Darger, Henry. Human Headed Blengins of Calverine Island Catherine Isles
NYMPHS by Emmalea Russo
1
Between paradises:
A sickness
Fun seductive
And wondering
If I’d become
Pure image
A nymph at the top
Of Purgatorio, alone with lights
In her hands
Against drugged sylvan shadow
Or in Paradiso,
Painting the gulf coast on firmament
Senselessly in Henry Darger’s novel
Tormented by evil adults
Then released, almost-free
Into reeds
Screaming for a thousand feet
In Darger’s novel of infinite
Nymphs, syringes, images
I can be spotted
By my outfit
Corpus Gloriosum
Cold, a trouble-maker
With tail and ancient
Aura hyperborean
An almost-maiden with eerie
Personality reading Sexual Personae
Hollywood Husbands, Madame Bovary
2
Outside city limits
Socrates is open to possession
By the nymphs
Inducing and producing
Metamorphosis and persistence
Of retinal image, plus desire
Humidity was done with me
And I was sick
In bed accosted by images
Of leopards bulls serpents
Scorpions and wolves gnashing
Saint Anthony in the desert
3
Syringe, from a wood nymph
Named Syrinx turned
Into water reeds out of which Pan
Fashioned his musical ecstasies
Spilled on the beach
In Santa Monica where I was more
Than animal but not yet human
A soul without union
Is useless, no?
I was hooked on a subject
From bed
It was spring
Outside in Venusburg
Or Vienna
Or Jersey Shore
Image of an image, dead
Reading constellations
Never written
We had paintings commissioned
Then we ate them on the terrace
As my images
Attached to topics
Sub-mundane
Envisioned the place
Where Florida Gulf
Empties into California
4
Sure, nymphs can get sick
Live near water
Won’t get raised
In the resurrection
Unless they mate with men
Under astrological phenomena
From bed, I phoned him
And said I was afraid
Of the endless novel
Of Henry Darger
Some fifteen-thousand pages
With illustrations
Still, I went in to what is known
As the realms of the unreal
Or whatever
Here—
5
Seizure-inducing
Old school medicine
In the foyer
In Florida with a view
Bone-white sky, dry
In California
And France on the other side
Laure dead in Bataille’s bed
Of tuberculosis blinking
Into dismembered furniture
Where I missed this
Sickness and its attendant
Nympholeptic men
Shining like horseheads
6
Half-pretty, in the image
I am throwing a party
At the mid-century
Modern home of a Los Angeles
Starlet
I wear ermine-lined coat
With leg of mutton
Sleeves, Elizabethan
From 1980s and you wear
Nothing
We are both younger
Than we’ve ever been
Stunning, say the guests
Half of whom believe
I will lead them some
Where unseen, that im
Ages will become
Music and music
A screen
7
Portrait of Queen
In Medici collar standing
Above the world
As bitchy nymph leader
To endless novels and un
Written constellations
I came willingly
Maybe, and running
Blasting White Rabbit
Mixed and quickened
Alchemical Studies
Mysterium Coniunctionis
Carl Jung and handsome
French philosophers
Who left Europe
For California’s
Machines and high
Possession rates
8
In Florida,
Walked parking lots to the mall
Under water tower
Sun, inhuman
Erethism and viaticum
Savoir-faire
Repeating machinery
Of industry
The mall was cool
Linoleum in which I read
Stories by the Chekhov
Of suburbia
Went fractive
Mad into our kairological
Station between paradises
Neighbors play a Celine Dion
Song of long nights and touching
Searching for sidereal balm
Or ash of what’s endured
The music at the mall
Replaced my turbulence
With a midmost peace
9
Thousandfold wandering
Microcosm I walked on
Long and charged along
A Delacroix
Tiger felling a horse
In blood-orange
Gray-blue
Ha ha ha
10
So I could hiss as wind
Into the ears of men and corn
Signing from the basin
Of a syringe the sun fills
White sky I can’t tell
From the white horse
Getting felled by tiger
In the shadow of a screaming reed
In the corner of a gone painting’s
California spring
(6/24/24)
Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Her first novel, Vivienne, is forthcoming in September.