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Yours is the music for no instrument
January 8, 2019 Nichole Robertson

Yours is the music for no instrument

yours is the music for no instrument
yours the preposterous colour unbeheld
—mine the unbought contemptuous intent
till this our flesh merely shall be excelled
by speaking flower
                      (if I have made songs
it does not greatly matter to the sun,
nor will rain care
                      cautiously who prolongs
unserious twilight) Shadows have begun
the hair’s worm huge, ecstatic, rathe….

yours are the poems i do not write.

In this at least we have got a bulge on death,
silence, and the keenly musical light

of sudden nothing….la bocca mia 'he
kissed wholly trembling'

                              or so thought the lady.

 

 From one our favorite modernist poets, and one of his most sensual, candid collections, Tulips and Chimneys. 
The poem has a spirit of adulation that's reminiscent of She Walks in Beauty by Byron, but without the constraints of meter or rhyme. Cummings has a gift for transforming and fragmenting language, and we wanted to capture that in this illustration. The illustration hints at a new kind of music, sensual and surprising, that belongs to no instrument or musician only to itself. 
You can purchase the print here. 

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