Snapshots February 9th, 2005


the blue through the bell tower
beckons &
                fades inwards
enclosed as heaven held fast

while all around more blue
hastens outward pale
shadows shift
their possibilities
across the snow
so whitely blued below


Douglas Barbour
St Peter's Abbey Saskatchewan


***


this is all there is
this winter garden
these bare and dead-

leaved branches
these dreams of
exile and eviction

juncos and pine
siskins pecking
the snow, ice

draping the fountain
this despairing friend
wrestling with god

and this caged canary
filling the sun-
room with song


Sharon Brogan


***


Wall


from here to plumb over there

cat walk up and down

Palo Verde limbs the skinny

every day bird talk

air



Frank Parker
 7:42:26 AM Tucson, Arizona



***


Jimmy Smith


B-3

perc ussion

control the circuit

that drawbar
                 switch

Mr. Smith--

leave us with

that leaner tone


Gerald Schwartz


***


we're far up at windows
in a city flashed
with new year stars
lion dance bristles
tracking the asphalt
white and gold verticals
colonial spires

another year's breath
heats the dry season
and its cocktail vocal
press into dark
nodes and expression
'how insensitive'
air labours to be cold

candles refresh the river
fire cracker thousands
it's a family thing
in a way station of strangers
caught between straits
bow over the card
and the god money

gong xi fa cai


Jill Jones
Singapore, 9 February 2005



***


On the subway
chickens crowin
countless chickens.
Useless to count the chickens.

One has a memory of chickens,
and they do step smartly.





The golden meanies.
Who would have guessed.
Why do those blest
behave so?


Mark Weiss


***


This Death

I have decided I will feel this death
the way I did not feel before this death.

I slammed the phone down when my brother died
and walked out, refusing to embrace his death.

We all change lanes. The line of cars behind
the hearse is long: insects hungry for this death.

I've kissed a woman young enough to be
my daughter. Age vanished. Respect this, death!

Snow accumulates and melts away.
Rain cleanses. The sun shines. Which is death?

The curtain rises. Dancers pirouette
beneath the stage. I join them. Is this death?

I'm never more alive than when I come.
Released, I think, "You are not like this, death."

We put my grandpa in the ground and left.
"Revenge," my sister said, "replaces death."

The woman chased her lover through the park.
They vanished at the gate, escaped this death.

My words erase themselves; the page crumbles.
I ask, "Can silence be what silences death?"

And when I cannot dream because your face
haunts the night? Who can dismiss death?



Rich Newman



***


my cock rises a(head of me
like the mascot on
an old Studebaker my father
bought when he was drunk
pink it was with
a smooth snout ...
mine looks panel-beaten
weather-beaten women-eaten.

some days its my
morning Vespa, others
my raging Range Rover ...
now it is sleeping
curled up like a kitten
in my lap. Nothing
for it to do today
but piss and look
occasionally out
disconsolately
at the world.


Andrew Burke
Mt Lawley WA


***


four small cars mosaic the drive
entities bubbles armour clothes
each goes their own way

she wrote about train seats that became beds
being woken at four in the morning to cross the sea

grey morris minor
the driver's hands
held up behind a shield of window

a red train pulls away more quickly than cars can
the duel carriageway left at a standstill

Liz
A500 in Stoke UK
3pm


***


Upon a time once

I placated winter

[or so i thought]

by calling its frost

SCULPTOR

COLLAGIST

ARTISAN

but now as

pressed cold returns

with its dark

painful immensities

i rub hand

stamp feet

shunning artifice

thirsting for warmth

Gerald Schwartz/ 8:57 am/
West Irondequoit/New York/ US/



***


PERFORM, CAROLEE [SCHNEEMANN]


Physicalization of the pictorial plan /
EYE-BODY exists as 36 images,
rigorous set of parameters for MEAT-JOY.
Found this huge crate filled
of physical configuration and the momentum
rope activates a language,
musculature in the acting.


Confluence of properties which are so entrancing /
an extraordinary psychic mystery story
ran
out in my nightgown into the snow.
Life juxtaposed with menace.
Enough confidence to trust
expectation of fantasy and righteous death.


Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 2-9-05 (8:16 AM)


Despite my inaudible and invisible urging from the audience, what I
witnessed was a lecture by Carolee Schneemann which I couldn't really
designate as a performance in its own right, though it did include
documentation of certain of her performances.


***


He is acting breakfast, using an expresso cup, a glass of water and a
neatly-folded newspaper beneath clean hands.
He is looking at something behind those looking at him; which is a bluff.
His right hand gestures to emphasise something which has not been said; but
which he might have spoken had he wished to. He is believable.
He smiles with the confidence of irrefutable knowledge.
He does not move; but he might be determined to prevail.



