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Snapshots, Wednesday November 24th, 2005
AFTER
after
he had
very
slowly
learnt
how to
spell it
they
split up
acrimoniously.
pmcmanus
raynes park
day early
***
(This phone conversation Snapı is from an on-going interview with
my 88 year old mother. Lately, since my 92 year old father
had a slight, but compromising stroke, sheıs become
Her former lucid, articulate and occasionally righteous self. As
One friend said, listening to her is like getting ³revelations
on the edge.²)
**
³I feel so sorry for young people today,
They grow up with loose ropes.
At least you and your brothers are interested
in my family and my motherıs family.
But these kids, these young people today,
seem to have nothing. Loose ropes
and no connection to much of anything.²
³Does your friend Lucretia ever call you?²
³No and I donıt expect she will. The people
who were my friends are not so much
anymore. They have become so egocentric.
Even if itıs at odds with the truth of things
whatever happened they want to make it their own.
That is, whatever might be the right memory,
they bend it to make it in accord with their own interests,
not what actually happened.²
³Do you still feel like taking action on things?²
³I think itıs over. I donıt have the energy
I used to have to bring to things.
I guess I would say Iım kind of
useless.²
³But donıt you think you can be a good witness
and take pleasure in what you see?²
³Oh, I donıt disagree with that. Iım a pretty cheery person unless I
get my dander up. I donıt want you to think Iım a sad sack.²
*
Stephen Vincent
***
After Spring Rain
From the suspension footbridge over
the Yarra from Finns Reserve
to Westerfold Estate, we see the river
higher than in living memory.
Logs, we are told, swept down
yesterday, smiting that
lovely island of willows.
Whatıs still above water is wrecked flat.
Yet here last night a platypus was seen,
as if dislodged from its riverbank hole
by the brown tide scouring ruthlessly
both banks and surging on towards the sea.
I linger to watch; my dog and her mistress
take their preferred brisk walk upstream.
My informant and I watch the sun lapse
over downstreamıs current; then: Platypus!
he calls to his aged mother. Where?
I see it, small, diagrammatic,
like a piece of boomerang, or half-shaped
kidıs boat facing up-water. Then itıs gone.
She doesnıt see it. Back at
last on the bridge, my wife doesnıt see it.
My words do nothing to evoke it.
But I saw the platypus.
Pluckyıs the cliché for the frail creature
dwarfed by the torrent; but who am I,
safe on the bridge, to bestow character
on webbed feet, flat bill and furry body?
2 pm, Wednesday November 24, 2004
Max Richards at Cooee,
North Balwyn, Melbourne
***
Everything Seemed Okay Before
At 19 I saw people my age cry for the first time.
We'd cried before but it was always the expected:
the scraped knee, lost fight, parental wrath.
But nothing that fell from the pre-Thanksgiving sky
to smash like an artillery shell into the turkey gravy.
Makes me think of the story of the kid who doesn't talk
until he's ten, the parents figure he's autistic,
'til on his birthday he tastes the waffles and snaps
"What the fuck is this crap?" at which his mother
damn near faints and says "You never talked before!"
He answers "Everything was okay before."
For the first time that day perhaps we knew that
nothing would ever be okay again. So tears.
Wassamatta pussy, y'can't take a punch?
No. Not this punch, not the blow to the stomach
that hit like Ruby's bullet, two days later, hit Oswald.
Even today: I drive a guy someplace, he says "They
oughta shoot that sonofabitch" and even though
I hate the man of power he's talking about
I tell him to shut his goddamn mouth
or get out of my car.
There was a play in the early 1970s: "They Got Jack."
Who's They? The Official Report said there was no They,
just a messed-up loser working out some kind
of private grudge.
But we have the privileged position of being
at the front door of decades of nightmare:
Kennedy, Malcolm X, Kennedy, even a shot
at Wallace, at Ford, at Reagan.
Ford is at the core of this fin de siecle monstrosity.
