Oh ok. I thought IT was on the leash, but ok!
Thanks for liking it
L
On 16 June 2015 at 22:47, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It wandered far & wide, & you followed as if on a leash, Lawrence.
>
> I stayed with it, too, as Sheila said….
>
> That I acts the confession well, without ever really doing that dance;
> other happenings all the way through…
>
> Doug
> On Jun 16, 2015, at 11:04 AM, Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > [This should do it]
> >
> >
> > Richard Kessling, Melbourne in Australia
> >
> > I have my shades on. A quarter past two.
> > P.M. I've eaten a large spinach pie.
> > It cost me little and includes napkins
> > and a plastic bag which I shall fill with figs
> > on Tuesday morning. An ant grabs fragments.
> >
> > The plate is borrowed from my landlady.
> >
> > She taught me several words of Greek for plate
> > as well as for the knife. That's ???????.
> > It's said "Ma Carey" with the stress on care.
> > Sounds like a film.
> > Kessling, it's very hot;
> > my mind is wandering and I'm following.
> > A man, a Greek, is digging a long hole
> > in the street below, but I don't know why.
> > He doesn't sweat. His wife removes his hat,
> > drops it in a bucket and puts it back
> > on him. Cool water streams over his face.
> > She helps to break large stones with a hammer,
> > talking. Extremely attractive. She bends
> > beautifully, bare-footed, trousers cut knee length.
> > I wish that she loved me and I was rich.
> > I have my shades on but it's not enough.
> > The ant is almost at the balcony.
> > It can't escape. The floor's really well-sealed.
> > This morning I evicted the spider
> > from my shoes. He's been there - perhaps it's she -
> > for five days, hunting from beside the heels.
> > It was desperate to run but had no shade.
> > She has powerful legs, that woman.
> > Gets down in the hole now, helping him, talking,
> > about whatever's down there. Water pipes?
> > Something of concern.
> > I have my shades on.
> >
> > How are you, you inoperable fart?
> > The Greek for fart is not in my dictionary,
> > not even under "Doctor-General".
> >
> > Two forty five: good poetry takes time.
> > Across the street, two teenage girls stand tense,
> > balconied in strident loud pop music;
> > finger tips flicker, keeping time, heads nod;
> > "I want... I want... I want..." Perhaps "I wish..."
> > I fail to hear the list of the desires
> > or else don't understand. Overlapping
> > as small streams merge fleet pulses in a tide;
> > an older song, on a peculiar scale,
> > from a take away, somehow more dominant
> > in its undercurrent, unsynched to the
> > insistent Western chant
> > What is the matter?
> > much repeated.
> > Yes.
> > What is the matter?
> >
> > I've written far too long. I'm tired out. Much as I like to hear my
> voice,
> > I'm off.
> >
> > *
> >
> > Too many beers for lunch. Hours wasted.
> > People volunteer and I want the company.
> > I take what I am offered; for my soul,
> > of course. Then a long talk in the garden,
> > all in my own present tense upside down Greek,
> > that I enjoyed, though exhausting. One thing:
> > tomorrow night, up in the hills, free goat,
> > music all night.
> > Now I'm up; the sky's showing off
> > what can be achieved with indirect sun.
> > It would take some painting! Hunting birds out.
> > I wonder if dusk clarifies for them
> > perspective as it does for us. Best clothes
> > are being shown off below. A lot of Greek.
> > An American has just said "squid" for "hi".
> > I want a walk. I've had enough of this
> > so “squid”.
> >
> > *
> >
> > Morning. Draught German lager.
> > I've left the balcony. I'm in the pub.
> > Eighteen hours have passed - quite good hours
> > and I'm feeling slightly paraplegic.
> > A man or a woman shaped like an egg
> > plods down to the water's edge, legs floppy,
> > guts floppy, hat floppy; an octopus
> > clutched in a cut off hand pops up, violent,
> > from behind the wall of the taverna
> > wop - rather it disappears and then goes wop!
> > If I stood now I'd see the hand's body.
> > An army truck goes past. Wide diesel creaks.
> > The deaf shepherd walks the sea's edge, his dog
> > slightly ahead, both all-seeing. The egg's
> > a woman! immersed now, a wet radish
> > in a fading white hat in a blue sea talking
> > with a woman's voice. To my left, a huge
> > strongish man in a t-shirt stretched round him
> > "Start with Gramosite" drinks beer; grey curly hair
> > dappled by little specks of bent sunlight
> > from the vine lauding over him it seems
> > boughs raised, as they've been trained, as Victory
> > is anthropomorphised as Capa's -
> > is it Capa? picture of the dying
> > soldier in the Spanish Civil War. More
> > assertive than the hands up of the dead
> > entering eternal fire; and more confident!
