Gig Ryan in Vietnamese Translation

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng
Oppenheimer trước Ủy Ban Điều Tra Những Hoạt Động Phương Hại Mỹ Quốc

Những câu hỏi của họ bắt đầu, rồi đến những giả định, tiếp tới là những giả thuyết
Mỗi góc cạnh bị tránh né, bị đẩy tới. Tiên khởi, những câu trả lời của ta có vấp váp
thành thực phải nói vậy, nhưng rồi qua những giờ, những tuần lễ giàn xếp
đã bọc vo quanh ta – một vụ – hẳn nhiên ta có thể thấy sự mắc lỗi thiếu sót
tất nhiên nó được hiệu chính, ghi nhận, để lúc khả hợp sẽ được trình bày với sự chuẩn xác
ngày nào, tập hợp nào, lý do nào. Sự kiện thuộc lòng kia ta vốn biết
mỗi công thức được tài trợ là một ràng buộc trong không khí, ẩn nấp gọn ghẽ
thế nhưng họ vẫn khéo giọng ngọt, tự hỏi có phải ý nghĩa phải chăng thế này thế kia
những cuộc gặp, những sinh viên của ta, những bạn đồng sự
vượt lên khỏi thứ chân trời nhân tạo, mang vết thương hở miệng chúng ta đã thấy
với những bạn trở áo, những người sẵn đích hướng, một diễu hành huýt sáo miệng
họ xóc xáo, tô đậm “những chỗ hư hỏng trong cá tính” của ta
rồi thì một mẩu ức đoán kêu rền kẽo kẹt. Ta còn được bao nhiêu chân bản ngã
một quả quyết cho tới chỗ Tôi là … rồi những hồi ức đóng lại, tôi xưa cũng đóng lại




Oppenheimer at the Un-American Activities Committee

Their questions began, then suppositions, then hypotheses
Each angle parried, pushed. At first, my answers tripped,
nicely true, but as the hours, the weeks arranged
around me – a case – sure that I could see the slip,
of course corrected and jotted, helpful, when applicable, to make precise
the day, the set, the score. The rote I knew
each angeled formula stringed in air, canyon-neat
yet they still wheedled, wondered if, what meeting meant
and my students, co-workers, rise above that gashed and made horizon that we
                                                                                                     summed
and friends turn who tended, a whistling parade
they shuffle and chalk my “defects in character”
and then a morsel, a speculation, creaks. I have so little self remaining
and crisp til then I am… and recollection folds and what I was too

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Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

Phan Nhien Hao in English Translation

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng
In the changed season

I heard the season has changed
the river is running this direction then one day the sea will enter the city
I heard in the far places people had lit up the night
with pleasure some are sitting down
an elongated room: people among the book shelves
the library is not that busy and high above sometimes I heard
that I was once a day dreamer who now often is too busy
to discern the breathings of the birds
a brown-bricked road, a time-perfected
flower, if one is to talk about youth
or, homeland, certain names, their abstracted relations
As nights fall I heard things will be calm again
I walk alone and this aloneness clings on me
two tied into one down the road-slopes
I heard conflict and reconcilement are dialectics of the wheels
surely the highway surface and speedy motion are handsome signs
                                        of a big city
I am right under the roadsigns
still manage to get lost from one haunt to the next
among schools of philosophy, political doctrines
                          and welfare policies for the poor
I have my skin, the colour of a metal coin
I heard if patient enough I may be able to do an exchange
for food, things neatly packaged, geographical moves
I heard many people like me have finished
yet I still am walking under a small sign, a flower
this pair of shoes cost me seventy-five dollars.




