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Snapshots January 26, 2005
TICKET
We all have one.
Destination known and uncertain.
Departure time written in
unreadable smeared chalk.
Nice: the conductor checks out yours
says "Not yet, stick around,
go do something else."
Ken Wolman
***
Almost all gone
under. Nothing to be
said. What now
could be. There was no
heart there, never, no
way out. The loss
is everyone's. Can
time erase the countdown to
zero: what hope was left.
Wednesday January 26 2005
Douglas Barbour
***
"Oh heart, calm down."
- Barry Alpert
I suffered a heart attack last Friday while
at work. A co-worker drove me to the Kino
Hospital Emergency Room two blocks from the
shop about 2pm. Around 11:30pm I was transferred
by ambulance to University Medical Center. Saturday
a cardiac catheterization was performed and a single
arterial blockage (70%) discovered. The only
problem is the blockage is at the junction of a trifurcation,
putting in a stint to expand the center artery would close
the other two branches. The decision was made to treat me
with medication (blood thinners and blood pressure
reducers). A radical change in diet and lifestyle is in effect. Better
to live another way then not at all. I was discharged Sunday after-
noon and have spent the last few days at my daughter's. I'm back
in my own home now that we're pretty sure things are leveling
off for me. The Creosote bushs' vital oils, a scent the rain releases
Frank Parker
***
mid-night
in last week's storm
hundreds of ducks
crowded
the curve of ice
along the river
low muttering
a whisper
of wings in water
everything quiet
heavy with snow
this morning
broken ice
covered with crows
lifting their wings
in dissension
if you were here
i would tell you
my life over
a meal perhaps
pad thai or chile
verde some too-
bright too-loud
restaurant you
passing through
and i pale lost
days at a time
i dream
a magician
makes things
appear, then vanish
the kestrel takes
sparrows every day
from the garden
and now
a red-tailed hawk
takes another
my neck has fallen
breasts belly
irresistibly attracted
to earth and i find it
no consolation that
this attraction
is mutual that
this ground
rises to meet my foot
the sky still black
the dogs still
sleeping and a hand
to the window-pane
pulls back chilled
Sharon Brogan
***
B[O][E][A]U[N]TIFUL SUMMER
[via Boris Barnet & Jean-Luc Godard & Jacques Rivette]
Be half of the railroad workers, and my self.
Oh heart, calm down.
Enough. If you need one, go
ahead and build
us, far away there . . .
Never forget, my friend, how
the road
is taking us.
Filled in and we'll see you later.
Up and
leave it at that.
So should we pay
up? That doesn't count
mistake, and it's our job to correct him.
Medal winner for the whole district.
Energetic.
Register the purchase of the bull.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 1-26-05 (2:37 PM)
Written during my first viewing of Boris Barnet's 1951 musical
comedy “Shchedroye leto”, a title which was translated as either “Beautiful
Summer” or “Bountiful Summer”. I found both translations corresponded to
my filmic impressions. The attention given to Barnet's films by French
directors/critics Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette must have contributed
to the ultimate decision to stage a retrospective of this neglected Russian
filmmaker. Rivette has stated, “Eisenstein apart, Boris Barnet must be
considered the best Soviet filmmaker.” One of Godard's favorite films is
Barnet's 1936 musical comedy, “By the Bluest of Seas”. The two male leads
in that film reappear in similar roles within the 1951 “Shchedroye leto”,
and the particular qualities of Barnet's directorial self-consciousness
help me to understand what Godard and Rivette were building upon or
extrapolating from when their films approached musical comedy. I had
previously thought their precedents must be American or French.
What I wrote while watching “By the Bluest of Seas” can be read at:
http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=769
***
all night awake
on and off
hearing the brush
of angel's wings
through the house
through and through
all peripheries then
astride the blizzard
leave leaving
only my crowded
dreams
4:30 am, west irondequoit, new york, us
gerald schwartz
***
After reading the FBI files
"you are as many as the flakes of snow," hard to think, so many, each one's
lazy
fall and drift of circumstance, a fingerprint of heaven, it would be wrong
to think
about this that this, you have been carefully instructed, the weather here
is
different, all reports are clear warnings of snow that goes on falling and
falling,
erasing again the lines just cut from the doors of private houses to the
public
streets, obliterating paths, frostbite is a loss of feeling in one¹s
extremities, or a
hand freezes to a fence gripped to keep the body from falling, why did you
think
you could sleep in the snow, lie down in its languorous embrace, foetal as a
snowflake or like that woman in New Jersey who lost her toes for being
unable
to curl herself up small enough to fit on the steam grate, did the cold
arrive in
your veins like warmth, if the snow's embrace shocked your cells open to
tropical transpirings, that was just the rapture of hypothermia, a gushing
in the
veins so chilled the snow arrived like warmth, what are you thinking of,
don't
you know it's wrong to think as you are, you are, I know you are, thinking
about
this that this, learn to read the weather rightly to consider the hours of
the
snow, snow's not scraps of paper devoid of any word except the ash particle,
the cindered mote that coalesces that lazy architecture around its invisible
eye,
you could freeze out there, not that I care, it's just faulty thinking,
that's all, why
did you think you could sleep in the snow, you could lose your extremities,
your
fingers, in some cases the tip of your nose, if someone in an office is
writing
and writing, the names as many as the flakes of snow piling up in drifts,
that
new names are falling on the drifts of the names that were, just yesterday,
dumped in empty lots, heaps of white, heaven¹s flesh already turning to
exhaust
and ash with the city¹s grime sweating from the air, now turning newly white
again with new accumulations, oh name that turns to a drift of snow, it¹s
better
not to think of what makes the mind so cold, able to discern with x-ray
vision
the underlying death sentence that this one deserves, or that one, hard to
consider, so many, sentences purging within, each one's lazy fall and drift
of
circumstance, a singer, a finger print of heaven, read the finer print, the
egotist
in that one, 'too preoccupied with success' 'can be bought with various
_______'
'documents of a compromising nature,' 'overheard to say on May 15th' is this
coldness as natural in the hand that wields it as a skin, sky, filling with
snow?
