Snapshots September 21, 2005
Blue movies
for pedants -
"punctuate me!
punctuate me!"
In a later
scene, a comma
and an inverted
comma
form a copula
Dominic Fox
***
Weather today is about middling.
Young guitarists all learn a new
chord. River daisies search for
the sun. Two doors up the street
the schoolboy drummer learns
from a book but has no natural
rhythm. The cat holds its head in
its hands beneath the back pergola.
Beneath the clothesline the herbs
grow among like-minded weeds.
On the silent river two pelicans
patrol the banks, one up, one down.
An autistic boy swings his legs off
the jetty, staring at the corrugated
surface, and swings his legs again.
'Just the way her hair fell down
around her face' floats from a ferry
on a wine cruise. 'Another time,
another place.' And now
the sun.
Andrew Burke
21/9/05
Mt Lawley
***
FORBIDDEN QUEST
[via Peter Delpeut]
Fishermen . . . Black Ice Bay . . .
Of the Hollandia's fate . . .
Rusty film cans in a village on the Irish coast . . .
Been buried. [Believe
I've returned. [I remember how she sailed.]
Dutchman knew the northern seas well.
Dogs to pick up /
everything else was crated up 'tween decks.
Now the picture never left our side.
Quest
unbearable. Only sound the picture box rattling.
Exact [ever witnessed]
shape of our course.
The skipper knew.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 9-21-05 (11:23 PM)
Written while viewing the first feature by Dutch documentary filmmaker
Peter Delpeut. I'd call it a "fictive documentary". The filmmaker uses
found footage shot in the polar regions early in the twentieth century from
at least fifteen different sources to "support" the tale told frontally to
an off-camera interviewer by the purported only survivor of the Hollandia's
1905 voyage to Antarctica.. This ship's carpenter is discovered living in
Ireland in 1931, shortly before he dies. and I couldn't help thinking of
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner as his narrative became more and more
metaphysical, though film cans and still photos get a lot of camera
attention within interior footage of his cottage.
***
'We don't write about autumn,
we write about fall. We have
fall here and not very much of it.'
Robert Kroetsch
fall fell far too soon
this year (or
is this so new
yet today's sun has
fallen only so far
down the bright
blue sky
& the trees their
leaves unfallen colour
full in 'the white of
dazzling light' a
-chieves
'a transparent light of
meaning' for a
moment & moving
across valley
walls a cast
sudden
glowing quilt
'no self here
to find, no
proper name'
left
Edmonton Wednesday September 21 2005
Douglas Barbour
***
bird cries lift me
from the shallow
surface of sleep
while i slept
flood walls broke
southern cities drowned
these northern hills
bleached tan
the maples turn
birches rustle
storms swirl
lifting the sea
south and north
autumn comes
north and south
the darkening
Sharon Brogan
***
MAYBE I WASN'T LISTENING
(through Barry Levinson's "Avalon")
Grandparents either dead or in the homestretch.
(Life is a journey, not a race, but they lost anyway.)
My mother's father dies six months after I am born.
Allegedly (remember that word) he looks at me and,
pre-emtombed in his own lifelong silence, nods in something suggesting
approval.
How to disapprove of a baby unless its future is visible to the doomed?
Maybe I have the caul.
Maybe I am the family basilisk.
I am born in my parents' middle age.
They are both liars.
They say they are Jews, but
rage and adultery are their faiths
and their only God is to curse their Thwartedness.
I am an Only Child: maybe this is good.
One misused child is a dysfunctional family,
more than one is a state-subsidized whackhouse.
But I am surrounded by endless cousins
older aunts and uncles,
substitute zaydes and bubbes.
I remember the smells of cooking
in Aunt Esther's kitchen on Marion Avenue.
My mother's oldest sister, first of six,
owns a brass samovar, bakes a Friday challeh
I can smell to this day, owns a huge record player
where I listen to Rodzinski conduct the Cleveland
in Tchaikovsky's Fifth.
But they do not talk, not in front of Kenny,
Not in front of Inez, or Toby or Bernard or any of my other cousins.
Sha! Yiddish! No, they might learn it, go outside!
Maybe there were legends told, stories repeated down the years.
Maybe I missed them if only because there was nobody to tell them to me
and everything I've woven about me (this included)
is a cloak of fables and lies.
The poet is born in the land of liars.
Maybe I missed them because I wasn't paying attention
because I'd learned the art of Self-Pity early, and it shut out
everything else:
The Family Circle meetings, shots of J&B (aka Jewish Booze)
oiling the conversation until it started to get nasty.
There were the brothers--Julius and Morty--
sons of my mother's second sister Rose and her husband Aaron,
brothers who would not speak for 10 years,
self-inflicted victims of a business deal that went bad.
Legend: Rose as a girl, age 3, still in Russia
pulled off the street by a neighbor because it was Good Friday
and the Cossacks were having their annual pogrom.
Truth: half awake in Rose's sewing room, I hear the adults talk,
it is 1953, it is all about a family in the neighborhood,
Rosenberg, they are in all the papers, dead or going to die,
and the children, they weep over the Poor Little Orphans
and I start crying because they are children without even bad parents,
and--a wonder--my father is furious, and it is not at me.
"Do not wake me for I am sleeping."
Recall Miller's Salesman:
Nobody ever told the truth for one second in this house!
Not always: but you had to hear it by accident.
