Hi all,
An amended snapshot 28, with Harriet's snap now added, delayed due to computer
difficulties.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
Snapshot
In the meantime
music
out of time no music
Oh, words, where are you
so absent in the song
Harriet Zinnes
sky is cleared of doubt
clouds fall out of noon
tendencies and charms are crossed
the cool stays in the stone
ants heave up orange ground
the saxophone is full
time is being stretched out
it has the tongue to tell
hammer noises dancing
wind moves warm on hot
stops the path with dust
and flushes out the street
arches are the atmosphere
branches drop their down
ecstatic blue is brief
prepared for leaving then
Jill Jones
1.45pm, Surry Hills, 5 November 2003
IT SAID PRUNE!
it said prune!
cut back hard!
after leafdrop!
and suddenly
he felt threatened
felt vulnerable
felt exposed
had his
leaves dropped?
and he rushed
back to her
for reassurance
and for comfort.
pmcmanus 8am
raynes park uk
After the funeral, the toddler we were minding,
while his mother grieved among the chief mourners,
ran round the back of the church and found
an overgrown sandpit, capsized
rusting yellow bulldozers.
Rescue begins...resurrection?
Why not save this one¹s life?
Toddler and minder are quietly walking to the road
when the vicar, farewelling the very last mourners,
intervenes. Oh no, the toys are still needed there.
Sorry, vicar, sorry.
What should we have said?
Forgive us our trespasses?
Suffer the little children?
Charity begins somewhere near hereŠ
8.00pm Wednesday 5 November 2003
Max Richards, North Balwyn, Melbourne
AND ATTERCOP SAT SMILING ALL THE WHILE ...
For some reason I remembered attercop ...
1. A spider.
c1000 Sax. Leechd. I. 92 Wiþ attorcoppan bite.
2. fig. Applied to a venomous malignant person.
3. Misapplied to: A spider's web.
Oh, well, tomorrow's from Basin Street to Broadway at the Town Hall.
And yesterday I picked-up a CD of Blind Willie McTell at the cornershop.
So now I know why the laid lady laid upon Dylan's big brass bed.
I wish I could work-out how to sell this stuff ...
Somewhere, there *has* to be a rich&hungry grad student who'd sell his
eye-teeth for a line on how the final version of Bembo's speech in book four
of The Courtier draws on Pico's commentary on Benivienni's Canzone, not
Ficino ...
My Italian is so useless ...
Maybe I should advertise on ebay: For Sale -- germinal phids, offers
invited.
Or maybe not.
Tomorrow I decorate the hall.
It's always tomorrow, isn't it?
If it's not yesterday, so far away.
Robin Hamilton
9.20am
Loughborough
Held under the spell
of the late Joseph Cornell,
I built a box about the size of a man:
solid mahogany, varnished, gold taps,
and lined with pure white Malayan silk.
Truth be told, I stole it from an old folk's
home and 'lost' its occupant in the Thames
on the way back to my Notting Hill muse.
I was not so much interested in 'assemblage'
as in a form of human 'decoupage'.
I invited a few of my tattooed cronies
for a pyjama party of PCP and drinkie-poos.
After a smoke or two they were much easier
- in their state of 'dissociative anesthesia' -
to receive the gentle caress
of the flensing knife. So I divested
slivers of their epidermal chef d'oeurves:
dragons, snakes, 'wino forever', 'love
and hate', and glued them with Copydex
onto my man-size mahogany death-box.
I spattered ox-blood and semen
across the smooth interior like a demon
Jackson Pollock and then filled the cavity
with statues of Ganesh, Jesus, the Virgin Mary,
added cow heads, butterflies and the laudenum
I'd fingered on my travels to various London
museums and art galleries. It became central
to my first one-man show at the ICA.
The critics raged. I found it all faintly risible
and called it: 'The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible'.
AB 05/11/03
Thread-safety involves a few precautions,
incantations before entering the fray.
Inside the critical
section it is cold-
er than we're used
to, with dreadful sounds
of cracking and
splitting all around: an ossified
rainforest brocaded with black ice.
The thread-pool is an oily lagoon
seething with electric eels:
its profile multi-
dimensional, spooling
prodigiously over
the table with its
neat flow-diagrams.
Once they get into the pipes, there's
no getting the little feckers out.
Dominic Fox, Northampton 05/11/03 14:52pm
now waiting to hear
the Minister of Community Services
share his other life
singing the song he wrote
a singer-songwriter!