Who but Charles Manson could dream such a dream
and not wake up screaming, in a world
beyond politics: Sharon Tate's ripped-out womb
becomes the symbol of an age of rending,
Generals take the field after politicians
define the field, Tamburlaine is recreated
each day on the plains of Mesopotamia
and video games give us all the chance
to fight a war without dirtying our hands,
or reassassinate a President in blissful absence
of history, consciousness, or conscience.
Everything seemed okay before
but it hasn't been for a long time.
I'm waiting for the video game that recreates
the Manson murders. Then
I can summon the Mother Ship
to get me the hell out of here.
Welcome home.
Kenneth Wolman
***
so far it's been overcast
and cast over with
cool rain or its inkling
all words for coffee seem
the same
even if they taste more bitter
on the corner
there's no use contemplating
that hair-thin scar on my hand
the past is now white
although my spirit slipped
out in serum of a paring knife
no-one believes the soul's
tiny fights anymore
there's a tangle of skinny leaves
and eucalypt bark
outside the clinic wondow
there's a light, some kind of light
that reaches under the skin
fluid moves within its red phase
the lipids are jumping
the biscuit is dry
heat crosses my tongue
all along the highway
the silver flags
and experiments in speed congregate
on the main drag, beetroot
nonya, recycled cooking oil
an arab bank, mosaic tiles
a bar with a dress code
a waterfall under glass
perhaps koi grow fat
and golden there
in their prism
travel exhales, tickets fall
gears uncertain until the mesh
there's a lot of leather
and bling between selves
someone in raybans smiles
under dark weather
Jill Jones
Wed 24 November, 9.30am
***
Thinking about traveling, going home/once-home to South Jersey for this
holiday, I found and played around with a photo I had taken of Newark in
the summer. Puritan came to Newark from Connecticut in 1666.
Photo is online
http://deborahsc.blogs.com/photos/poetry/newarkdowntown2.html
Back on Sunday to hear Ken read in Montclair.
from behind thick, sweet
marsh, they carry given names
forward, cross waters
believe themselves the founding ones
settlers, sojourners, build tall
on ground already saved
Deborah
8:30 am
Newark-on-Passaic, NJ
***
Don't all say happy birthday.
I'm 39, so save
it for next year.
A beach towel.
A coffee mug.
Wake-up and toast
by Callan. Muesli
by Samantha. Tea
by Glenn.
Two floppy stapled books of bright texta drawings.
Four bittersweet home-burnt bootleg CDs.
(If you kiss a plastic frog, do you get a plastic prince?
Well I tried it yesterday, and let me tell you, it doesn't work.)
One autobiography: he wanted someone else's life,
but lived his own. Maybe I'll write to him and say
I wish I could have had your life,
catching those buses, going to those places.
It might make him feel better.
A party for two, with my keypal from across town.
She brought me a home-made card and a home-grown plant
and I gave her some eggs from the chickens.
Home-made biscuits, coffee,
bread-machine bread and home-grown lettuce and ham.
I showed her my room, this one room where I display
my identity. This is nice, she said.
We listened to the bittersweet music
and made our wishes.
She went home.
I did the carpool.
I cooked mashed potatoes and mince.
I put some old wine in the mince.
I drank a glass too. It's my birthday.
Chocolate cake for dessert. Glenn bakes better than me.
There weren't enough candles.
So I asked to have four, because I'd liked being four.
But they just used all they could find.
I blew them out, all except one.
Samantha said that means I have one boyfriend. I cut
the cake. The knife came out with a touch
of cake on it, so the children,
according to their ritual,
screamed.
----------------
Janet Jackson
Thu Nov 25 00:00:21 WST 2004
***
This moment's
distractedness
is nothing to do
with luck or
failed inclination.
It's just that
the air's stillness--
utter rain-creased
stillness, clean as
an empty bowl--
has led to
another dark,
another breath, or
seethe, of darkness:
a single crow
impatient in trees
stays hidden
inside of it,
a half-registered
burst: sparrow-noise,
like a blanket
over the hedges,
billows it up,
curves it into
waves.
