And Morphy losing:

Arif Telaku  "Eindpartij/Endgame"

Daniel Solnon  "L' Echiquier"

Robert James Fischer  (photographer unknown)

 

                      Orchard Bees

 

Wrung-out, aching, caked with a sweat
he wouldn't claim, living the wrong life,
he shook the branch until the last apple fell,
never glancing at the others, whose backs,
as they gathered, were as arched and gravity-clutched
as his, their gestures in the limbs as solemn,
as exhausted of flight.  Bees drifted where he labored:
he imagined taking in that hovering intelligence
humming the way back, the sweetness
welling up inside on its own, that furious
attendant stinging.
                            And he dreamed it
resting in his room at dusk, letting bees
drift through the open window like a gold smoke,
lighting on the potted irises, shuttling
weightlessly back out, a tune he'd heard
in his mother's humming before she died,
charming the locusts and the mayflies
of his childhood, and after, from the balcony,
when the girl in flowers sang "Sweet Honey
in the Rock," over a bronze platter of candles.
Even her teeth and tongue were washed with gold

He craved so much more than the dumb labor
and the daily wish of bees arriving and leaving.
So he roused himself and went back, among the ripening,
to the hive in the dead oak's hollow, and reached
inside the chaos of buzzing, a down all over
his arm like thorns grown fiercely inward.
Then he held a gold fistful of cells, dripping,
the queen rich there in his grip, and felt
the swelling, his hand already alien, a mitt,
he thought, for what was beyond pain, and sweeter.

Swallowing his cries, he stumbled home, the swarm
trailing him like a gold whirlwind on its side,
its force pouring in and out of his palm,
nothing of his sleeve visible, instead a furious,
winged skin made entirely of teeming.

Inside, he felt the writhing of a new life pacing
everywhere, needling him all over, so shivering,
he plucked the wings and legs from the queen, asking
Will you forgive me, little master? and eased her,
alive, back onto the cluster of cells and honey,
and laid it all, not much bigger than a gold wafer,
on his tongue, squinting back his tears.  He thought,
Not my will but yours, not my life
but the one that opens everything
in spring, in a singing no one owns.

What filled him then, for hours, an intelligence
shattering itself over his skin, in his mouth,
its voice of little terrified violins awakened
inside him, the sugars dripping from it,
was what he'd always dreamed of being, other,
a home of voices not his own, their harm
and sweetness, sustenance, all the way
at his core, though the swelling in his throat,
though his eyes full of their own closure
would not stay open, his ears turning
to nothing in the hum--particulars failing
the stuffed chair under him his weight
the sense of his mother's round pale face
when he tried to call it back--the stabbing

of his boundaries turning to something else some
black painlessness regret exploding in his place
taking back the whiteness from walls the hum
he'd allowed inside too much to give but the sense
of his mouth was passing notes a far-off murmur
of blankness eroding even the erasure's feel
and the changing began
                                   to slow but it wasn't done.
When he was cold, the hive still growing, the throat,
the stopped lungs filled with something like breathing
that wasn't breath, a flurry and a cache
of sweets, a motion living on without him now.
And the amber music, winged, fully bodied, as real
as steamed breath had been in the spring dawn,
streamed in and out the window, a tune nothing
was humming from no one's mouth of bees, winding
out to lay its wash of weightlessness and pain
where it was required, down over the worked land,
and the trees' brief blossoming, over the earthbound,
upward-facing keepers of the trees.

 

                  Greg Glazner

 

 

 

                 A Walk at Dusk

          

        after a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

Come with me, toward the leafless trees.  See
the way they lean, dazed with fog and grief
as they seek out one another in the haze?
Isn't that how we are able to go on--by believing
all that matters will one day be revealed?
That is why I made the waxing moon so sharp,
its violet face aglow, why I put the moon under
the influence of Venus, though we know
these lovers are light years from each other.
But I have not brought you here to talk about
astronomy or painterly technique but rather
magnetism of a different order.  Over there--
now you see it:  the megalithic tomb.
See how that massive rock appears to float
like a ship asunder?  This weighty sepulcher
will not leave me alone.  I have painted it
under a hood of snow, girdled it in broken oaks,
glazed it with opaque aspersions.  Some evenings,
walking here alone, I am that rock--or I am
a man trapped beneath its lid, dense
with melancholia, my fur hat a granite wheel,
my stained hands sunk deep into the pockets
of my cape.  I have heard it said that memory
is a form of recovery, a healing.  But sometimes
when I venture to this field at the dislocating
hour--the very hour that slips across
our foreheads at this moment, before
the earth rolls over in the star-cast void
like a capsized ship and all of us gone with it--
memory breaches the grave.  Walk with me
awhile, I pray you.  I am drowning on dry land,
and only a stranger's gaze can save me.

 

                Dinah Berland

 

 

 

 

                Missing World

 

In the grand scheme of things,
These words are smaller
Than one pixel in a black
And white photograph,
A grain of sand, smaller
Than molecules--no--
Smaller than that.
Zoom out, as in those old
Science films in junior high,
From one letter of one
Of these words, out--
To the room, above
The house, the street, beyond
The neighborhood, up and out
To rows of roads,
Circles of cities,
Then vaguer and cloudier,
To swirls of white, green, and blue,
To the globe of the earth
And on, pulling backwards
To the fine minimal web of planets,
Still in reverse, slower now,
To the sparkling veins of star
Systems, the rich, billowing
Arms and legs of purple
And orange gas, twisting oddly
Like deep-sea creatures
Who never see the light,
Outwards still to the spirals and coils
And corkscrews of galaxies
Like amoebas hustling across
The cold emptiness of a glass slide.
Stop.  Here words must
Overlook, exclude, deny.

 

        Christine Stewart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Described in Chess Review by Hans Kmoch as "the game of the century".  Notes by Graham Burgess, John Nunn & John Emms

Man, if I ever pull off a "windmill" technique I'll consider myself having attained some kind of chess pinnacle. I was just thinking about this game today because I read this article that showcases another windmill technique...

http://www.chess.com/article/view/the-windmill

But yeah, that Fischer, man... who else could let their Queen go and follow through with such a material gathering maneuver... check, gobble, check, gobble, check... unreal.

hey guys I've created my first puzzle come see it.It's win this game 2!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes by Graham Burgess, John Nunn & John Emms

Notes Graham Burgess, John Nunn & John Emms

Lots of exclamations in this one #;)

Tamas Vamosi  "Bell Ringer"

"Anglo-Indian Chess Set"  (Circa 1930)

Max Ernst  "The King Playing With The Queen"  (1954)

"Antique Egyptian Chess Set"

Genius/Gza "Liquid Swords"

Thanks Ives, think thats the first comics art we've seen here #:)

 

Here is a link to several pages of chess comic strips:

http://www.edcollins.com/chess/chess-comics.htm

Mycal's Posters  "Mate"

Mycal's Posters  "Caught Red Handed"

Antique chess clock (c. 1900)

"India: Lotus wood chess set"  (red sandalwood & boxwood)