you no longer believe in anything
movement of train, mauve waves
grammar’s anomie
gets you down or
war at the back and crown of head
PsyOps, o chicken little the sky! the sky!
o the fallen sky an edge of blue
hanging but
still breathing those colors?
a garden broken & restored many times
how often trying to leave it, bend away
words from that beautiful throat
listen or break or oscillate or
clamor as opposed to “read about”
could you be my model human being
up there on the dais?
o you, she…maybe he’s the one
& we came back from the cinema
glow behind our tears
and you saying a woman, a woman!
how tragic to be such slender thread of a woman
where was I being led?
more people thick in space
in constant motion
twisted around a clock
solar wind, solar heat, sociable matrix
it’s an atavistic mixed-up dream
and stirs the branches
high in Freedom Park
it was the voice of a desultory fragment
of speech now, talking about “state” and “union”
how darkness turns at the wrist

- Anne Waldman

Posted in Textism on Friday October 28, 2011.

Back then, what did I know?
The names of subway lines, buses.
How long it took to walk twenty blocks.

Uptown and downtown.
Not north, not south, not you.

When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,
you were gray-green, incomprehensible, old.
What you clung to, hung from: old.
Trees looking half dead, stones.

Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving
unseen, unread, unremembered.
Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,
ash-of-the-woods.
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.

- Jane Hirshfield

Posted in Textism on Monday April 25, 2011.

I have trouble with old pics
their sweet bitterness
their cutting edge
their tricks

—a daughter’s mittens
hung from cuffs
laid out in kodachrome
a taunt of time. Enough.

I’d rather mine old nuggets
upturn what’s scattered
in my skull —the gold

stick with what
my head will hold

I do not take nostalgic risks
The photobox stays
beneath the bed
with jewel cases of bygones
in code on disks

When my memory goes
it will not matter
I may not even know the aliens
who peer from three by fours
or are splashed on screens
in pixel splatters

Love is best as it occurs
life too;

Now is breath’s agency
Love and life are only inside time

not frozen
not shot with poignancy
not both a blur

- Jim Culleny (via. 3qD)

Posted in Textism on Monday January 31, 2011.

This guy got lost in the snow. Then found.
Then came a sense of having lost the snow
or lost the water or some infinite thing.

He watched the ME channel, day in and
day out. He couldn’t help it: An old fish
swam by some little fish, asking,

how’s the water? The skeletons in one
show taught parables about greed, envy,
and lust, to prove that vices lead to loss.

This little rat got obsessed with
weight lifting and sex, for example.
She preened on, licking her tail & feet.

But that rat had already been lost, clearly,
or had already lost. From the beginning,
she had looked thirsty. Her dark eyes peered out

toward some infinite thing, some body
of water from which to drink,
across which might be a horizon.

The guy remembered his time in Alaska
when, close to death, he had longed for God
with a purity that felt close to God, how

afterward the longing ebbed, and even snow
forgot and went back to being a hassle, often
dirty. The skeleton said truth every time

the rat said beauty. In the wild, you have to
melt snow before you drink it. He had known
that much, how to separate the air from water.

- Heather Green

Posted in Textism on Monday December 6, 2010.

I finally fixed the page of (very) broken links to favourite posts, and thought I would share for those of you that haven’t seen this stuff before.

I’ve split it into four sections, the first dealing with the everyday and mundane, like the light on card-yards at sunset, or the memories of a childhood totem. I also wrote about ruining colour film, leaving 2046, and that time she was raging at the world, and I couldn’t work out why.

I wrote about travel, and the early-morning smells of pakoras in Jalgaon, and the town in southern Laos that just installed their first traffic light. When I was in Prague, we talked about glial cells and sex, and outside the snow kept falling, although nowhere near as much as in a station in snow country, Japan. Another train was the one in Taiwan, and the gaggle of aunties surrounding it.

