PERFICIO
(after Leonardo da Vinci)
Memorandum: Have two boxes made to go on a packsaddle.
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Blow out a pig’s lung to see whether it increases in length and breadth or if it diminishes in length alone.
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Enquire for Vitruvius at the stationer’s.
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Have ears of corn half the size of a shinbone sent from Florence.
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Commission a translation of Avicenna on the utilities.
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Memorandum: Make aqua fortis with one part Roman vitriol, one part saltpetre, one cinnabar, one verdigris. Add pyrites and if it turns green know that it contains copper.
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Tuesday buy wine for the morning. Buy beans, panic-grass, white maize and red, millet and peas.
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Study Theophrastus: Concerning Flow and Ebb. Concerning Whirlpools. Concerning Water.
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Use an arrow as a balance and weigh the substance when heated then weigh it again cold.
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Memorandum: To dissolve hairs, horn, bristle and nail, make a depilatory from a distillation of lime, orpiment and lye.
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Memorandum: Go each Saturday to the hothouse to see the nudes.
SPLEEN (Narcissus)
N. poeticus. Yet again
an unhappy asphodel snaps
the gastric drainpipe. Narcotic,
unworldly, a toxic doctrine
of undivine retribution.
Excise the splenic nemeses,
the malevolent underworld
perfume. Injudicious the dys-
crasial entourage, the
enfleurage dodgy, unpoetic.
SPLEEN (Auricula)
Wrong-hearing the ear split wide.
Spleen-weary auricula seeds
rumors of ungenial blood:
blood-gossip, uncultivated,
a sheer lack of blood-reserve
(red cells gone wild). O unfiltered
depravity! A settling of
spores, the perennial payback.
(Soil hemorrhages shock-indifference
—fruit of bleak incuriosity.)
_________
Baudelaire in italics.
Photograph © Yale Rosen