Trong mùa đã đổi

Nghe nói là mùa đã đổi
con sông chạy hướng này rồi một ngày biển sẽ vào thành phố
nghe nói là ở xa người ta đã thắp đèn
ngồi chơi trong căn phòng hẹp giữa các kệ sách
thư viện vắng người và ở trên cao
tôi đôi khi nghe nói chính tôi là kẻ mơ màng
nhưng thường thì sự bận rộn
không nghe những con chim thở
con đường gạch nâu và một bông hoa cổ điển
của những giấc mơ thiếu thời
quê nhà và một vài liên hệ mù mịt
buổi tối nghe nói sẽ yên
nhưng tôi bước đi và sự một mình lẻo đẻo
ngã bóng xuống đồi
Nghe nói xung đột và hóa giải là biện chứng của những bánh xe
mặt lộ và chuyển động là dấu hiệu điển trai của thành phố lớn
tôi ở dưới các bảng chỉ đường
                          và còn lạc từ hang ổ này sang hang ổ khác
triết học, chủ nghĩa
và những chính sách phúc lợi người nghèo
tôi có màu da của đồng kim loại
nghe nói nếu kiên nhẫn thì tôi có thể đổi được thức ăn
sự kiện đóng thùng, các cuộc chuyển dời địa lý
nghe nói nhiều người như tôi đã xong
và tôi còn đi dưới bông hoa nhỏ
đôi giày này giá bảy mươi lăm dollars.

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Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

Vibrations (after Fiona Wright)

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Pat Grant

Vibrations

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Posted in 58: PUMPKIN | Tagged ,

The Spider in the Kitchen (after Andrew Sant)

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Kirrily Schell

The Spider in the Kitchen

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Posted in 58: PUMPKIN | Tagged ,

Concrete Sequence: APPEAL IN AIR

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Philip Davenport

APPEAL IN AIR

APPEAL IN AIR parallels the names of birds with the names of poets, particularly those from the avant-garde tradition. APPEAL IN AIR assumes the form of a spreadsheet that adds together a suicide, a list of bird-names and a valedictory roll-call of poets. By using an accounting tool for an anatomy of sadness, the poem questions the way that we place value in our own lives.

Who gets overlooked? What’s unheard? What’s too loud?

The poem begins with a pile-up of noise, urban overload, into which is inserted the story of A, a true story of a suicide, verbatim from an overheard conversation. ‘… a thought lost in noise sold as music …’ The poem drowns in random information, out of which come soaring flights of birds … first in tiny letters, then in flurries of word / birds that populate the page. The final section leaves us in the big wilderness spaces of the air. The sequence presented here is culled from my original book, APPEAL IN AIR (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press), and assembled from previously unseen material.

BEGIN >>

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Posted in ARTWORKS, ESSAYS | Tagged

Fiona Annis’s Celestial Measures in Ferrotype

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Fiona Annis


Real Things Do Not Dream Long | Fiona Annis | C-type enlargement of wet-plate collodion | 91x91cm

Common threads in my work include the use of instructions, time-based media, and esoteric technologies. This is paired with an ongoing interest in how the past inhabits the present. In this respect, the prefix re is in constant use: return, revenant, remediate, reinvent, and residue all reoccur in the writings that describe my various projects. Most recently, the impulse to riffle through discarded or disavowed material objects is interwoven with an exploration of obsolete lens-based technologies. Continue reading →

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

Twelve Sights of the Sea

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Ian Gibbins

{sea-anemone}
barely inside and out, the rippling enfoldment
that adheres to your nerve-tips, that draws you
further away, abandons any comfortable reassurance

{sea-breeze}
through your voice, strained to breakpoint,
hastily called upon, past your lips, parched,
cracking into bloodlines, blisters ready to weep

{sea-gull}
or swoop and dive and bank and soar
or pick scaly iridescence off your blinking eyes
or steal the thoughts leaking from your bones

{sea-horse}
from your memories of brothers, sisters,
babes-in-arms, collected, recollected, encased
by the thinnest of ivory, the purest of gold

{sea-pen}
across the ebb, the flood, the marks circumscribing
your day-long, week-long, drift through doldrums,
your irresolute desire to be elsewhere

{sea-salt}
the sweatiness of countless dock-side farewells,
the story you neglected to tell the crowds that came
and went and cheered and invariably forgot to smile

{sea-serpent}
too bright for photography, too dense for dreams,
the sun, the air, the fire ablaze underwater,
while you, alone, prepared to catch the sparks

{sea-shore}
a fleck of paint, screw-threads, unspliced fray,
is this some kind of clue? splinters, half-varnished oak,
was this your final hand-hold?

