SNAPSHOTS 2

so little time  
            so many infinities

A PoetryEtc Project:
Week One:
Wednesday April 30th

in the whitening centre of chrysanthemums there is a dying sun - all that boiling hydrogen which here metamorphoses into a flower curling up in its organic stench before my eyes - perhaps it is like the pain in my scalp, a white node of numbness which spreads itself along my skull as intimately as muscle - it sounds like that riddle of the two eyes, the pond and the sun, each looking at each other - of course I know it's only error to invent rhymes everywhere, to invest a star with consciousness and vision - perhaps it makes our love more bearable, for how does one stand such ephemerality? - this shadow of flowers falling across the room in the early electric light no less permanent than the clatter of plates in the next room, or this aching brain dissolving itself in words, or the children who move within themselves restlessly towards a larger light

Alison Croggon
6.34am, Melbourne, Australia

In the Bathroom Mirror, Wednesday Morning

Dawn Song of Myself

I'm perfectly well, mutters my inner voice,
stirring its first syllables in the darkness.

Coughing then wakes me - my own, and it hurts.
That didn't happen yesterday -

the virus defeated, a few symptoms lurked.
But - resonating my dead father's cough! -

all rasp and splutter, throughout my childhood,
that then and thereafter kept me off tobaccoS.

Shuffle into slippers, to the bathroom.
Ech! - tousled crumpled lopsided -

A gargoyle needing a gargle.

Mirror mirror on the wall,
I've become my father after all.

Whitman! I think of you:
The feeling of health....the full-noon trill....

the song of me [prolong that me-e-e]
rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Obviously not an early riser.
I think of me, short of breath me,

my before-dawn assignation:
flesh, take up your burden.

Eye-contact! Sing....

- Max Richards at Cooee, North Balwyn Melbourne

Each hour they grow fewer, the splayed
lipped, white drift of the apple blossoms
falling to wind, late frost, and 90 lumens
of the brilliance of paper falling, shredded
to the floor, even incised with the black burning
of someone else's sacred defoliation, love is not
transitory enough but snail-like shapes
self to shell, or hooks like scorpion tail
in crevice or niche, long past luck or life.
Who wants to love forever? Love should fall
like the apple blossoms, die at the kiss
of a bee, learn to perish, come to an end.

Rebecca Seiferle 7:51 pm Farmington, NM

WRITE RAY JOHNSON

"always on the revelatory level"

Right where we had thrown the bottle.
I have a
terrible . . .
Engineering an event.

Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, Maryland / 12:42 AM

 

here outside
my window
in the small street
the tree
has exploded
all fresh leaves
sparrows keenly
hunt for bugs.

patrick mc manus
raynes park -london 8am

pressure, stale desk smell
or lift off, blinking
lights of a jet past a sunset
an italianate pink and paling azure
oh, the precision of sighing words
after five, waiting for the painting
of angels within the rules
gag on what is sensed - paper askew
and the outside, trees, hustle, leaf, bus ways
jangle, train tickets, lit pools
what is senseless - paper askew
tiers, tabulations
the ticking keys

Jill Jones, 5.25pm, an office in Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia.

 

dream mix from last night's shows
fades as the radio voice impinges

eyes open slowly
to growing light
fuzzed as I reach
for my glasses

stumble toward the kitchen
the walls a shadowed rose
sun lifted just
into the window

Doug Barbour, Edmonton at about 06:20 30 III 03

 

wednesday quotes

 

/the cartoonist prefers the French market/

/when the bottle, seen as the focus on which both contemporary design
and art pivot

starting from Warhol --- the patriarch (listen to this, he'd be laughing)/

/Sky - Doll, yes we created it, Barbara and me/

/not to mention his due interlocutor, the one with the infinite men crawling/

/when I became the teacher at the Disney Academy in Milan/

/crawling all around the bottle - keith haring

as a striptease, that is how she showed it in the ad

the round womb of it standing out on the box with his picture/

/and do you really think illicit drugs are more dangerous than the others?