just like Tom Thumb's Blues
but his government
attacks all such wastrels
(wastrels! yup, they'd
use such terms, we
know these people
they rule us now
in every country state
province I
still can't figure why)
& trying to decide
if I'll go to the trouble
of turning off the radio
before I hear him wail
while more homeless
sing their own blues
on the corner
covered in snow
uncovered by the recent cuts
always already made
Douglas Barbour
Edmonton November 5.03 08:22
mollusk fog
lulling
unswept in circles
swamp willows bathed
all ecstatic wet
4:24 PM, West Irondequoit, New York, United States
Gerald Schwartz
following yellow shades a day compares to life-in cold twilight the
colors of leaves almost painfully patched now at night a soft-warm
tangible scattered still mass
new date on the immaculate page
lyn leon dandelion over the dome
Barthes’ Punktum’s hard to strike
read and write
(the malignant regard of the girl
punished in her dyed purple pride
awakens busy silly bees
and the dust sizzles alive)
contemplation
contempt on the platform of a plantation with content palpitation
template the common plate of action
Anny Ballardini - 10.42pm - South Tyrolean Bozen
not that kind of low
pressure system
the jade buddha man
played a cheap skate-
board video game
til 5 ayem
when the temp dropped 10
60/50
in half an hour no
tornado though
she says looking so
bored her Red Stripe
shaves 2 inches
tipped close to gloss
lip & hummed outkast
songs sinking all
this to her background
deep girl heaven
Chris Murray 10:08 p.m. Dallas, Texas
the fact
she reminds me
of my sister
on a good day
the fact
that she shares
the same sorts of genetic endowments
academic associations, the pus color rage
i can see under skin
that barely contains such living
between pileups of shoulds and oughts
the disenfranchised loneliness
a mother with alzheimer’s
all of this, any of this
in common
makes it
complicated
to fire her
today
when
after an initial relief
a rush of adrenaline
before the how is lost in a search
for the dust-covered face of authority
the untangling of procedures
of separation, of letting go
cutting losses in structures
organized for redemption
this is not family, i remind myself
she is not my sister
Deborah
Newark, NJ
begun at 4:55 am
Deborah L. Humphreys
Through The Valley
In whispered sigh, the wind lifts a sleeve of cedar
The doves lift their voices and wings in sudden flight
In upsweeps of clouds, on the horizon, neither
Twilight nor dawn breaks away from the dark of night
The doves lift their voices and wings in sudden flight
An ambered light filters through the valley and trees
Twilight nor dawn breaks away from the dark of night
The memory lifts in a misty shape of leaves
An ambered light filters through the valley and trees
Silence follows her dreams across mountainous land
The memory lifts in a misty shape of leaves
To form a melody in movements of her hand
Silence follows her dreams across mountainous land
Hope dispels in rivulets of image and peace
To form a melody in movements of her hand
When poetry comes quietly within the reach
Hope dispels in rivulets of image and peace
A red tail hawk circles in dreamscape atmosphere
When poetry comes quietly within the reach
One writes a new arousal in the eyes and ear
A red tail hawk circles in dreamscape atmosphere
In upsweeps of clouds, on the horizon, neither
One writes a new arousal in the eyes and ear
In whispered sigh, the wind lifts a sleeve of cedar
Deborah Russell, 8:55 am, 11-05-03
Baltimore, Maryland
GRANDFATHER
Not yet I'm not--but last night, suddenly,
thought it might be fun,
though both my sons seem disinclined to marry,
understandable given family history,
still, accidents happen, and I thought then
how nice I'd have it,
bouncing the (literal) little bastard
on my knee, singing to him
(even though everyone in the house would
tell me to shut up, Verdi scares the kid)
even volunteering to change his diaper,
a skill I learned and mastered
with the same sons who've grown to be
the fathers of these mind-children.
Later, because he's still a mental creature, I could
take him for walks through my imagination--
or maybe not: I'd probably scare us
both to death.
KTW/11-5-03, Princeton, NJ
SNAPSHOT 28
in a theatrical context time
is the fourth dimension the one
that's beside ourselves the
rich bonus gained by journeying
through the piece chance
on the other hand let alone
sheer coincidence has to be
an attribute a hidden agenda
capsuled within time or buried
deep inside one of its secret pockets
one of which has to be that flight
attendant's breast pocket
from which he pulled that
curious copy of dostoyevsky´s
the double identical to the one
i had intended to take with me
on the flight to read en route
but inadvertently left behind
on my bedside table and surely
another secret pocket must have
vomited that other man with whom
i brushed shoulders in dublin
all those years ago and
startled by our resemblance
did a double take before he
disappeared in the crowd
árni ibsen
midnight
november 6 2003
hafnarfjördur
iceland
ANOTHER WEDNESDAY
"And that one which is death to hide does not lie with you useless..."
Did I ever tell you I was taught by Ernst Honigman at Glasgow in the
sixties?
Briefly, tangentially, he was on his way up and out to a chair at Newcastle.
Later, he shafted me over a grad application to Newcastle which turned on
Donne's Spanish authors and he zapped me as I didn't read Spanish.
... which was more than mildly lunatic as Donne was reading his Spanish
Authors in Latin, which i knew but Ernst apparently didn't.
Like an old lag who complains because he was fitted-up for the one burglary
he *didn't* do, that annoyed the hell out of me.
Ernst was a real tight-assed bastard, but he said one thing that always
stuck in my mind, vis a oddly enough vis the sonnet you reference --
"A disagreement over the punctuation of a Milton sonnet is quite enough to
justify terminating a friendship."
I was maybe eighteen at the time, and it struck me as more than somewhat
mad. Little did I know ...
I do so wish you'd get off Milton-L. Jeezus that list has to be the pits,
American noyau hierarchy. If you want a scholarly one, try Ficino, the
haunt of recidivist Neolatinists. There simply aren't enough Neolatinists
in the universe to create a hierarchy. Or if you can stand the heat,
SHAKSPER -- deeply take-no-hostages.
Ho hum my watch tells me it's 7.20, but whether at night or in the morning
... Whatever, it's black outside.
Robin Hamilton
Loughborough
19.35
