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POETRYETC Home

POETRYETC  June 2015

POETRYETC June 2015

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Subject:

From:

Sheila Murphy <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc: poetry and poetics

Date:

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 10:07:54 -0700

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (227 lines)

Utterly compelling, Lawrence. Very strong and draws one in completely.
Thank you. Sheila

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:04 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)
>

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