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Snapshots February 2, 2005
faith not shaken.
faith not shaken!
not shaken!
not!
not.
heart still taken
heart still taken
still taken
still
still
still
waiting, skating
on old ice,
shaking the loaded dice
still
Janet Jackson
***
The New School Year
End of January: midsummerıs hatchlings,
uniformed new-borns swarming across
these suburbs in patterned waves:
déjà vu armies, pale green, mauve, brown,
panama hats on some, kepis on others,
long socks on some, sandals on others;
back-packs weigh down most of them.
Schoolıs back in. You feel for them:
some are enjoying reunions
with mates the holidays had parted;
others feel returned to dread -
last yearıs ordeals are back, worse?
Morning-recess raucousness
spills across streets and whole blocks.
My friends who teach - shall I email them:
Back in harness! How does it feel?
Iım free!ı? The staff-room must be stifling.
Whoıs on yard duty? Did you see
the media spreads: Teacherıs Sex Rompı? -
there but for the grace of. Keep
an eye on X, heıs at mid-life,
newly separated, alone at home.
Some of those girls are dangerous.
Theyıll be sharing the clippings now,
naming the school which cannot be namedı.
I drive on past some posh ones: St Bede's,
Fintona where gels excelı*, Trinity,
Xavier, Baptist this, Methodist that,
Erasmus, Scotch; beyond: Scopus, Luther,
Tintern all teaching Values - at a price.
Now come the bullying four-wheel-drives
blocking the suburbs for an hour
while the posh mums take their darlings home.
28 January - 2 February 2005
[*the Fintona gate-sign says; 'Where Girls Excel']
Max Richards at Cooee, North Balwyn, Melbourne
***
all night the rains come fatly down and then
puddles full of mutter and a gentled sun
turns loose and wet on green
ripples on the concrete coiling where
toes fried a day ago and glassy air
dreamed waves of water where no waters were
lulled dogs loop nose to tail
snores shuffle with the patter of the fall
and all is well
Alison Croggon, Williamstown, 10.49am
***
(fragments)
To not know what to say when you do. The veil over her lips, the lips, the
ellipse (sun, moon): the shadow across the walking body. She gets older, can
no longer leap over the creek, but must slither across the rocks: a learned
dignity, an inherent style.
Those who manage the wealth of individuals. An abundance ruled by someone
else. No, thank you. Not here in the West. $39 annual memberships to borrow
money at 23%. Knock. Knock. Whoıs there?
Tomorrow morning on my way to Richmond, Virginia. Episcopalians, a
Conference of the philanthropically Rich. To sell a letterpress, 30 pound
weight, massive lectern Bible! The rule of text. The new rule: electronic.
Digital. Bye bye ink and metal. A sturdy, stable, formal impression, the
page with the outline punch on the other side, no longer an inherent need.
Textual speed: letters hover before the eye briefly to disappear. Everything
logo dedicated. Mickey Mouse, the delivery boy on roller-skates. To write an
undecipherable piece of language. The large billboard with the sign that
says ³This way in...². The text leads to the small, white hole on a large,
blue space. Into the hole we go again. Blank. Blank. To draw a series of
blanks. The billboard on the corner, 5th & Harrison, an open book and the
word, Fiction. The eye follows the ladder up from the parking lot to the top
of the billboard into nobodyıs todayıs warm blue, delectable, sky.
Stephen Vincent
***
a bloodied nose
the Bug did it
(just like the Bomb
in the Fifties)
the body winds down
but we repair it
like patching
an old bike tyre
out the back a cat
plays with a frog
out the front a cat
eats a lizard
boxed in my own
mortality
I toss between
past and future
pills before breakfast
pills after -
oh let the garden
grow wild
Andrew Burke
***
"City bombarded with icicles"
barrier tape is still bandaging trees
its crime scene garishness
torn away overnight by the living
passing through, perimeters
closed
for icicle warnings:
those transparencies thickened
to stalactite honed
by a roofıs slow drip
to clumped ice dams above heads
dangerous architecture
keeping pedestrians
on their toes, a crash the size of a car impending
above a threshold,
some squared to drain pipes
reaching from roof to street,
others as long as two or three floors
of menacing overhead
and that burst of sun
melting
frozen fists to a sigh of one slipping loose
strangest blow of heaven
this time chunks harmlessly into the walk, strangest blow
of heaven, breaking the window
of a car,
strange
as a window
falling from its chain suspended
above the cafeteria's table
to shatter upon
the head of one child
wearing a frame of brokenness around her neck,
a jag sheering toward her throat,
how to move through this new terrain
dangerous for people down here
dangerous for people up there
that man whacking ice
from his roof
the postal carrier
gauging the drip, drip, drip
of threat, different
risks of freezing
falling
wings, not clouds or lazy circling eagles, but icicle-related injuries
along the walkways,
so many
unnamed, unknown
looking up in something like alarm,
uncertain
where is the clear path for getting to school on Monday
winding one's way through,
so much new is unknown,
even those clumped bushes, each one a shock of wiry branches
knotted to one root
whiplike, stripped of leaves,
nothing left but a host of tiny red berries
what are they called? why always forgetting to ask?