> > But gestures often say two different things
> > as smiles indicate intending murder
> > as well as love and fear; or confusion.
> > Stars flash in the rising tide, breaking open dark.
> > From my polarising shades, the sea shines;
> > nothing's amiss; nothing can be wrong;
> > as Jarman interviewed was positive,
> > urbane, intense, resistant to darkness.
> > My second sip. A duck comes in the bar
> > and says "AGG" to the owner, both sitting;
> > he shooes at it; his grand-daughter falls back
> > wards over a plastic chair which falls on
> > her as his wife jumps exclaiming rushing;
> > the duck gains ground, the child begins to cry
> > until silenced by hugs; the duck says "quack"
> > but I ignore it, gulping my cool beer;
> > the radio fanfares: "Now supermarkets."
> > Male voice. Supermarkets blah blah
> > for several minutes. Supermarkets.
> > Female voice. Yes, supermarkets. Blah
> > and blah and blah with some words that I know.
> > Supermarkets are they blah or blah-blah.
> > And so it goes until the teeming words
> > seemingly die like spawn in drying spring pools
> > or the sheet yellow under the olives,
> > Cape Sorrel, late March, eventually dead.
> > Not that you've seen that, I think. Make metaphors
> > or think of how weeds take over specimens
> > if one just stays clear. Slowly their voices
> > merged into the cicadas until I was
> > listening to a lyra and a fiddle.
> > Weeds are the finest flowers in my garden.
> > Spring's a random time. Give me high summer's
> > wordless rooted persistence against fire.
> >
> > An hour's passed. My beer's warm. Someone
> > it sounds Anatolian blowing something.
> > An English rose is being gauche, goggled,
> > in her twenties, hat with a pretty man
> > ducking her, to the prompt of "Don't you dare!"
> > She's orange flippers. An old scratched record:
> > an unaccompanied woman, pained voice,
> > pure voice; no one hearing a song of loss;
> > my beer is done. One tenth my allowance.
> > The supermarket two come back until
> > becoming a piano voiced over.
> > I have no idea what is being said.
> >
> > A combined popping of stopping mopeds;
> > Italians, one's shorts open at his cock,
> > bang in showy and light large cigarettes;
> > they sit, each like a young cross emperor;
> > one stares at me so I stare back and win;
> > god help us. The shorts are closed to laughter.
> > I haven't seen an Italian walk. In Leros
> > I climbed to the hilltop of Xerocambos
> > and found what I believe's a Roman light
> > camouflaged as a Christian church. But the old walls,
> > a thousand years B.C., I think, were wrecked.
> > The Italian army billeted there
> > in 1912, heaped up the stones randomly.
> > Archaeological evidence pulled apart
> > because those shits had nothing else to do.
> > Folly on a British scale. Arrogance!
> > Gerondas, here, a farmhouse blown out
> > from its centre. Only the weight of its stones
> > stopped it from collapsing; on a wall
> > in the yard, possibly where it was put, a canteen
> > Wasser Wehrmacht 1943.
> >
> > All patronise the Greeks, elevating
> > Aristotle and Plato unless they say
> > that Greek civilisation's solidly
> > from Egypt. Or worse. Till they put questions
> > that cut the thrust of our advances
> > like knives in the neck of a bull.
> > Worse still, Aristotle never imagined Britain.
> > Harpoons exploding inside a whale's body.
> > Whoever took Aristotle's Politics entire?
> > He's a name to use: like Winston Churchill.
> > But I'm with the whales and bulls and doubting thought,
> > pulled like a rope as in a tug of war
> > and make myself untied.. Greece was nearly
> > socialist, could well have tipped up Stalin.
> > But, no, that's quite silly. You can't beat
> > wankers like that. You have to go round them.
> > I mean all three of the Yalta teddy bears.
> > What is important to keep full in mind
> > is the betrayal by my own country,
> > British troops shooting Greeks in Athens
> > in nineteen forty four, the war open.
> > Greeks who'd fought Fascism. They were murdered
> > because, like Berlin and Rome, London
> > was into manipulation to match
> > hypotheses they dared to call ideas,
> > a set of program declarations
> > asserted to be realistic, daft
> > as Adam Smith or Bentham. Destructive.
> > This Macedonian nonsense. Quiet
> > people led to jump forward like a dog
> > when you touch something of its it hasn't touched
> > for ages. Britain letting Bosnia go.
> > A Greek last night kicking a screaming dog.
> >
> > (1995)
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuation 2
> (UofAPress).
> Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
>
> There is no life that does not rise
> melodic from scales of the marvelous.
>
> To which our grief refers.
>
> Robert Duncan.
>
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