get literal and all, this is what it meant to me:

Original:
you dismiss all prominent apocalypse theories where saints prevail and shove the dining room in the closet.

I know your restlessness, the tangled scent of red. there's nothing heroic about this.

you're irresistible amongst flat tires, and the minutia of a daytime half-moon.

Translation:
1. you don't think 'good' will prevail, you repress the conventional/the common consensus

2. I understand your urge to use violence as a solution, the
irrational/confused/delusional instinct for war, there is nothing heroic about this.
(and to continue what Leanne started: "scent of red" is a direct reference
to the smell of blood, "restlessness" to the lust for it, "tangled"
to the illogic necessary to 'justify' it.
[red also connotes: Mars, god of war, all that stuff...]

3. You are only appealing when compared to the least significant of things.

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Of the lines in the original, I thought the middle ones:

"I know your restlessness, the tangled scent of red. there's nothing heroic about this."

were excellent.

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Erthona: "but does a line like "the tangled scent of red" convey any meaning"

"Meaning" is created in the act of reading, NOT writing. The extent of what
is communicated depends on how much the writer and reader agree on the meaning
of the terms the reader is interpreting.

Also: If I write a poem dealing with nuclear physics to a group of physicists,
my success involves my communicating to that audience, not to
someone who doesn't know (or care) about nuclear physics.
(There's no "fault" involved for either party should the poem fall into the wrong hands.)
It's a question of audience. But if I get my physics wrong (or confuse one mythological god
with another) well, that's another matter...

I remember when I read Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" for the
first time. It seemed like complete nonsense. But, it turned out, it was
reasonably straight-forward, I just didn't know the terms.

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream"

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

literal "meaning":

I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help lay out the corpse of an old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finished. It all seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the house of the dead – all that appetite, all that concupiscence.

Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen, and went in to the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face, it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been

She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life – all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must look steadily at this repellent but true tableau – the animal life in the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other tableaus of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances.

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this above was taken from:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poe...mperor.htm