Expressionist Ecology

Graham Harman has a wonderful post up about Pierrot Lunaire. My favorite is “Der Kranke Mond”:

You nocturnal moon, sick to death,
There on the black cushion of the sky
Your face, so swollen with fever
Enchants me, like a strange melody.

An unhealing love wound
Kills you, with longing, deeply smothered,
You nocturnal moon, sick to death
There on the black cushion of the sky.

The lover, who in sensual delirium
Goes without thinking to his lover
Delights in the play of your beams,
Your bleached, agony-wrenched blood
You nocturnal moon, sick to death.

I just finished yet another essay on dark ecology that quoted this one by Gottfried Benn:

Oh that we were our primordial ancestors
Small lumps of plasma in a sultry swamp.
Life and death, conception and birth—
All emerging from those juices soundlessly.

A frond of seaweed or a dune of sand,
Formed by the wind and bound to the Earth.
Even a dragonfly's head or the wing of a gull
Would be too remote and mean too much suffering.

In my view there needs to be more ecological poetry like this—expressionist, “decadent” and gothically dark.