you should not think in the way you do of these intersections of snow, none
of
this intersects in you, that's just a village of people who did not know
they were
neighbors vanishing in the snow, you'll have to get up out of that drift and
try to
find your way home, what were you thinking of, trying to sleep in the snow,
this
direction, in that one, follow the street signs, it's just a snowstorm,
making the
air warm, after the snowplows do their work, follow the science of the
meteorologists, impartial thinkers, they know what they're saying when
they
say afterwards will follow the realm of frostbite, the diminishments of
cold
Rebecca Seiferle
10:41 Waltham MA
***
the pen so cold
snow is edging the city
and wind test the monuments
their verdigris work of the soul
there will always be dancing
at the bar americain
though the tongue freezes
without speech
and all along the boulevard
people press their lives
into the sounds in their heads
there's something tender in stone
the cold frees it
the living stand with flowers
and feel the coming sleet
water is more than rain
there's no sleep beyond the night
and now is always interruption
sweeping away the leaves
I cover my head
where the cold falls
Jill Jones
26 January, snapped 25 Jan Cimetiere Montparnasse
***
REVISIT
revisited
after many
many years
my old town
Croydon Surrey
with a population
now over three
hundred thousand
pedestrianised trammed
expanded modernised
highly commercialised
stored superstored
and not one
second hand
bookshop
:-( pmcmanus
raynespark-uk
***
January 26, 1999
A stranger and I lie flat on our backs on a living room floor. A doctor
the most lovely, slightly roly-poly man speaks to us about the process in
which each of our bodies will be ³re-impassioned², even, in fact, go beyond
'mere' passion. He uses a word with ³pad² in it; he points his hands to
indicate there are muscular pads imbedded through out one¹s torso and legs
that his unique massage system will work to ³unlock.²
The room, which is now a kitchen, is full of a silvery white light. I pick
up a massage tool off the counter-top; I gently rub its round rubber shape
back and forth across the top of the back and shoulders of the stranger.
It¹s spiral motion reminds me of an Osterizer, but, instead of cutting and
grinding multi-colored fruits and melons into sweet juices, the Doctor
explains that the device is a ³ body blender.² One that eliminates what he
calls ³impadination² to revive the body into its natural, ecstatic state.
Strange the way in which the sublime yesterday¹s hike up into the
Palisades- infuses the nocturnal. The flipside of passion becomes the word
³impadination."The ³pads², one suspects, are the tight leg muscles, still
sore from climbing four miles up, then back down the mountain. Each one
each permeated ³pad² - a solidification of the ecstatic.
Welcome, Doctor. Welcome, stranger.
**
(If you read this far, I find this passage oddly contrapuntal with the mad
descriptions of abuse and torture in the American run gulags around the
world. What enormous, sad and dangerous fear of the other!)
Stephen Vincent
***
Cider and a Cypress
These days the Calder Highway
Melbourne to Bendigo skirts
(what it once bisected) on its route:
most of its lesser towns and villages.
Woodend, Kyneton, Castlemaine,
without much heavy traffic, breathe again.
Now it¹s apple-orchard Harcourt¹s turn.
Which side of the green valley
and its village should the bypass run?
The good folk of West Harcourt said the east.
The good folk of East Harcourt said the west.
The sad folk of West Harcourt have lost.
The bypass will be a while coming.
Meantime we¹ve stayed in East Harcourt
cosy in a former apple shed of granite
next to a granite homestead now restored.
Helen G. of ŒRose Hill¹ showed us her garden:
roses, wisteria, lavender, chook-run,
willows round a duck-pond, and treasured
though ugly, a vast ancient cypress,
noted by the committee that turned the road
west not east. ŒPerhaps it helped save us
from going under,¹ says Helen. The cypress
is adorned with her daughter¹s pony¹s old shoes.
We toast it from a quart of cider supplied
from next door Henry of Harcourt¹s Cidery.
Just half a glass makes us woozyŠ.
2
In West Harcourt we call on Helen S.
ŒWe¹re sad indeed the road¹s coming our side.
We in the west argued long and hard.
We¹re rather dark on Henry at the Cidery,
he¹s evidently a man of power.¹
a view backed by his cider¹s potency.
3
Alone with the cypress, I step up
by old lopped limbs and see within
a round platform of brown foliage
where long since, apple-growers¹ children
played childhood away keeping house
in the cypress¹s enduring embrace.
7.45am, Wednesday 26 January 2005
Max Richards at Cooee, back last night from Rose Hill, Harcourt
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