Sometimes I write about things that hunker down at the edge of my thoughts and scratch and scratch and scratch until I let them out for a run. If ever been curious what William Shakespeare has to do with stealing canoes, you might enjoy Leschenaultia. The Lord of the Forest is about a trip across the ditch, but is also about trees, and letting go. If you’ve ever wondered whether you had it in you to be a superhero, perhaps you should try Singapore, but not if you’re certain that the world is about to end.

Japan is a fertile ground for stories, particularly when you have friends that enjoy breaking into Alien buildings or swimming with phosphorescent algae amid the lightning. Dizzy knows that old men come a knocking, and old women get that foreigners just don’t understand, while sumo wresters, well, they just like kitsch.

Posted in Textism on Monday October 18, 2010.

I am
still thinking of that raven
in the valley of Yush:
with the double rustle of its pair of black scissors
it cut a slanting curve
from the paper sky
and through the dry croaking of its throat
it said something
to the nearby peak
which the weary mountains
bewildered
under the full sun
repeated for long
in their rocky skulls.
Sometimes I ask myself
what a raven
with its decisive final presence
and its mournful persistent color
may have to say to the aged mountains
when at high noon
it glides over the baked ocher of a wheat-field
to soar atop a few aspens
which these tired sleepy hermits
repeat for long
together
at summer noontides.

- Amhad Shamlu (via 3qd)

Posted in Textism on Wednesday October 13, 2010.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand (via. 3qD)

Posted in Textism on Tuesday March 23, 2010.

Leuconoë, stop examining your
Babylonian horoscopes
and wondering what kind of death
the gods have got in mind for us.

We’ll never know. Accept it.
This winter pummelling the ocean
on the pumice rocks of Tuscany
may be our last.

Or not. Be sensible and pour the wine.
This life’s too short for longing
and the clock spins as we speak.
Days come and go. Hold on to this one.

- Mark Haddon

(found on the back of a postcard of a child throwing a dozen white doves into the air, written in Glebe’s beautiful tiny print, that was tucked into the cover of a book. As I took the book from the bookshelf, to throw in my backpack to take overseas, it fell onto the floor. It is signed, “pour the wine.”)

Posted in Textism on Friday January 29, 2010.

She remembers swimming here as a child, her brothers splashing and taunting her from the deeper water as she stood at the end of the jetty and held her nose. Remembers bombie competitions from that same jetty, before they put up the signs about amoebic meningitis. A cartoon man holding his nose, tornado above his head, and the warning in thick red letters stating simply, “Don’t risk it. You could die.” So holidays from the lakeside, then, half a blackened and rusted 44-gallon drum as a barbeque, Coles sausages spitting fat, and the ever present smell of burnt onions. Before the kiosk with postcards, keyrings and souvenir stubby holders. Before the kitschy tourist train. Before the gate.

Tonight, the gate across the pitted and dusty single-lane gravel road is pulled closed, secured with a looped chain and a brand new padlock that gleams dully in the moonlight. It’s close to full, the moon, and it shines through the huddled gums that line the lake, casting dancing shadows onto the water. The sound of the frogs chainsawing at each other carries clearly from the bulrushes at the other end of the lake to where she is standing.

Other than the frogs, it’s a quiet night. The train that runs along the shore finished its final run hours ago, the charter-bus-driven tourists have headed back to the big city, and the single-room cafeteria closed for the night. She inspects her shoes, the mud clumped across the toes and shoelaces dragging in the soft silt where the water dries up and the eucalypts’ roots twist and tangle as they reach down toward the lake. The lock is at her feet, and she thinks that the mud will probably jam the mechanism.

“Hah! You drag me all the way out here and expect me to grok this? What am I, a naturalist? Davey Attenborough’s secret love-child? Jen, I’m a fucking arts major, all I’m supposed to do is smoke pot and read Kerouac. You can’t expected me to get this. It’s outside my limits. Officially beyond the scope of my curricula.”

She knew they hired canoes out here, knew where they kept them, but didn’t think it would be so easy to gently force the lock and walk one down to the waterside. Thought that in this day and age there would be someone, anyone, to stop them. She realised, then, that she’d been in the city too long. Worrying about alarms and home-security. 24 hour call-out. She’d even been to the hardware store the week before, a whole aisle dedicated to tiny white signs explaining in meticulous detail why you shouldn’t jump the fence to burgle this house. Her house. It still thrilled her to say that.

