SNAPSHOTS
1

so little time  
            so many infinities

A PoetryEtc Project:
Week One:
Wednesday August 15

It should be a garden, or a message saying Wilkommen, this place, but instead it thrives with shadows, bustling their populace. Breathe, breather, and try to believe. Could describe the swanscalm, them smooth on the water, or too the moorhens, their croaky insistence, or for that matter the bread, (like cotton, all flaky, and white) a hand, must be mine, has flung it to their dependence. It is no garden, nor do huge pinions, the fallen eyed's, beat over it. Begone from the scenario, thou darkwinged. It is the canalside, the Mile Straight they call it, in Lear's Ruins, that's Leicester, on a close afternoon called Wednesday, at now that is the time, where a hand again (I know it) touches down , feel, the sure soil of it, the what can be stood on, Earth. Breathe.

David Bircumshaw
Leicester, UK, 12.30pm

A desk frenzies itself
in the bureaucracy of the day
files stare each other down

outside, streaking clouds
played by wind current
no decisions
just white just blue?

outside, smogged pink
grips the horizon
wheels constant below
all decisions
glinting belly
of arrowing jet

and the present in the air
somehow escapes me again

Jill Jones
A desk on Level 4,
372 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia, 2.45pm

It was closing-time in the cheap restaurant where I had just eaten, and I was at the counter paying my bill. Outside a station-wagon was parked at the curb, a well-dressed man in his thirties standing by the open tailgate. He was delivering the next day's greens to the restaurant. A slight, emaciated, bare-foot old man in worn black pants and a worn black cloth jacket that had the look of having been slept in carried the heavy straw baskets of groceries, perhaps 2 1/2 feet in diameter, the 15 feet from the car to the counter. He was short; the counter was at chest level, and he had to lift the baskets to place them on top. But he couldn't do it. His whole body strained with the attempt, and his eyes were wide and staring with the silent effort, and with the fear, I thought, of being found out as useless, discardable, after a lifetime of lifting and hauling, no longer worthy of the few centavos his labor could earn, no longer worthy of food. The teenager behind the counter helped him with his load, before the boss could see. The old man's feet were small and clean, like a child's, and splayed like those of anyone who rarely wore shoes. Otherwise, he reminded me of my grandfather.

Mark Weiss
Antigua de Guatemala, 1.30pm

Strange quality of fixtures:
       desks and chairs, smooth
wood of flooring. To amount
to no more than a presence here.

Today haunts these oddments,
       objects with their catechisms we read,
their sides angled from us,
indicting the sharp edges of time and being.

Still: to have thoughts of naive festival days,
       of childhood, when we fulfilled ourselves
in speech.

Michael Heller
Westcliffe, Colorado, 9 pm.

At work he shuffles his M&Ms
they spill to colour her day
she would give anything for an M&M
let him paint her car delete her rust
even more, she would trade boots of red
bend every key in a wrecker's yard
bang drums in his beetle seat
to have his youth his mind of letters
his M&Ms

Helen Hagemann
Joondalup, Western Australia, 10.00am

Airport. 5am. Temperature - 0.5 degrees. Pink and greys clustered in the floodlit gumtrees. Screeching of their family squabbles as I heave the travel cases out of the car. Taxis pass in clusters like goldfish in a turgid pool. Airport building a lighted ark for other dark figures. Like me, haven seekers drawn toward it in hurrying clusters.

Glen Phillips
5am

Steep slope banked grass-edged sidewalks; carriageway, cut in, a strip of torrential surface flow. Flies haloing wheelie bins. Too hot for England, trees brown and weeping all varieties. And, under all, motion, tarmacadam fracturing over twisting roots, a man- hole tilted. Above, many more insects than fat houseflies. A magpie waiting in a flower garden. The island is full of over-sweet and amplified sound. Small valley bottom, bright sky fluxed between parti-multi-walls, faux tudor, crazed roof-tiles, pigeons, a small variety of shops, few people shuffling between them, cars going through the crossroads on their way to centre their occupants.

Lawrence Upton
Suburban Surrey, UK, 12.15 am

BEFORE

Crag attached to shard swept an inch a chiliad on beast backed schist flooding embanked upthrusted claw spumed in accidental tyrranies or tyrannical accidents over arching seas of terrible calamities' shale armoured horizons. Observe that impassible crack where competing floods are thrown back frozen roaring. Over this planet we are inching. Eeeee engines off in pterodon glide silence.

Below. Under clouds realms in trance mountain range backs. That cirque of sharded spiked peaks stuck into cloud mists rises from mountain morraines. But in the far through cloud sea: a pyramid bursts forth snow cap glinted by sun. That line of peaks where lightning bolts carom under black vaults see it inching away now. Valleys of perilous twisted abysses in which to fall without finding any end to it. Uncharted rivers rrounded by burgeoned granite hraals. Twisting massifs rise for moments through the foam only to fail as glinted that lone pyramid reigns. Horizoned towers spike over poured slaveries of force

Richard Dillon
41,000 Feet Over The Cascade Mountains, Washington State, USA
from a US Airways Boeing 737
August 10, 2001, 2:00 PM MST

Meme L'amour

The steps have vanished in the dark.
Stairs end.
The glimmer of a light only a reflection
like the noise of steps long gone.

