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Snapshots, March 23 2005
What are the terms of disappearance?
Anyone's disappearance?
*
Inhabited by ghosts
He She Thee
Their voices intimate as clover
to a child's ear on grass:
"She talks to me today -
He, too."
A transparent sense of City,
historical layer upon layer.
The perforated beach, little holes
in the sand, the spray of clams,
an arc of shiny salt water
through which one hears:
*
A stretch of kelp below the cliff
A layer of thought, or the lack of:
*
To frame the self against the details:
the face against the found jar, the found
classical Greek vase, the found rusted orange
in which the fracture of Apollo
plies three missing fingers against
the cracked, faded harp, once gold:
This object available for $375 on Castro Street.
*
A conscious history. Conscious to make history.
A requirement to be conscious. To be pulled
by the details. To maximize the presence
in which a detail knocks you off your
Stephen Vincent
***
A School Visit in Lent
(Brunswick, Melbourne)
We walk through the schoolyard tentatively.
At 3.45 almost all have departed,
bouncing beside their smiling mothers
in the afternoon sunshine. Iım to wait
for the half hour or so of an interview.
This is Our Lady Help of Christians.
My wife the speech therapist goes inside.
She is Jewish (as was Their Lady,
that made-over Jewish momma),
I agnostic, looking forward to Easter eggs.
A grey-haired male snooping round the asphalt,
admiring the young bodies (look at me, Mumı)
taking their last fling at the jungle gym,
I half expect to be accosted
(take your paedophilia elsewhereı).
Instead of nuns these days itıs staff in civvies;
one, solving a whereıs my schoolbag?ı problem,
is a pocket Venus with a dazzling smile
Iım sure my dull one almost meets her eye
but she swerves away from connection.
Where can I sit with my book? There are
benches in shadow and benches in sun
and none have backs for me to lean on.
All are for little bums and short legs.
The bench for me commands the best view.
Early autumn: English trees above
ready for their foliage to pale and fall.
Knees under my chin, I open my book,
Forster, Howards End, dear old Edwardian.
A little girl glides past me on a scooter.
Her solemn grace has a timeless air.
Her future ought to be good, schooling
fairly traditional, moral certainties on tap,
This old suburb, once depressed, prospers.
The boy inside, my wifeıs concern, who knows?
Before I can reconnect with Forster,
back comes my wife. A short interview.
Oh the teacher, male, totally
dispassionate. He didnıt want to hear.
Iıve worked with this boy for years,
heıs lovely, and just made school captain!
But this one teacher isnıt on his side.
As for the school, in thereıs a big notice-board,
covered in black tissue, with the giant words
CHRIST IS DEAD. Well, Easter Sunday theyıll let
Him live again, but it isnıt Friday yet.ı
These Catholics. We walk to the gate,
set in its high wire mesh. Itıs locked already.
The parish church we skirt looms dark and locked.
Come Sunday, the routine Passion past,
may glory and a hope for help return.
Max Richards / Wednesday 23 March 2005
***
"is been dry for months"
in the taxi and road slick
fire engines, melange of branches
and wish of asphalt
fiddling with the ticket machine
with the language
have a cheesy-mite scroll
if you're hungry
can you eat your words
while the wind gales
sucking each struggling syllable
drumming its old earth tune
newly played round scaffold
steel still holding
and damp bowling club lawn
squeaks a compact grass tune
as the Concordia Club's German
credentials flutter - yellow, red
black - which folds into
the story of this land
with what intent
it's just a day of gale force
a lot of water
and experience seeking language
"is been dry for months"
now rain blots the words
Jill Jones
Kogarah and back, morning, 23 March
***
IT
it
was a small thing
a request a trifle
but from somewhere
deep deep down
rose a terror fear panic
and it was impossible
quite impossible
impossible
and
we wobbled
tracked backtracked
searched heartsearched
hopefully got over it
back to normal
dear old normal
normal again
normal
pmcmanus 07-30
raynesparklondon
n624
all too recent snap
***
This day passed as quickly
as yesterday, no sunrise,
only a lightening of sky
and later, a darkening.
Rain washing down on
snow, then snow on rain.
A measure of solitude.
A measure of sadness.
Four a.m. awake in that
border space. Ice fog
to the ground. What do I
look for in this place? Some-
thing that hides in the day. Some
color, some shape undimmed
by pragmatism. Some measure of joy.