Aunt Esther stops cooking, gets lost on subways.
Yasha her husband, she married him in 1907, is dead.
She is dying in a Five Towns nursing home
where her oldest child, her firstborn son,
pays the bills but never comes, and where every male
from me to the Puerto Rican busboy
gets the same question: "Bist du Al?"
That is supposed to break your heart.
It breaks mine now.
If I'd been awake then mine might have broken.
Or maybe it did because that was 1962 and I
remember it to this day.
But what did I not hear?
Ken Wolman
***
a brightly-coloured bird
snaps a reddish spider
from its web among rotting berries;
the silk is broken, disrupted;
the food is disabled, squelching
both sides of a half-closed beak
neither bird nor animal shows emotion
Lawrence Upton
***
In Our Skin
Untamed,
you penetrate,
in aberrant circles -
sowing flames with
your breath
Your body burns
a memory - scorches
my soul with desire
for you
A slow sting,
the white singe,
that closes eyes
and purses lips -
brilliant and aware
life is
in our skin
Deborah Russell
***
8:32
Last day of summer
Gray sky
Sound of street sweeper:
Stephen Vincent
***
A Doubtless Dream (after Keats)
This tender autumn night, I am no stranger
to tragic love nor the countless, careless ways
my heart has dashed and know not
what flowers bloom at my feet, neither
the number of trees, I might pass
The grip of my eye holds fast to a dream
that survives and is destined to surpass -
to know love in all its beauty
and to know its everlast . . .
Through this dark and dreary Valley I travel
with the light of a doubtless dream
I am beautiful and eagle swift
I am love and all its bliss -
I am a soul fountain of full-throated
sparrow songs
This moon and all these stars, shine for me,
and there is but one - just one, that smiles
and nods and the rest? The rest were never
born for death but for immortal poetry.
Deborah Russell
***
Spray and shadow
To take one step down, two, dodging
fresh magpie guano, morning
pleasantries, the plastic lines, cracks
along paths and bowls, leaves
the horizon shudders, where toons
play TV roll, poetry booms machinelike
wheels, voom-doof-tish, chunks
dies out along the road above
the dog's heartache, no need to translate
the loneliness and the cropped, grunge shine
close lily, photographic, all the above, blue
this all moving us, two step, down.
Water's dark shadows, and shiny
cold on toes, and hands me fresh
the nozzle screw, this sometime
boy-thing spray and spill all
make things rise, splash glint bugs
and dams die down, but what about
this green thing here, I feel beyond
latin names, all us suburban
species, collapse sometimes, we and are
more than bones and chlorophyll, that we
shudder in the wind and full
of water, this we drink as if mouths.
The fence, the orange grit, time
runs across all surface, within
also, how far dug and splintered
the instances sometimes drag, alive
I suppose, and spring, if we were talking
of it, is appearance, rush
flagrant green exotic glories
the only emptiness. Something I feel
nowhere is, words are sound or
they are painted on labels, touch
it all, not the same, skin feels different
every raised up counted time.
Even if above passengers flight
through sun haze, we call down
here, no ground our ground
just passing, light and rust, the touch
of our hands, yours knowing
but what do we mean by fertile, bent
on appealing to earth, bring forth
what will, and die, each time
rasping, skin close, that suggests
we are the women or leaf of dreams
as a dark wing, its bones closing
lands on a branch, rocking kiss.
Who's made again this air, if not
the past garden, the mistakes
land pressure and browned seasons
our frail litters and spectral green veins
filled and filtered the sweet and
crushed tang, oil falls out of us
the flood we fritter or fret with
spatters the brick each day
bruises and fair filigreed buds of
branching, or earth shit still sticky
that communion leads on
to where the flower opens.
How much later is the moon
to be reinterpreted, all our tides
bunched at rivers and scuttled points
wherein you find still, plastic
soldiers, frisbeed 80s vinyl
the earliest rap, the taste wind
skipping the reticulations, night dew
and scuttle, skin and leaf raise
hairs, I might not tongue the TV
litany blueing the eye across fences
hose dribbles, spent all that water
still it lifts, and skews silence.
Jill Jones, Wednesday 21 Sept 2005 4.45pm
***
ASHES
he thought
when the
time came
that he would
like his ashes
to be scattered
on his allotment
but prudently
she pointed out
that they would
upset the soil
probably kill
all the plants
blight the land
but on the
other hand
judiciously used
in minute amounts
heavily diluted
they would be
excellent as
an effective
slugicide.
pmcmanus
Raynesparkuk
***
Terezin and my In-Laws
1.
My father-in-law Michael calls it
Theresienstadt.
It was his last camp.
A lad, set free in š45, he had
nothing and no-one to return to in Romania.
His wanderings led him at last to Australia.
Here he made a life, married.
Four children, four grandchildren.
Israel he visits, but not Europe.
2.
His merchant banker son, Andrew,
phones him: Dad, guess what?
Our Prague office, which is in a castle,
has put us in a limo, wešre on our way
to Theresienstadt.
3.
What they said to each other next,
I havenšt heard, but I'm brooding on images,
one easy to see: the limo
with Andrew the banker, riding high;
the other, from sixty years back,
harder to visualise:
a starved lad whošs seen
things hešll never mention,
with nothing but a number
tattooed on his arm, and
a ruined continent to put behind him.
Max Richards
Melbourne
Wednesday 21 September 2005
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