It is morning now.
The rooster has begun his anthem.
One leaf falls from the tree.
One bird (where is his mate?)
is quiet on the branch.

Do not search for water.
The pond has dried up.
I hear the barking of a dog.
Fantasy, of course.

Harriet Zinnes
New York City (at home) 5 pm

down through thick red
sunset growing dark tree shadows
school building work children
bright headlights long warning
narrow down the lane and risky
hold the right to be on two feet
against a shout and wheel spin
garden silence deeper the tv off
computer folded hall light on
a glass together in the kitchen dark
two forks and the remnants of dinner

Liz Kirby
Macclesfield, UK, 1.04 am

angel of life swirls above
of death Alexis is
alert and cries

tom bell

out of bed to answer the phone, early, before 7, thinking must be my lady but it be my youngest son's future mother-in-law phoning from england to say they boarded the plane alright. big deal, i think, landing's the important part. & i stand in my laughing banana t-shirt, left arm in lime green fibreglass, looking out at a grey morning. there is a bird calling like a child's petulant cry, repeatedly, somewhere in the tough old gumtrees that are just getting their colour green back from black. yesterday i said goodbye to 3 usa students from kenyon. birds flit and fly each day, my mind too, yet i am still amazed how the young roam the world like it is their backyard. shadows cross the road now and day begins. the kettle whistles, magpies cluster at a door downstairs for the man who feeds them, and i cutup red apple to sweeten my oats. to begin at the beginning, it is shining now in the rain- damp, bird-chortling morn, as a one-winged sparrow sits, chirping to his friends far and wee

Andrew Burke
Daglish,Western Australia, 7:15 am

My three year old
son's first painting
the lines bleeding
into each other
I see him there
leaning forward
then standing back
to assess his work
and I hear him
delighted
I a good painter boy

Anthony Lawrence
Tasmania, Australia,11 am

openings @ 1/250

how the light
lays colour & shadow
across the greens & reds
of crabapples
newly grown beyond
the kitchen window

how shade in morning light
shifts with each breeze

caught flash of
reflective skin

a light let in

Douglas Barbour
Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada, 8:30am

A Wednesday

dirty window for years

gray clouds

Skyline Forest

tree limbs twitch

cold toes

Frank Parker Monterey, CA, USA, 7:35:58 am

The empty bottle of whisky in the window dwarfs Mrs. Robb, who has set out a plastic chair in front of the grey-white wall. Beyond it, silver blue haze. Click here to see more pebble dash. We probably do more pebble-dash than anybody in the Washington area. Period Property UK's Agony Uncle. Ask Malcolm ... You can write to Malcolm free of charge on any subject, providing it's got something to do with Period Properties. Cicadas. King Rat on the t.v. It's not quite that hot here. A girl on a bike cycles towards Mrs Robb. Their backs to the sea.

Malcolm Phillips
St Andrews, Scotland, 3 pm

Photoshop

I go to pick up the prints.
None of them have turned out
and all that returns
is a blank roll of film.
All those great photos
I took of the kids
during their week
at the soccer clinic
are not in a neat
yellow envelope
with the blank negatives —

S.K. Kelen
Lyneham, ACT

Two days I've suffered suit and tie
And now I'm naked in my bed.
My wife lies reading next to me —
But turned away and fully dressed.

Michael Snider
Raleigh NC, US, 7.43 pm

Days of rain leaves lush grass,
receding waters, lily pads
big enough for fairy feet,
no blooms, just hungry ducks

sit on the bridge, watch them
wrestle chunks of stale sourdough,
a real-time movie, background in motion;
joggers pad by on the packed trail.

It's a perfect day, Kodak moment
developing within our view finder
reach out over the rock falls,
climb to Hermitage Road and home.

Shann Palmer
Bryan Park mid-afternoon,
Richmond, Virginia, 1pm

Tannoy: Passenger Villa, Passenger Villa, please go to Gate 11 im-MEE- diately.

Phil Nicholls Heathrow Airport, Terminal One, UK, 11:43am

Black, it must be, but the outside is somewhere else, a voice said, and what is whispering surely it is called time, that falling, and beyond anything else the next word lies open. Hey? do you need glasses? Pardon my friend, that is you I am talking to, and yet again something happens, it might be conscious, and the spectrum is waiting there, hiding iin its palette, bet it must be a something, give it a description, sweat, lights, a glare of not there, world.