Sharon Brogan
***
woke today
imagining
peering far beyond our
solar system
as if for the first time
seeing measured light--
two supersized gas planets
orbiting
closely
distant stars
two giant planets
made of
hot
swirling gases
1, 340 degrees Fahrenheit
or higher
Compared with this
newseen
lit blaze
our infrared signature
must seem
watery
weak
cold
crystall'd
Gerld Schwartz
West Irondequoit, NY/US
7:55 AM--3/22/05
***
Reading an essay called 'Truth and Meaning' after
a forty plus degree day
and 150 minutes of Creative Writing teaching,
I shake my head to free
the muscles in my neck. Arterial roads
are blocked to the city
of my thinking chambers, multi-forked trenches
house the open wiring,
sparks running along their surface like disco rats,
thoughts arcing over -
'Postmodernism shows us the impossibility of
the existence of one
true version of anything that matters.'
Berryman whispers in
the dream shadows, 'anti-matter matter' ...
'St Steven / getting even.'
The electric fan visits and I wait for its wind.
The simple things in life
are still complicated. I pick up the theme of
a dream last night:
analysing the dream in a dream and waking up,
analysing it. And
go to sheep, counting sleep ...
Andrew Burke
***
Tiny Sparrows
There are miracles
in my life that never
cease...
I swaddled them
pink and white -
attached them
to milky breasts
and nursed them
full and fat...
Small miracles
that grew too fast -
distant, stubborn,
spoiled and raw
Tiny sparrows
that broke their wings
to fly from home, but
they are miracles
none the less...
And wearily
I must confess
these are the miracles
of my flesh -
grandmother's
and mother's bones
They formed
a lake of tears
and pools of laughter
became the pillars
of my strength
My land of miracles
that never cease
and never cease
to amaze me
Deborah Russell
Fort Collins, Colorado
03-23-05
***
Snap 1. Young Japanese man in clean fishing hat, his face midway between a
smile and a look which might be disgust, as he is offered a pasty by a
smiling chubby woman in a white coat, her face reddened from cooking steam.
Snap 2. 4 young Japanese, 2 female, 2 male, each wearing a clean fishing
hat, looking about them wonderingly or with surprise, holding sideways bulky
white bags, each rising in a curve, similar to a paper dosa
Snap 3 from same group, 1 male, 1 female, eating french bread pizza, the
paper bags looking battered but not yet empty
Snap 4 another 4 shot - single track railway / terminus / a one vehicle
train - in summer all the platform will smell of wild garlic. They are
standing, looking. The conductor regards them inscrutably from the train.
Each of them is eating a french bread pizza.
Snap 5 - wide format - 3 of the Japanese are climbing the hill from the
train station to the bus station, laughing, one gesturing, crushed paper bag
in one hand, pizza hunk in the other. In the top centre, a train is rounding
a headland beneath a bridge
Snap 6 - similar to Snap 2. Concrete hilltop platform to receive buses. They
are watched by a man in a yellow jacket. He is there all the time. In the
winter he wears gloves. It is his job to say "I don't know" to passengers'
questions. Sometimes he argues about what time it is with drivers. This
place is called the Malakoff. It is called that because that is its name.
Snap 7 - 2 groups of 2, different pairing to Snap 2. One still has a whole
slice of french bread pizza. The others watch him.
A local regards them all. He looks angry and suspicious, and a little
fierce. He is almost round. He looks a little oriental. On his head is a
woolly hat which rises in vertical stripes from his ears to where a spire or
cross or weather-cock might be in the middle of his head, broken half way up
by a horizontal band; the shape is of a large jelly mould. He embraces a
cased cello.
Snap 8 - the four, scattered across a car park, holding shreds of paper
bags, bewildered, worried. In the centre, a railway station and glimpses of
four platforms. To one side of it, on a single track, between two platforms,
a one vehicle train, stopped short of the end of the line. In front of it, a
train conductor, watching them.
Lawrence Upton
***
such snow fall
holding white on green
pine branches slumped
& on the side
streets deeply white
& rutcut confusion
slide & slip
pery shift &
corner shuffle
off or into curb
or park & wend
kicking up white
to classroom & then
poems discussed to be
broken happily by
new mother & her
two week old
replacement for
a poem or two
never missed in
the pleasure of
Douglas Barbour Edmonton 23/03/05
***
grey still, dead stick trees in a field
green over green over green
black cows, stand black against
orange pink sunset light
on mushroomed truck
gum tree gum
two birds at flight
autumn blows
jade moon, faint moon
brown bat moths,
bat in the violet horizon
clouds, they are grey
Robert Lane
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