the only color blooming
in ice so many
could be galaxies constellated
to random, aperiodic order,
arrayed in mythic figure and story ripening
before any eye has been born
with power to see and fix them to imagined
shape, though the new stories perhaps
would resemble the old, the heart evolves so slowly
and there are only a few predictable ends,
are they edible? poisonous?
and to whose tongue?
perhaps some creature
could eat them and go on singing,
or are they some variety, human cultivars
cultivated to appeal
to the gardenıs predictable shapes of temptation unmeant
for living hand or tongue
beautiful singularity,
piercing intensities of red
and specificities
of shape which resist metaphor while inviting
it, drops of blood?
like those leeched carefully
from the acupuncturistıs tiny lancet
extracting
too much heat or too much masculinity or femininity
from a particular body or draining
the anguish
of pressure point?
or self-contained
shining in their
spheres, like eggs or earths,
each one a tiny world meant to seed some meadow
they will splinter and burst
to reach, be willingly devoured,
consumed into another,
or like the seed some saint visions on the hand of
god
and sees all world, all eye,
dreaming within, or was that a fig or a nutmeg?
or perhaps secular and many, their shapes
of young women's or men's nipples
brushed to erectile
breath or hand,
but, no, only the shape allows,
that color is rather
of lips bit to blood, lipstick, something, nothing but what
associating mind brings
as the fool wandering a field of snow brings along weeds of fled
goathead in heel, burr in palm, festered nettle
beneath the skin
themselves, too bright, inutterable, unnamed, in this field of snow
the transport
transplantation, accidental transmigration, you
who have no name for what you walk among
as the sun transpires in the skin of the berries
transects the hazarded edges
and that legion of frozen angels
begins to loose its grip
and falls
shattering or merely
melting into the melting earth
*headline borrowed from the Boston Globe
Rebecca Seiferle 12.17am 2.2.05 Waltham MA USA
***
My daughter's new flat
has peeling paint and
wine stains on the dun carpet floor
a jaundiced velvet drape
hangs at the window
and she has a view through jasmine
to a municipal park
My daughter's new flat has all
my cast-off pots and pans
the crayon-coloured vase
from Italy
the punk teapot
that pours from the Mohawk
My daughter's new flat
has a new Captain Snooze
double bed
it has a boyfriend
who likes my daughter
in her tan and turquoise cowboy boots
Jennifer Harrison
***
her flaked back
her ghosted arms
the small hair rolling down
the back of her neck
a chip out of her shoulder
do you think she's impressed
with barely a trace
of that other dame's smile?
the expanse of her belly
shines in flash lights
her forehead glows
and apparel falls away
that she's holding up nothing
but herself
or is open to all propositions
as scholars debate
there are no end to her arms
Jill Jones
Venus de Milo (Aphrodite of Melos), Louvre Museum
2 Feb 2005
***
through the gates she goes
who eighteen years before
made me a gateway
crying both crying
and now she is beyond me
and I am beyond myself
Liz Kirby
1st Feb 2005
in Macclesfield
(daughter now in Thailand)
***
COMPUTER
computer
not well
sad black screen
first master
and slave
not detected
second master
and slave
not detected
cmos settings
and memory
all wrong
hit FI to
run set up
hit F2 to
load defaults
primaster capable
but disabled
not perhaps unlike
its silver surfer owner
pmcmanus
raynes park
***
LANGUAGES FOR THE HORRID AND ABSURD
(out of Eliot Weinberger by C.K. Williams)
"I heard about Hashim, a fat, painfully shy 15-year-old, who liked to
sit for hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the
4th Infantry Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details
of the boy's death, the division commander said: That person was
probably in the wrong place at the wrong time."
I was the little fat boy who sat in the Bronx Botanical Gardens
with a book, stuttering like an automatic weapon,
but who learned to use words like weapons.
You taught me language; and my profit on't is,
I know how to curse, O division commander
whose children I wish incinerated in your house
in some shitville like Elyria, Ohio,
to avenge the honor and the name of shy fat boys
who have lived through time to curse your seed.
Let God forgive you for what you are doing,
I, not God, damn your body and your soul.
"I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: We ought to look in a mirror
and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say:
Damn, we're Americans."
Did the military censors edit what you were really saying?
"Lets whip out our 20-inch shlongerinos and wave 'em around,
we're ready to knock up a herd of heifers cuz we have
the same gene-pool and brains as a goddamn steer."
If Schwarzenegger is right, if Iraq's economy is as bad as California's,
then we are all in trouble.
Bush the Elder weeps to hear his son criticized.
Dubya is a cured man, after all, a man of God
who was counseled by the Rev. Billy Graham
to give up the bottle and cocaine snorted through $100 bills,
and find his way to the forgiving power of Jesus.
This is curious, since I know someone whose sister,
now in long-term recovery, used to get high with Dubya
when they were both in Houston.
When asked if he has gone on the road back,
she just laughs enigmatically. I am terrified.