{sea-snail}
perhaps you wished for oxygen, a raft, a tightly closed
bulkhead, instructions on which way to come about
in case of break or catastrophic failure below deck

{sea-star}
what did you see, scratching for contact, before
the sky was crushed flat on its back, before
coral reefs zigged and zagged and slashed at the rain?

{sea-wasp}
useless now, the oil-skins, Mae-Westers, personal
flotation devices as required under law, a buoy
engulfed with tendrils displaced in the roil

{sea-weed}
only By-the-Wind-Sailors, storm-sintered glass,
one canvas shoe, barnacles, slow-darkening Sargasso,
the bells, a message unbottled, awaiting receipt

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Slick

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Paul Summers

dawn unleashes
her molten hoard

a lucent slick
assailing land

2 snakebirds wrought
from whitby jet

incise its skin
to break their fast

a boat named hope
is coaxed from sleep

she clears her throat
her bilges spit

a shoal of diesel rainbows
spawning in her wake

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Penal Colony No.14.

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Gary Allen

When the wind howls, like a Belaz 75710
blasting through huts, wire fencing, padded jackets
you know there is snow coming
the fields will be white like heroin
and then you don’t need fences
there is nowhere to go, but the cathedral vastness of the mind

and the time it takes to walk a cell
to shower, and shit, and play games with the warders
like pretending to be killed, or that the world has not forgotten
that you are on hunger-strike, that you have been beaten-up
or sexually molested, or this is not now, but between the wars.

Where have all the great poets gone?
bargaining their meagre rations for scraps of thin paper
to write their poems on, hiding them behind broken masonry
in their cells, on the chicken farms, factory floors
until they rot unfound, unread

or memorizing each agonizing word, line, verse
in their food-starved, work-numb minds
until the first word, line, verse disintegrates
and disappears like salt waves falling back on a beach.

There are only the old women left Nadezhda
some have been here for years
neither kind nor cruel, but indifferent
to suffering borne or given,
oh, and young girls writing punk lyrics
to a man on a pale horse in Siberia.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Homo Suburbiensis

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Thom Sullivan

With a phrase from Franz Wright’s ‘Another Working Dawn’

you’re dreaming still : soaring high above an endless city : your view
slantwise : your back to the dawning sun : the streets are empty :
the high-wires knotted with pigeons : you’re dreaming still :
of absent friends : of your own domestic library : its drowsy aroma :
the piles of weighty hardcovers you’ve acquired : there’s nothing
for it : but to turn yourself out into the streets : post-boxes
gagging junk mail : newspapers lying at the streetsides : unexploded :
even the notorious guard-dogs, the most predictably vehement
of them, have developed inhibitions in the night : which means
nothing : you’re dreaming still : meat-hooks in the soft ham
of your ankles : scraping the pavement : a dreadful rasp : that wakes
the neighbours : that wakes the whole indecent postcode :
clammy in their bed-sheets : from their dreamless sleep :
or sleepless dreams : one way or another, they’re dreaming still :
late night programming flickering inside their eyelids : station ads :
infotainment : the exposed breast they didn’t kiss : aged sixteen :
that wakens them : with a hankering for pavlova : it doesn’t matter :
you’re streets away : in an avenue of enthusiastic bottlebrush :
that sheds its eyelashes onto your shoulders : where some ghost :
some lost child or teen suicide : agitates a swing in the soldiers’
memorial gardens : rattling its chains : with a lightness that counters
the heft of gravity : its tension on the swing : its catenary fullness :
puddles in the gutters shiver : attuned to some resonance
beneath your hearing : suffering it like a skin : some gristle
in the teeth of the fault-line : on a corner a broken bird : dishevelled :
its eyes screwed shut : it’s dreaming still : wheeling high above
this vast suburbia : paved with rooftops : its view slantwise :
far beyond the curvature of the earth :

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Carte Blanche

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Thom Sullivan

I.

what to make of this blank space :
this white noise : to score it :
to give it some characters : to put
black marks against it : the way
these lines run on : stack up :
stretch out : ranks of peasants
shaking their rakes & forks :
agitated : jostling : is there
a weak point in the defences :
a vulnerability in the lines : some
place we might break through :
into spaciousness : into nothing :


II.

