Objects

In the manner of
and in their wastage thereof
the things of this world
its objects
and as its people run
or walk slowly
there are always the ruins
to aim for
for they, the beginnings,
are the goals.
The ends come without fail.
Their realization though unknown
is not a beckoning but a solution.

He who walks
meets her who runs.

Harriet Zinnes, NY City, USA, 11.30pm

  
SNAPSHOTS 2

so little time  
            so many infinities

A PoetryEtc Project:
Week Four:
Wednesday May 21st

liquidambar, I dislike your name, as if chosen by some nurseryman to be a
marketable tree,

but autumn here in leafy Melbourne does bright things to my home street's
double row;

sad how the overhead wires across the road ensure the upper branches are
regularly butchered;

sad how my neighbours these weekends with leaf-blowers noisily spruce up
their lawns and grass verge;

sad how Australians call the latter The Nature Strip;

sad how one morning soon the city council will send its roaring wheely-brush
machine like time's winged chariot hoovering near;

s.a.d. - seasonal affective disorder...

farewell the fallen liquidambar leaves...

Max Richards, Cooee, North Balwyn, Melbourne, noon

this morning
he felt like
a mighty eagle
lord of the sky
sitting on his eyrie
screeching defiance
at the world
but then
his wings
sort of
fell off
and
he
was
left there
looking
rather silly
and vulnerable.

patrick mcmanus, raynes park, london uk-08.32

 

APOLOGETIC HAIKU

(for Jill)

sitting broodily
everyone has noticed Jill
except me -- sorry!

Robin Hamilton, Loughborough, 8.45pm

(for jill and for all of us enjoying this moment)

 

wednesday here and now it is five a.m.
miércoles at the bodega unloading today
off of trucks with motors running and loud
men have no idea that this
cuarta-feira i can sleep in until i feel obliged
to rise to a voice who proclaims this is
brick city and "savor wednesday" is the section
of the paper from which i can almost see
the weekend over the columns and recipes

i am happy that we are making our own

day for poets, a holiday, and sending a wish-
you-were-here.
in newark, in gaoth dobhair
at the cliffs of moher where it has been
de céadaoin for five hours and geography rolls
over us like a wave

Deborah L. Humphreys, Ironbound, Newark, NJ, 6:03 am

 

Sound Bites

Here in New York, it's a gray,
Code-Orangey sort of day with inter-
mittent rain showers. There's the whoosh
of traffic on West Street coming through the window,
mixing with Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and
Percussion and the whirr of my laptop,
unclipped nails clicking the keys.

Halvard Johnson, New York City, 8:50 a.m.

 

As eleven approaches
the buzz of highway
roadworks
recedes like a woosh
on a roll - that curious feeling
greetings of flowers
and letters
the smoke of friendship
still rolls on my tongue
the sun becomes shade
and night and the cool
why not - remember
this once, never would have
to receive, and how hard
to let the cloud
the talk, the elusive perfume
wafty like dream
that rhythms, that exceeds
the junk, the noise boom
that comes with the territory

Jill Jones, Marrickville,
Australia, 10.45 pm

 

ODE TO JOY
1
My old washing machine
beats to the beat of
the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth,
molto vivace, moto perpetuo,
PAH pa pa Pah pa pa Pah pa pa Pah pa pa,
inexorable as fate. May it long survive,
&
Vale!

2
I know it prefers small loads and on spin will
sometimes complain by emitting
the smell of burnt lubricant.
Why, then, do I test its limits? Do I see it
as rival, or perhaps
as myself, extended? as if it willed
to conquer the assaults of time?
Some day surely the replacement parts
will no longer justify the expense and
the old machine, cast off,
will rust among weeds.

3
But I have taught it
to dance in place instead of gyrating
across the kitchen, I have trained
its ponderous weight to sing for the moment
as I would have it sing, each load
become a sort of triumph
after these years.

Mark Weiss, San Diego.

each day is a tally of words
some are the size of amoeba
but string together into a complex
stinging battleship some are as big as
tomorrow drawing through impossible
futures its vapour trails of promises
and desolations and some are general like
utopia and some are those tiny
words like "you" and "me" and "I"
as in I hope you are all right there
in the distraction of your pain and that
some blue hand will brush your brow
with surcease of sorrow as if a star
could be exactly as we imagined it
when we were children like an
angel robed in starlight whose clarity
restored all dimunitions and as
for me the words keep flashing their
ephemeral realities in such infinities
of colours and I am counting
them and counting them

Alison Croggon, Melbourne, Australia , 8.18pm

 

Repairs and maintenance

‘How comforting,’ we say, ‘this suburban rain reaching
the end of a mended down-pipe in a dry house.’
The silicone’s a shadow of itself,
first knitted on like wool,
unraveled for the insurance claim.
The short arms and long pockets that pollyfilled
the yearly damp, was a landlord, best forgotten,
like a foolproof safe.
I got a handyman in, familiar with rivets
and gutters. Now there’s magic in guided rain,
fairylights that don’t hiss, eaves in glamorous white.
And the drains are more vocal
since the house zips up its winter coat.