Lawrence Upton
West Penwith, Cornwall, Yoorp



***


The Poet Who Is Anarchic



The poet who is anarchic
has a devil of a time.
He takes sheets of paper,
tears them into shreds,
pastes the shreds together
with a tainted glue.

The poet who is anarchic
wades in churlish waters,
plays with deconstruction,
unhinges his tangled metaphors,
sweetens his fractured syntax
with a secret rhyme.

The poet who is anarchic
scowls at Walt Whitman,
laughs with Rabelais,
angers Ben Jonson,
whispers with Mallarme.

The poet who is anarchic
has a devil of a time.


Harriet Zinnes



***


POT

he so
lovingly
skilfully
painted
a picture
of a pot
an Attic
amphora
5th century
B.C.
and then
for realism
a masters
touch
he painted
a hairline
crack
across it
but then
suddenly
sadly
the pot
shattered
into a
myriad
of shards
and he
gave up
painting.


Patrick mcmanus
Raynes park uk


***


A NIGHT WITH ROSIE

Slacks, jacket, and a rhinestone brooch
that rides the velvet like the diamond pin
of an order of nobility from the final days
of a lost Ruritania.
One likes to think of furtive trysts,
a quickie in the closet,
crackle of crinolines,
when only the chambermaid watches,
as if for those with battubs
it was a better time.

The metaphoric stones
the metaphoric pants
the metaphoric flesh.
What if I wore a beauty mark?

Feeding addiction,
a finger at a time.

Trying to find the structure.
The waste places
lost in reflection.



Mark Weiss


***


The sky without a cloud:

Language without a mask.


Stephen Vincent


***


Stony Rises and Purrumbete from Above

Dreaming before sleep, I was in the air
above the Western District, not drifting
as in a balloon, a favourite wish of mine,
but as in a silent helicopter,
directedly inspecting what till now
I¹d seen only by road, implicated
into the landforms, hungrily glancing,
in touching-distance of those dry-stone walls
where the fields of Stony Rises are still
rocky, skirting those dips where dairy herds
trail in the afternoon to milking sheds,
glimpsing, as the road curved, a broad lake,
one of several, its glitter and coolness,
and broader pastures dotted with sheep.

At last I could sense pattern and relation, how
that small town earned its keep and its dignity,
with here light industry concealed, and there
its Avenue of Honour, green Anzac
veterans remindingly on parade,
leading to a half-modernised shopping street,
two or three civic buildings and a cenotaph.

Long driveways led to homesteads previously
hidden from me. One I recognized:
Purrumbete, creation of the Manifolds,
first land-takers, squattocracy - bluestone
and timber - now a Œluxury guest house¹.

Skirting over lake and guest-wing chimneys,
I dreamed again the children there who¹d once
stepped shivering into their cave-sheltered boat
and drifted out through willows to fishing spots,
patient till the trout and salmon leaped;
from above I saw its shearers¹ quarters
round which, ambivalent Œguest¹, I lately tramped
muddily before breakfast, ruminating
how sheep had paid for art, for a son to go
to Cambridge, change his world-view, fight to save
an order he despised Š John, I¹m thinking of,
soldier, poet, Marxist, musician, who,
returning post-war detached himself
from privilege and class-feeling, settled
remote in humid, spartan Queensland,
collecting songs from shearers and the like,
waiting on the change that never came.

Squinting at the Great Hall¹s murals*, I¹d read
the family story: 'landing of first sheep',
Œdiscovery of lake¹, Œtasting the water -
finding it good¹; Œjourneying through Stony
Rises¹; Œattacked by Blacks while sinking well¹;
Œbuilding of homestead¹ - some dynastic triumph.

But now in dreaming flight above that land,
veering towards the Tower Hill sanctuary,
I saw flocks and herds of other families,
(none ŒBlack¹ - they made themselves, or were made, scarce,
west at Framlingham under forlorn roofs);
noted this for writing down next day, and slept.
     
* murals by Walter Withers, 1902.

- 4-9 February 2005

- Max Richards, North Balwyn, Melbourne


***


waking, he is not certain

after no shaving

he is not certain
but there is the morning
which is not ahead

here is the morning
and still he is not certain

at night, he was more uncertain,
that is, in the darkness

after coffee, unwashed, with no reason to wash

he is uncertain

he is thinking but there seems to be no reason

this does not restrain his uncertainty

she sleeps

and he is alone, although he doesn't care

another coffee

it is morning, again, and he is dressed
but unwashed

he has no reason for dressing

the sun is not shining

waking, he has, this is not the darkness
not ahead, no

the words are empty

the coffee mug is empty



Thomas Fallon