whiteness on whiteness : to pluck
a white rabbit from a white hat :
in the middle of a snowstorm : or
a ptarmigan in its winter morph :
the whites of your eyes shining :
the cat who got the cream : your
mouth opening on a porcelain
smile : & death with a moon in
her pocket : song of the pack-ice :
jingle of the permafrost : an army
camouflaged in bed-sheets :
gnawing ice : marching out to
battle : under a flag of abject white :

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

for Sherman

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Steve Halle

what i mean to say is i mean no,
that’s not what i mean to say
i mean to say something “some-
thing, anything” the silence
is torture, i mean. what i mean
to say nothing at all even something
said, i mean, can mean nothing
but what i mean to say, something
i meant to say, i mean, before
i was so rudely interrupted, i
mean to say what i mean to say
regardless of who is speaking.
i will interject, being derelict,
what i mean into this laborious
discourse, i mean i will labor
to say what i mean to say and i
will, i mean to say, say what
i mean until each ear hears what
i say i mean. what i mean to say
is i mean to say i love what i
mean, so to say, i love what i
mean to say, for instance, say
i mean to say what i mean to
say then once what i mean to
say is said only then can i say
what i mean by what i mean to say,
that is to say, i will say what
i mean about what i mean to say
when i say what i mean to say,
and then also when i say what
i mean about what i mean to say
and then say what that means.
i mean, i see a man or woman,
and i say, “say, that man or woman
may mean to say what i mean to say,”
but i’ve not yet heard that man
or woman express what they mean
to say to see whether it is similar
to or the same (in principle) as what
i mean to say and i say if we
are in agreement why not say what
we mean to say to one another. i mean
to say, who does not love to revel
in the agreement of saying and meaning
and saying, furthermore, what one means
to say. yet, if this very same man
or woman means to say something askance
of what i mean to say i mean, this
is another matter entirely. what i mean
to say is i will say what i mean
to say i mean until the man or woman
understands not only what i mean
to say but also adopts what i mean
and says what i mean to say before
i say what i mean myself, or failing
that, says what i mean to say simultaneously
with the thought of what i mean to say
unclouding itself cognitively because
what i mean to say is why spend time
saying what one means if another means
to say something dangerously contradictory
to what i mean to say. i mean, if what
i mean harbors any kind of value at all,
then certainly this value presents
a kind of universal and i will find
that what i mean to say connects me
with other mans or womans by the shared
principles of what we mean and say,
i mean it is not possible and possibly
not even conceivable that what i mean
to say is not what i mean because
if i mean to say it, it must mean
it is what i mean and what i mean
to say ought to be said in such a way
that what i mean to say is recognized
as saying what i mean to say in the doing
of the saying. say any man or woman
happens to hear the act of me saying
what i mean to say, i mean, this man
or woman should know what i mean
by and/or through the act of saying
what i mean to say and if the man
or woman do not know, it is perhaps
because they have never imagined,
i mean to say, something other
than what i mean to say. that is to say,
i have completed the extent of what
i mean to say to the fullest superscript
of my powers for saying what i mean
to say i mean. i have made the act
of saying what i mean to say so
incontrovertible from and interconnected
with the true meaning of what i mean
to say that any man’s or woman’s version
of what i mean to say that differs
from the true version of what i mean
to say or mean will most surely
be the fault of the man or woman who
has superimposed what he or she means
to say or means or says over, above,
beyond or through what i mean, what
i mean to say or say i mean. i mean
these mans and womans that don’t
mean to say i say what i mean to say
have tipped the communicative playing
field in favor of hises and hers
egos, in favor of believing i mean
to say something other than what i
mean to say. what i mean to say i mean,
i mean, i mean i think, or what i mean
to say is i think the acting out
of saying what i mean to say is a
perfect act. i think and what i mean
to say is as what i mean to say appears
like a ghost voice on a recording
device as if from out of nowhere.
what i mean to say gets enacted
and emerges in what i say i mean about
what i mean to say and what i mean
to say is these mans or womans cannot
possibly think, what i mean to say
is, cannot possibly think what i mean
to say is something other than what
i mean to say or of what i mean
to say as expressed in word or deed
ought to mean what i mean to say
and not, i mean, what some mans
or womans means to say i mean. i mean
what gives that he or she the right
to say that what i mean to say is anything
other than what i mean to say i mean.
i mean, considering a discrepancy
between what i mean to say and mean
and what some man or woman thinks
or interprets what i mean to say i
mean makes me so angry and frustrated,
which is unwholesome, i mean, my anger
prevents me from acting out what i
mean to say. i mean i want to rid
the world of the potential mans
and womans who say what i mean to say,
i mean, differs from what i truly mean
to say i mean because, i mean, in this
way it is possible to once and for all
mean what i mean to say in emergent
thought and word and deed finally.
what i mean to say is i will then not
hesitate or waiver to say what i mean
to say for fear because then when
i say what i mean to say it will be said
in such a way that what i say i mean
to say will really, truly be what i
mean to say and mean without hesitation,
counterpoint, misinterpretation, or dispute
until what i mean to say differs
from what i mean and say, at which point
i will have to refute what i said
i meant to say with what i mean to say
about what i meant to say and said
and meant & it will become gospelized,
eliminating of course, those mans
and womans who say that what i mean
to say about what i meant to say
and said differs from what they mean,
what they say and what they mean
to say about what i have said
and meant, or say and mean, and then
what i mean to say and mean about
the changes to what i have meant
to say and meant will become gospelized,
overflowing, i mean, with the absolute
truth of what i mean to say that is until