Helen Hagemann
Perth, WA Wednesday 8.45pm

REJOICE & BE MISERABLE

             via Miriam Schapiro &

Excitable surface

                                                     magically drawing

                                                                                                                  monumental.

Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, Maryland / 9:34 AM

GERHARD RICHTER

grew up in
every circumstance.
Russian soldiers.
Hunger was
an adventure
"really great, man"
Drawings and watercolors.

Russia, just for a tourist . . .
I have to go that's no life.
Cheap, dirty, banal photograph;
harder
to deform
element.
Really don't know what I’m doing with these . . .

GERHARD RICHTER

Good method. I
empty, feeling terrible, don't know what to paint,
really nothing.
House with its furniture
always as long as I can
remember
different.

Reasons
I was never. Left wing
can ask why not
handle this?
Terrible. And doesn't work.
Exists,
right?

Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, Maryland / 9:32 AM

 

SNAPSHOT - pigeon boogie

indirect sun

lone woman
eating a brown tube
in off-white air
magnesium flare filling
legs together
on her knees a book
she holds down
hard each side
reading
skull tilted angle-poise
the sweet within closed fingers
socks short
trainers a little grubby

on its side a pigeon
dead still head smashed leaking

Lawrence Upton, Carshalton,
Surrey UK approx 10.5 a.m.

 

Moist running sunlight, the
relief of roaring silence and the
thundering canine
behind -
this drifting hairline
sensation, fresh damp growth
shaded in water, green
through jellied lense;
soft thud of the
overhead threat.

Jon Clay
Wanstead Flats, London
4.00 pm

 

as i read
              'elusive perfume'
or the fall of words down
                                     'keep flashing their
ephemeral realities'
                         as if
as for
                    'a holiday, and sending a wish-
you-were-here'

while to the
                 upper right
of the screen
the blue sky
& brightwhite blossoms
                                 of the pear tree
out my window
                           glow

screen time 7:57 a.m.
& i mouse i mouse
i move to more poems

Douglas Barbour, Edmonton 07:59 May 21 2003

 

a glorious day
ideal weather for creating
and someone's begun

already a roller
and a bulldozer
working the old

tussocky potato-fields
on the other side of my fence
the new extension

to the old church-yard
will reach across the slope
so when the time comes

it'll be a glorious day
ideal weather for creating
and i can simply look

over my shoulder
wave and climb over
the fence

Árni Ibsen
Hafnarfjördur, Iceland.

Before breakfast 21/05/03

 

After the sand and the houses, the nakedness
and the elaborate artifices: the juniper tree
with its bitter blue berries, its frond-like
leaves like the webbed feet of tiny green
frogs, the hot dry smell of decades of dust
caught in its branches, the bark like torn paper
shredding away from the red aromatic heartwood,
the ephedra's pale fingers, thin reeds of stem,
breaking into clouds of yellow bloom, a snag
of cedar erupting from the ground surrounded
by a drift of wild and deeply blue
that I have no name for, anymore
than I have name for all your flowers
that fill my house, for all flowers
in the desert are but the accidents
of the erratic rains, so peripheral and so seldom,
dying within a day. And who wants love
when it is happy to ever come to an end?
As a swallowtail butterfly careens out
of the dense green of pinon, caught
as it is on the rising thermals of impending
noon, it flies out of some deep shadow, flies
both fervently with intent and drifts erratically
toward me. Is it by accident or desire
that all your love so comes to me? So
borne along by whatever is, this butterfly,
its bits of red, its brilliant yellow, almost lands
upon my forehead, its shadow, a bright kiss.

Rebecca Seiferle
Farmington NM 11:43 am

 

Baby still in abeyance, "in
the balance" although not
as at the profane (and
interrupted)
feast.

"Hanging
over us," but it's
a baby, not a sword,
that cleaves the world:
a speed bump, a sleeping

policeman, sticking out a leg
to trip up time. It could
be starting as I speak;
it's hard to tell if
the swell

will break
sooner or later. So
sleep on it, around it: wake
me up when it's all go. One
more for the sunrise? It's a free show.

Dominic Fox, Leicester, midnight

 

Cherry blossoms pout like young kisses and droplets
dangle from lips of fresh pink flesh. Everything
is bathed in shine. A wasp flies between that tree
and my window, zooms at the glass and bangs
his head hard. Circles again for another assault.
Is it romancing me, entertaining me, trying to share
a secret I cannot understand, or have I been visited
by a tiny Kamikaze with a burning death wish?

Audrey Friedman, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, 4.09pm

 

Far

Your voice on the phone,
for once no echo,
the distance barely a breath,
the time between us.
For you it's dark,
for me the light is softening,
the birds twittering in the rain,
the evening traffic.
Soon I'll pull the curtains,
the street lamp pale orange,
our flat a square of light,
much as you left it,
with cushions, papers scattered in puddles,
the potted plant contorting towards the window,
your surprise framed on the desk,
abandoned cups of tea, the remains of envelopes,
and it's been so quiet since you left.

Aoife Mannix, London, 20:49