who can come up with some intelligent thoughts?/

/yes, the trio will be playing, the sax player was superb, I do take
the responsibility/

/oh you will be traveling to taranto and then all the way up and down
again to rome?/

/a winter love, that is Jonson/

/can you please quickly revise it, the weather is not too good, exams
in a couple of days/

/run baby run

4.07 windy, lightly windy, get changed, class in 20 minutes/

/watered plants very dry oblique low sun rays love wind/

/philip dick and carlo galli note them down -first thing amazon- next
time i'll come with the list/

/analytical philosophy and linguistics... "Le souper des crétins"
"Say it in English"/

/words -fire points- words

timetable___considerations - quotes, quoting my life down on a screen,

Anni Ballardini 6.54 pm

 

I FOUND A POEM

(The Continental Op has been offered a cigarette by a witchy lady)

She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, with a sort of coo in it.

"I am so very sorry. So many people do not like them. I have a Hindu
incense mixed with the tobacco."

I didn't say anything to that. It was what you would expect of a woman who
would dye her dog purple.

-- Dashiell Hammett via Robin Hamilton, Loughborough, UK

 

Because the new landlord has not
renewed the contract with the gardener,
the grass is uncut, and sprinkled with daisies,
dandelions (scattered handfuls of cash)
and drifts of a blue flower whose name
I don't know (inkstains, or miniature lakes,
or mould). Looking again, they seem
crowds, seen from a great height:
blue-uniformed conscripts perhaps,
reluctantly conquering the lawn.

Peter Howard
Noon, The Grange, Swavesey, UK

Midweek, kvetching about work intensifies.
We picture our directors crying, "ker-ching!",
as bonuses tumble from their gladsome hands
into their yawning pockets. Blatant surfing
for better-paid positions, then for jokes
about Saddam, breaks up a clump of time.

The afternoon drags, accelerates. There's a vending
machine will swap your self-esteem for blood
sugar, just when it's needed (circa three
thirty PM - siesta time in lush
cancerous tropics where holidays are booked).
No mystery now why everything is crap
with lackies like us doing the wiring-up.

The punchline is, "I need a new bag, dad".

Dominic Fox, Leicester UK

it's rained in the night
finally the bushes have exploded
into green cars rushing by me
in every which direction why
i'm reminded now of a curious encounter
in madrid a few years ago i do not know
but the image of this old man serving
in a downtown coffeeshop remains
he'd lost his voice to cancer but had
developed this curious method of
laughing through his nose to be
heard and why oh why do i feel
as if i'm missing something though
the laughing coffee-shop man had
found a way to stay a while longer

Árni Ibsen, Iceland

 

a creeping breath of green
new leaves unbearably new
oak the nubs of fingers
shivering tinsel birch

the river full to boiling
pours down
dark brown water
a tensed muscle where
the current finds ease

underfoot old leaves hands
still under the cuckoo call
quiet hand on hand and alive
with the movement of ants

Liz Kirby
(Padley Gorge - The White Peak
10.40am)

Already the light is turning
from grey to blue. The woolly bush,
dipping its fingers into morning, rises over the
shoulders of a rusty fence. Velvet slippers are prettier
this year, since their retirement to shade.
In the far corner, a willy-wagtail rolls dawn over his busy tail,
flips through a pond of nemesia.
This pond, no matter what it is, is enclosed murky water.
Having woken at 5.00am I'm still dazed
by the black river of night,
sleep no relief from a late hour call,
daughter's sad voice floating in like a lamp click,
a sudden clasp of the latest hardcover -
her loss, bursting like blue veins on the backs of hands.
I have learnt to listen to their names, the ones she holds dear
some singer, guitarist or bassist -
nameless souls going out like candles.
I think I lead her gently back,
wait for the letting go.
Later, I will surround myself with chores,
type words, contemplate silence,
her laughter.

Helen Hagemann
Perth, Western Australia