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Sinking into Silence

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Lorraine Caputo

—a poem for two voices

Long after midnight
silence pools within
this inn within
the city

Sliced by
someone’s snores
the giggle of a baby
a motorcycle sputtering by

Each sound

the keying of a lock
creak of a door
marching steps up the main street

Each sound
sinking

the cooing of a caged dove
rustle of bedclothes, squeak of springs
a truck shifting gears

Each sound
sinking into the
depths

a television tuned to the late-late show
dripping water from a faucet
distant bark of dogs

Each sound
sinking into the
depths of the night’s

quitted shoes falling on a wooden floor
hushed voices

Each sound
sinking into the
depths of the night’s
silence

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Offshore

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Barnaby Smith

11.53pm, Crackneck Point, Bateau Bay

tankers queuing up and down the coastline
sparkling in their sleep they are
compulsory distances apart

the scene, what we have decided is sorrow as bruising clouds
hover offshore compelled by
stage directions: sound of seagulls
and waves

impetuous winds mark the ritual
in coarse March air forming
puffy blisters decoratively against the stars

the hush before psalms

silence as a virtuosic act of history
written in memory of the sea

a whip of intimacy must be how the animals
feel
when they come
to our back door
to die

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

The Art of Fugue

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Helen Parsons

Angela Hewitt in concert, October 2013

There were two silences. One I had expected.
Where the final contrapunctus breaks, unfinished,
she had asked us to be silent and we were.

It was as if Bach had just died, as if
that vast creating mind had vanished suddenly,
gone into some dimension inaccessible to us.

We felt the miracle of what we’d heard, the mystery
of the source of rivers and of their dispersal finally
into the sea. And then she played a late chorale:

Now before your throne I come. It ended.
Silence again, and then the clapping came
in great cascades and we were on our feet.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Termites in Spring

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Kyle Kohinga

He says Termites. Scrutinising
their Braille, he finds a tinyness too obscure for such stubborn
thumbs. He says The wood’s too bitter, compensating
with his literacy in timber.

*

I think, the termite’s entire body
is devoted to language. Following a scent’s stain,
a pilgrimage to sucrose wood.

*

We talk about the tragedy of knowing.
He says Look at this bit, steel-toe circling
a section of raspy
decay. He says They had no clue, sniffles
at the arrogance of the past.

Alone, I study sections of floor-board
for nescient letters, tracings
in dusty termite-shit, scraping clots out
from under my ruby-red fingernails.

*

He pulls back more stucco.
He says They’re gone. He says Bet you they’ve got designs
on that oak out front.

In dreams, my elbows scar with blisters
where a termite has broken out
through the skin. I spit creamy fistfuls of them, feel
a scrotal tingling, that
their empire needs the sex of my bones.