David Bircumshaw
Leicester, UK, 11.35pm

fragrant scented
wattle blossom
on moist warm air
the sea swells
the horizon holds
a leaning yacht
glass green white
marbled wall
lip curls     falls
spray shatters
a thump    a roar
shore shivers
churned    cream
violet and sepia
foam fingers
clutch and drag
scouring lace
seeking pearls

Josephine Severn
Pearl Beach, 15th August 2001 10.30am

Formica I think and false mahogany and someone's keys, must be mine, sprawled on my eyesight. That is to say this wood-thing that is to say in this yellow. Glare. Light-bulb. Waah! too bright is the light and my pupils shrink, they are a mammal's, not to be looking at it. Something moved, it did!, maybe it was me, or a shadow, likely, and a printer says to me, chug, beige, of sorts, yes you can be tomorrow, you can, honest, talk.

David Bircumshaw
Leicester, UK, 9pm

The wet edge of a softened day
recoiled at crow call.
An amputated dog at play
on spring green earth.
Cacophony of murmuring,
presentient of parting.
The yellow heat of wattle in
unseasoned settlement.
The still born lamb removed at birth.
A coffee scented warmth.

So sudden, all this life.
Its cyclical meandering
Skied, wing edged,
yet,
still ending

in one long and indrawn breath.

Maria Fletcher
Looking out over farmland from a verandah on a spring morning at Yarlington, 11.15 am

Lavender sky late evening maples. No wind the river a reflection of the sky, but moving. Thump of bass from some kid's pumped-up truck. Light of late summer, lavender, no, green. The sky by convention is blue; in Viet Nam the word for blue is the same as the word for green: xanh. You just have to know. You know. You do know. Fruit ripens, the sky hangs above us its radiance entirely its own, entirely ours. I am slicing the mango open: qua xoai, the first syllable spoken with a rising then falling tone, the second with a falling tone. Sweet the light sweet juice.

Jospeh Deumer
South Colton NY US, 6:15 pm

up. fruit and fibre. swallow pills till I rattle. weekly shopping in Sainsbury's. bought an extra meal by mistake. an hour of the Beake as he returns borrowed books: Kinsella (J), Schnackenberg (two), Landbridge, The Goblet of Fire (J.K.Rowling). chemist for more pills. my bath to clean me. and now as I eat my sandwiches I stare out of my front window at the beautiful green tree and think that I havent a word of poetry in me, and havent had for years. An hour to the pub. read Sheila Rowbotham.

Douglas Clark
Bath, UK, 10.55am

magnolia shatters
in the early spring
— brush of a cloud?
a blackbird?

the grey sea heaves now
under its rash
of whitecaps

strange, that ragged seagull
on the ragged lawn
its beak so harsh
in the dull light,
its red hunger

Alison Croggon
Melbourne, Australia, 11.35am

I get on a tram with Kenneth Koch.
I've never read his poems before,
& with each line I feel like saying 'hang on'.
It starts to annoy me
so I pull another book I borrowed
called 'Dispatches' by Michael Herr.
It's for an essay apparently based
on secondary sources
for a course called Modern America.
At least, this was listed
as a secondary source;
perhaps primaries are less edited;
young, like this nineteen year old's account
but somehow valuable
because he reckoned he'd seen it all.

I can never read
dissecting the CBD.
There are kids my age wearing tracksuits
& cigarette straws from McDonalds.
My sister said a gang of guys got on her tram.
From their bags they pretended to pull
automatic machineguns.

I just fell in love with a circle-face girl
who paired with me in a Macbeth tutorial.
We were decrypting a passage
upon the battlements;
she kept saying 'Affaffination';
kept laughing, into my eyes.

William Fox
Near Melbourne University, Australia, 4:25pm

"Pensee subite

Sous le noir fige
La raison m'accable
Mon sort est scelle
L'oraison minable

LD"
Gael Grand
Greater Manchester England

See on the walls of the barn-like
shrine, airless in the heat,
the rows and rows of stiff-backed
boys & young men
locked in their paper squares,
foxed and fading. The Obo-san drones
on in a growling bass. Lights incense,
claps hands. We bow our heads.
The sound of tears & prayers
& the electric, hysteric
throbbing of locusts.

Jesse Glass
Chigiwa Town, Nagasaki Prefecture
5:50-6:10 P.M.
August 15th
56 years ago the war ended

each light blurs
the resonance of some old music some sense of the
patterning of rain

passing, the slap of wipers:
a wave to
someone's neighbour

Clayton Hansen
Warwick QLD 6.45pm driving home in rain

From my window I see three old soldiers in berets and navy-blue blazers with rainbow medal ribbons, fresh from some service at the cathedral, talking in the sunshine outside a garden full of marigolds, petunias, fuchsias, yellow, orange, red, purple. A young bearded man (foreign student?) goes by in mauve trousers, lime-green teeshirt, blue rucksack, and they glance at each other briefly. No war, but a lot of clashing.

Matthew Francis
Llandaff, 15 August, 12.00 pm

SNAPSHOT

So little time, so many
infinities...
Enjoying them a great deal,
and will--click my own
shutter

Candice

***************
Frank Parker
Monterey, CA, U.S.A.