But there were moments when she knew, felt in her bones, that this wasn’t it, that it wasn’t right. The city destroyed people. Ate them up and spat them out as latte sipping clones, fixating on whether Mulberry burst or Teal tension would suit the feature wall better. So she stood in that cavernous, fluoro-lit hall, looking at chrome fixtures and knew she’d need to get out again, and get out soon. No little white sign for her: “Beware: bored and irritable country girl. Exhibits symptoms of cabin fever when contained. Bites when threatened.”

Now. Now, the alcohol beat a fiery tattoo in her veins and Leigh pranced up and down the shore, skipping stones and dancing a strange little jig, hand on stomach and elbow outstretched. He seemed genuinely excited. City boy in the country. Styled hair and fashionable shoes so wildly out of place she wanted to laugh at him. Walk up and smack him one in the stomach and call him pissweak. Instead, she flicked the hair out of her eyes and yelled, “Oi, Leigh, quit fucking around and help me with this for a second, willya.”

They ease the boat into the water. A flat, stubby nose and no keel ensures that it rocks wildly with every tiny movement and she overcompensates at first, leaning it heavily to the right and eliciting a squawk from her passenger in the back. She knows he’ll make jokes when they’re out there, knows how uncomfortable he’ll feel but, bugger it, he’s inflicted enough trivia nights and weekend brunches on her. Still laughed at her enunciation. Her clothes. She grins as she thinks how he’d take it if she took him back up north. The old country. Home.

Her brothers would eat him alive. Mirrored shades and knowledge of Plath, Burrows, and The Unicorns hold no social currency in the Territory, red dust working its way into everything, dog in the back, rifle on the floor. Spotties for the roos and tinnies for later. No Mojitos. No Mid-strength. Metrosexual as foreign as Molvania. She’d do that later though. Force him out of the city, and out of his comfort zone. For now, this was good. Drunk and floating in a stolen canoe, in a lake they said should have dried up years ago.

She leans back on the paddle and they coast to a slow halt, blurry stars reflected in the ripples and the brown water silver in the moonlight. He laughs then, a short bark that echoes off the water, “Fuck, if they catch us now, we’re so fucking fucked.”
“Eloquent, Leigh. Eloquent. Sure it’s F.A. you’re taking and not Law?”
“If your honour would please, the plaintiff was forced, under duress…”
“Duress? That’s what it’s called, is it? Running back to the car to get the extra bottle.”
“Well, I was clearly not in command of my faculties.”
“Yelling at me as to whether ma’am would prefer the salt and vinegar, or the cheese and onion.”
“Faculties.”
“Going back again for the glasses.”
“I shall cry piracy on the high-seas. Taken at cork-screw point and forced aboard by a fearsome she-pirate.”
“I’d say more muddied, brown and rapidly lowering seas. And I think the word is corsair.”
“Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves”
“If that’s yours, I will spot you the rest of the salt and vinegar, pour you a glass, and row you home.”
“Bill. Always Bill S. He of the Globe and the funny pants”

She leans back then, against his chest, and looks up at the stars. Pollux and Castor draw parallel lines in the rippling surface of the lake, lines that trace the silver-grey trunks of the gums and point out over the scrub. This is a compass bearing away from white pickets, wheatgrass, and ‘skinny with one, cheers’ and it soars upwards and out, to where there is nothing but clear and open air between here and the desert. But not yet. Not while the frogs are singing opera and the moon sits above, fat and contented.

“Leigh, how do you feel about amoebic meningitis?”
“What, I, what?”
“Hold your nose.”

And she rocks to her right, hard.

Posted in Textism on Sunday January 24, 2010.

1.

The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.
A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
“I’m going down,” I said. “I won’t be going up.”

2.

The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.
A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
“I’m going down,” I said. “I won’t be going up.”

- Mark Strand

Posted in Textism on Thursday May 28, 2009.