"I heard an Iraqi man say: I swear I saw dogs eating the body of a woman."
Old saying from my childhood: A Jew may not eat a pig but a pig may eat
a Jew.
"I heard Colonel Gary Brandl say: The enemy has got a face. He's called
Satan. He's in Fallujah and we're going to destroy him."
Send over Mel Gibson. He has seen the face of Satan.
Satan does not look like Saddam or Osama.
Satan is a woman.
Anyone with shit for brains should know this,
so I would expect Col. Brandl to get it.
"I heard that Saddam Hussein, in solitary confinement, was spending his time
writing poetry, reading the Koran, eating cookies and muffins, and taking
care of some bushes and shrubs. I heard that he had placed a circle of white
stones around a small plum tree."
Saddam will never go to trial. He will live out his days calmly,
stuffing his face
on RingDings, Twinkies, and Devil Dogs.
I would like someone to smuggle out his poetry so I can read it.
Power ruined him. Maybe the lack of it will prove at least in part
salvific.
Who can forget Williams' description of Mayan scribes, fingernails
torn out, and of how formerly great cities languish in a jungle, forgotten.
The world turns to Macchu Picchu, an abandoned nothing filled with
mummified children clutching mummified dogs and cats, frozen toys,
time shut down while whoever conquered them, who bashed in their skulls
or ripped out their fingernails first, also has gone on to some form of
reward.
Did their gods smile when killers killed babies, sacrificed teenage
girls on an altar of Commandment?
Like the soldier asked, does Jesus really want him to go around shooting
Iraqis because some false priest
says it's okay if you don't enjoy it?
That makes it sound just like screwing: it's okay if you don't enjoy it.
It's for the purposes of de-creation.
Personally, I would like to kill whoever said that.
I might enjoy it a great deal: I'm willing to take that chance.
How sick we are, how in need of penitential fire that we rain upon others.
At least now I'm starting to figure out why Carolyn Wright insisted in
read Works on Paper.
Kenneth Wolman
***
OILCOLOR
(theft of metaphor via Anne Sexton)
Drive him up to Massachusetts
for soccer camp
college for him a week early.
The background (we both know)
cannot be scraped down or washed
it is no watercolor
it is oils, indelible
his parents' collapsing marriage
freshman year his escape.
Jake also is an oil color, bright
on a dark grounding
in early ugliness
that truth always is.
Our first to leave,
bequeathed colors of strength,
hard varnish,
a chiaroscuro.
The Prodigal Father wants to kneel
before the Son and ask his forgiveness.
Yet it is time for me to go.
"Well..." I say.
"No," he says, "don't go
getting all emotional on me,
Mom will be here next weekend,
you can both go nuts then."
Of course he is right:
get in the car, get out of here
before we both come apart,
do the deadhead down I-95
in and out of radio silence.
Something has forever changed,
never can go back.
One thing of many.
Kenneth Wolman
***
LAST, EDWARD SAID
Lecture to bring my self up
and not look back at what I've done,
so frustrated.
The writing, and not do any interviews.
Egypt had been changed completely after I left.
Done neither the one nor the other.
We should immediately leave--
a house for us in Ramallah.
Resisted, which is what I felt.
Delinquency, when I was punished.
So brilliant, magic in the interaction of words & music,
a quite unique unfolding disclosure.
I went to an entirely new world.
Difficult, almost impossible, discipline developed a hardened habile.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 2-2-05 (5:33 PM)
Written during a screening of the 120 minute film released in 2004, "Edward
Said--The Last Interview", directed by Mike Dibb and Charles Glass.
***
as this sunset (color of clementines?)
is sensed through this
cold of cold (feel of catgut pulled?)
seems as good
a time as any
to take a wooden box
nearly square
wrapped in an ancient shawl
and open it to
our darkening land
taking out a mixed
packet of seeds
of dogwood ofstaghorn sumac
a Seneca clay pipe once
found by Bear Lake
a pint of Maker's Mark
and all that's
verified by
human hearing
west irondequoit, new york, us
4:52 pm
-- Gerald Schwartz
***
'passion flower'
beyond cold night
opening up &
outwarding off
that tangent
ial spread of wonder
meant whose fingers meld
the notes
whose breath
scatters all the possibilities
heartbeating into ears
with just the gentlest brushstroke
shhh sshhhh
the petals fall
ing
sing
Douglas Barbour
***
I am dreaming again
of prisons, and whales
breaching in Douglas
Channel, that slow under-
water rising. You are
riding your bike
through rice fields; sleeping
spooned to a long-haired
woman. I wake
in this cage of pain, nosed
by happy dogs. Hoarfrost
whitens the grass;
slickens the wooden steps.
Your cool season approaches
its end. Here,
cows are calving, their milk
drops. Imbolc, the harbinger
of spring
brings buds to the birch's
thin branches. Tonight
I will dream
the shadows of whales
deep in the water.
Tomorrow
snow will mound in this
garden again. I drink
my bitter
coffee and read that your
mango this morning was
especially sweet.
Sharon Brogan
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