Waking, I hear a phone-call in the hall, his voice gone stiff
on certain words: sander. Girls. Concerns.

*

Yesterday, I bit paint off my nails. I coughed
at the ceiling. Today, I scratch three lines about water, or
the dank retch of rot, and then

such human noise is muted; everything
is muted by the bitter taste of wood.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Reaching

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Heather Taylor-Johnson

Somebody died three houses down
it was the girl – and this is what I want to say –

she was sixteen and could not breathe
air failed to travel its path and floated

just beyond her reach. She could not speak
and worst of all, no one heard her reaching.

Silence is never silence;
darkness and cloud-cover cushion volume

but they are not impassable.
I sat outside; no wind carried the pain

from the home three houses down
yet I felt death by the handful emptying its load

onto my lap, skin absorbing the heavy loss
it spilling from my chest, my eyes

pouring pictures out, tacit words shooting
from my mind. You were there:

in the op-shop hammock hanging
from the longest branch, you near-winter rapt

to be lazing, drenching in the big sun
and a thin grey jumper, there was a bottle

of water resting in the curve of your hip
the novel you had been talking about

sleeping on your full breast, and then
you were dead –

the loss of your breath
felt in the stillness of the leaves.

Death was not death that day
even in autumn, when sunflowers refused to rise,

but something like silence, like darkness
and cloud-cover. Sometimes I reach

for your phantom body as if I am trying not to fall.
I cannot breathe or speak

and this is what I want to say – I might die
the heart ceding to long stretches between go

and go, the brain too tired to dictate to the heart
and no one, my love, no one would hear my reaching.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Pain Management 1 & 2

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Lesley Carnus

What size is your pain, what strength on a scale of one to ten,
what colour is it, what song does it sing?

My pain is grey. Dull like layers of fog that settle
over the tors of bog-lands. It is a gloom
that spreads and seeps through bone.

The song it sings haunts the bleak muirs.
It leaks out of mean homes that once bred warriors
whose callous shadows weigh down

the shoulders of men taught to bear grief
with a straight back and a grimace.
—————————-
Mine is a scarlet poker that sears
nerve, spine, brain and flesh.

It skewers each act and thought
with thrusts so deep
that each breath is a burst of fire.

It has trapped me here on a narrow cot
of catheters, drips, timid shots of morphine.

I listen to the faint pulsings of machines
and pray to no god but mercy, for silence.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Finishing

Posted on February 1, 2014 by David Hathwell

The love of form is a love of endings. —Louise Glück, ‘Celestial Music’

What if it’s somehow like the end
of a good, a well-told story?
Then you’ll have completion,
have, better still, completeness.

The reckoning will be a rounding off,
an arrival so well foretold
by the setting forth the journey
will have seemed all along a return.

All questions will be answered.
Should the sense signal loss—
or, worse, disaster—even so,
at the sound of the last cadence,

when the long rhythms of the telling
lapse in a great easing fall
that finishes the whole,
prepare for a lift of startling fullness.

Let the speaking word ebb as it will
at the close, not hurried or slowed.
You’ll feel the rightness of silence
and space.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

A Cup of Tea

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Paul South

after Kevin Brophy

A good cup of tea is poised so
everyone becomes your aunty.
Below the base of the nose time is infused.
The afternoon sighs.

A butterfly may dance through your field
of vision. You needn’t look around.
The room and the chair are recognised
as long-lost friends. A teddy bear
is raised from an old box somewhere.

The conversations are wallpaper.
Light filters into the old house,
and beams upon the still living carpet.
The air swirls, dizzy with dust.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Pope Innocent the Last Addresses the Crowd from The Gallows

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Eric Paul Shaffer

As God’s first servant, I’m here to reveal His secret:
we’re entertainment. We’re a spectacle for clouds,

who admire our constant changes and read mystic
meaning into our shifting shapes. For the wind

and waves, who rub us like stones, we’re lucky.
For rain, which loves irony and our laughable,

accidentally effective efforts to erode and exhaust
the world, we’re amusing. For mosquitoes, leeches,

sharks, and crows, we’re fresh fruit. For coyotes
and cockroaches, we’re the best of good providers.

We’re a doomed, mistaken race, a two-part mini-series
on the Evolution Channel: “Species of the Damned.”