Gerald Schwartz
West Irondequoit, New York 9:52 AM
***
Windows and doors tight shut it assaults me
over two back yards
from a house across the lane
continual harsh pounding
not what I'd call rhythm
no variation
no hint of melody
pulse pace tone unchanging
the weight of it
can't bear it ears
can't think mind
going out getting
away
remember hand on door
I have to wait in for a delivery
put on the Brandenburg Concertos
louder than neighbourly
and
and become
chords
running bass takes off
into full heart
my blood
dances
dances
along my veins
violins in my fingers
oboe-voiced bevelled phrases
my heart breathes sighs
a treble recorder
there is buoyant air
in these phrases
I am clarino
impossible heights
and my blood dances
Joanna Boulter
Darlington UK
5.30 pm
***
Reading David Cannadine's essays 'In Churchill's Shadow' this afternoon
I realise that I have what Gertrude Himmelfarb calls
'the Tory imagination'
And I have never voted Conservative in my life.
I am trapped as a perpetual adolescent.
It is a defining moment.
Bath, 19.05 24 November.
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
***
Reading Paterson while
waiting in the X-ray line
I thought, Don, dont play
in those woods
theyve done for a
famouser poet than you
and why would you make
Plath speak, or Joyce, or whatnot?
Let them be-so Keats thought Dante brought
unlooked for news
of Ulysses. So what? Sometimes
a fosse is just a fosse,
a tree is just a tree
lovelier than
a turnpike rest area
and quieter than a roomful of ventriloquists
rolling logs.
David Latané
Richmond, Virginia
***
'We intend to find ourselves. In the burning city.'
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
But who are 'we'
& what can any one intend
any more as tanks surround us, all to
deliver their salvation. How find
it here or anywhere so saved our selves
have disappeared, gone in
communicado or incarcerate as charred totems, as the
TV cameras roam above the burning
homes & cars, the liberated city.
Wednesday November 24 2004
Douglas Barbour
***
----- callous bin truck
flattened the poppies
with intent .
but - a little rain
an hour of sun -
poppies popped up again!
all the yard laughed
to see such fun
and the washing flapped away
like a clown .
Andrew Burke
8.55 am Mt Lawley
***
OF OLAFUR ELIASSON
[for Arni Ibsen]
OF OLAFUR E
Of what potential does an artwork have?
First projects I did. Was a rainbow
our eyes to adjust to a certain color?
Looking into these systems of how our senses negotiate our surroundings.
Aspen Colorado where there is this lamp post
from the drops up to the light. Metaphorically speaking.
Under a bridge in Bremen, in a little boat.
Riot in a place like that in fact not dangerous.
Easy. Then the ice would melt.
OF OLAFUR E
Of ice.
Fact that a model
or construction should begin.
Light would enter in the far end of the gallery
as you stand there and wait for it to move.
For a tunnel I wanted to do later
utilitarian devices you need living in a glass house
running up a big one running down again.
Ears easily fooled. A line of light destabilizes.
OF OLAFUR E
Of this piece slowly
fading in &
out of how we see things,
looking a bit like a grotto:
anthroposophic city
flying
upside down . . . playing with these systems.
Rocks by Beuys.
Eyes are not really the main issue here and you start to smell.
OF OLAFUR E
Of the space--seems to be turning up
first looking under or behind the mirror and then at.
Out to the street in NYC
lies behind. Less smoke depending on where you would enter.
Agree that you could indeed lay down on the
floor.
Un-understandable scale
really tangible. Is tangible really a social question?
Event or repetition of the event was slowly taking over.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring MD US / 11-24-04 (9:19 PM)
Discovering that Olafur Eliasson (who grew up in Denmark and was now living
in Berlin) had Icelandic parents was what finally convinced me to attend
his lecture at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.
***
These creatures, who companion me.
These friends, who sustain me.
These poets, who inspire me.
This house, which shelters me.
This garden, which feeds me.
This stone, which teaches me.
This changing moon, which comforts me.
This earth, which absolves me.
This ground, which will receive me.
Sharon Brogan
***
Beach
I've tried to gain the things
the sand straying down my leg
could wait to shake off.
We don't ever mistake
walking
with a chance
of surprising the view
with attention.
With eyes this open,
the sea is just surface
rewritten like the end of every road.
Jill Chan
7.00 PM Auckland,New Zealand
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