Don’t deny the truth: Deity deserted us long before
we designed our Dolls of the Divine and forced

our words into their mouths to frighten our children,
quell our silly fears, vindicate our ugliest ideas,

and invoke a host of winged, blonde, bubble-headed
Barbies to sing an unseen sublime. Tighten the noose.

Check the trap. The drop must be quick and clean.
Do well now what you do best, but mark my words.

My grace is to believe what no other is fool enough
to believe, and I worship, as should you, what I see:

a gutter pool dammed by leaves in November rain,
a finch in a cat’s claws, the yeasty rising of the loaf,

a summer cottonwood crashing into a muddy river
gnawing the bank beneath ragged roots, a black slug

on a sidewalk, an owl, a thistle, a fly, a star so faint
the eye admits the light only at the edge of vision–

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Nagasaki Rain

Posted on February 1, 2014 by John Upton

Silence is always audible through the noise,
it’s your watching soul
disturbed. The buzzing city is a laminate
pressed upon awful stillness. You arrive
among a Ninja whispering of rain
under a riot of tyres at
Victoria Inn, 6-24 Dougashou.

In this lobby they’ve buried the body of the desert
in art deco
plush English furniture complete with upright
Agatha Christie phone – you’re in the Cotswolds
not Nagasaki
till in reception Japanese are bowing
as in the days of Queen Victoria,
when smuggled guns began this sad relationship
with high explosives.

In the lift’s quietness you ascend like God, aware
of an itchy skin rash on your ankles. Hotel soaps?
Room 412, you splash on lotion, rub it in
hang your soaking socks over the towel-rack,
then step into the shoes
of invading armies back five hundred years
that burned across Japan’s most Christian city.

Jesuit footfalls in the aisles
of this painted wooden church, modern veneer
on Armageddon. At Ground Zero you stand
before a high blackened chimney, potent as
a crucifix.

Peace Park down the road, a shuttle-shuffle place
with photographs in tiers of floors to terrorise
the human spirit into peace while, blocks away
devotees hover in pachinko parlours
firing exploding rounds like they’re in Moscow,
New York, London – not in a nuclear graveyard.
The rain has stopped, the desert’s everywhere.

What do you do when you’re bombed back to the Stone Age?
You bury and rebuild, and learn to love
baseball. Now, in the silent lobby, waiting
for the bus, you’re thinking it could be
yesterday, or Nineteen-Fortyfive, serene,
two minutes past eleven.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Swan Song

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Lynne Potts

It was the song of a swan I heard falling
in mist over the harbor after the ice broke
leaving the shattered pattern of a spilt goblet,
its long neck still, after splintering the air.

And the swan herself mingled with faints
of water flowing as the ice shrank
the edges of that strange harbor so empty
except for glass and a long unbroken silence,

others having left, holding their coats by thumbs
over their shoulders as the quiet echoed
over their footsteps as if the harbor pond
could be forgotten or left to merely happen.

But the song had been my own so many years
I knew I would know it when it came for me.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged

Eurydice Speaks

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Caitlin Maling

(after Edward Hirsch)

I
You didn’t know how I hid my head in darkness,
a child in the oak avoiding moonlight.

How I could touch with only closed curtains,
snuffed candle lingering in hair, in breath.

How your skin burnt through my sleep
so I woke all mornings on the boil, a little more

evaporated, a little less, than the day before.


II
My Father hung light all over my Mother
as though she was his hatstand. Across years

she was blinded to any other image;
my face was his and in her own
she saw only the places he had touched.

On our marriage when you took my chin in your hands
I knew, I could never hate myself so much,
nor love you enough, to become your mirror,

to see myself only through your fingertips.


III
When you played my name back into being
I remembered what it meant to want,

felt the drowning sound of longing
reborn at the back of my throat.

You peeled dark off me like autumn leaves
leaving me bare, blood already blistering,

the thick of you on the tip of my tongue,
Orpheus. Orpheus, the song of you

in my footsteps, almost enough
to dance me out of shadows.

Not quite enough to stop me
slipping your name from my lips,

the turn of your head, and the darkness.

Posted in 60: SILENCE | Tagged