féte champétre :: rustic festival

There is garbage outside the gas station. A single mound of used furniture. A love seat, mildewed with blotchy stains. A foldable table, its missing leg ten yards away. The attendant’s wife is walking around with a gigantic tarpaulin bag, half-filled with things. Her daughter is seated on the pavement, reading The Cappuccino Years by Sue Townsend. A jukebox even, its glass smashed in, and round plates in neat piles. The attendant is looking over this mess, his cigarette dangling from two fingers at the side of his hip. As if he’s contemplating setting it all on fire, and watching the ambers glow in the night. Tonight’s sky will be cast in an orange hue, or so the weatherman said. The colours will walk into each other, no more different than one thought writing itself into the next, one abandoned to issue an awakening. The scroll is crisply burning, as is the painting of Xiamen and its port of 14th century merchants.


* This is a reprint. The poem first appeared in the literary journal "Grey Sparrow". 

cogito ergo sum :: I think therefore I am

How does one plunder something like peace of mind? The old pirate looks strange with his sarong bag in the bustle of Zhejiang. Even the eye-patch is there, but hardly ornamental or a political statement. There’s a long scar down his left eye, thick and callused, as if to say this story is one that will remain untold, remain mine. “Memory is a pirated something too, isn’t it?” Gigi says, adjusting the flower in her gingham hat, its fabric petals drooping in the humidity. She’s thinking of the Mahabharata, in particular the Anusasana Parvan. In this scene, the wise grand uncle Bhísma, laying on his bed of arrows, instructs Yudhisthira on ahimsa. Gigi’s dreams were dear and ideal too, like her memory of them. Like a wheel? This is sentiment borne of an ars poetica, signed off with your name and mine. The cache in Gigi’s pocket will fit no one but her. In it, the pirate sees what he can retrieve for his people. The abode of no abode.


* This is a reprint. The poem first appeared in the literary journal "Ceriph". 

ding an sich :: thing in itself

There is a stillness in the air, like the mendicant with his begging bowl. He doesn’t ask for alms, only food like a bowl of cooked rice. The old lady scrapes some from the bottom of her wok, charred and bits of black, and hands it to the boy outside her window. She gestures towards the mendicant, who has looked away into the alley, its own shadows merging into darkened doorways. “All night, the sound had come back again,” Robert Creeley starts off on his poem, his voice serenading this slower evening. Like one of its lines, the poem too is something other than this. Something more than Yongdingmen Zhan, where we all seem to be headed. It is not the “Beautiful Strange” of Bedrock or the “Prelude in G Sharp Minor” by David Helfgott. The poem’s notes are softer, languid almost. Like the carp swimming into the curve of its own small trek across the duck pond.


* This poem is a reprint. It first appeared in the literary journal "Ceriph".

Terry Crabtree’s Countertransference in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!

Ego: Remember it’s an author’s death if you can’t haul this out to the verandah. By cruel and unusual punishment too. This happens when you share your opinions.
 
Id: What gives? I’m just standing here. I think we should mix and match the vintage Alexander McQueen with the Armani jacket, and spice it up with that pair of Patrick Cox, in cadet blue. You were joshing, right?
 
Ego: No, the Christian LaCroix, with the lavender beading. Do I look like I’m laughing? The Automaton Suits should find a sewer and disappear. We’re already in The Last Exit to Brooklyn. It’s already written.
 
Id: Where is it written? This isn’t Yentl. But yes, it’s been written by the Homeboy Prophets. This is another slice of bizarre. Am I in South Park? Is this Angels in America? Or Glee? Yes, Glee.
 
Ego: No, you’re just being your immovable self. Before you go on, I know you’ve got feelings. Hector already talked about this, and subjunctive history, in The History Boys.
 
Id: Holy Milkshakes! You can’t talk to me like this. No, this can’t be a protected illocutionary act. Not in my emotional state. This can’t be real, like when you said you loved me.
 
Ego: Only in your lifetime of retextualising worldviews, and E. M. Forster covered that in Maurice. And my corn-fed cows are prizewinning bullfighters. Sean Penn, you mentioned Sean Penn.

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Locked Into Dualism

The ball will not bounce, steel canvas, floor markings to measure its rubber tracks. Stand in the idyll of the island. Step onto its boulevard, dance in its piazza. Freedom within sides is a retrogression, id within id, solvent, ethereal, edge of space. “Draw me into the outside to walk an inner feeling.” Let the sky infiltrate the bluing front wall. Let the left quarter close in, shuttering the sun. Herringbone and houndstooth. “Not before the double yellow dots meet,” Jean Metzinger says, pulling in the thermospheric layers like worsted fabric. No noise or draught, tiny carvings scratched onto the astragal.


* This first appeared in the journal "Shinshi". 

First Consciousness

Georgia Desmarais taps each wall to check for a weak spot. A clue like Rodin first reading Dante, then Baudelaire. “Is today Wednesday or Thursday? Where are the light switches?” Georgia is growing wary, her eye like Max Ernst’s Chinese Nightingale, its iron beak as cold to the touch. No warmth. No barrateen bedding. No food, water or electricity. Just colored lines, and sometimes a mansard roof. Wenge door at the back, sealed shut. No windbrace or sprockets or windows although occasionally, the crackle of shrinking glass. No turning weather. No mechanism or motif or memory. No
handle to grab onto.


* This piece first appeared in the journal "Shinshi". 

Somewhere in Middlemarch

 
One of the drummers said Gerard’s a nonvirgin virgin, which doesn’t surprise me. But he seems so self-assured, as if he’s travelled the world, and seen it for what it is, and sort of laid back into a comfortable platitude.
 
He meditates, that’s what. He has all those good chakras properly aligned, softly wheeled into place. And his own guardian angel seated on his shoulder, with his hand on his brow to check his temperature.
 
“I’m lucky as your fluffy keychain,” Gerard said this once, on one of his good days. “It’s as if someone’s looking out for me. Who’d turn away a deus ex machina? Who’d turn away a good intervention?
 
I told Gerard once that I thought I was George Eliot. I really think I am – who said anything about prosody?
 
Don’t laugh, Gabrielle. You’re channeling, taking in the cosmos. In another life, you would have been Eliot, and written letters to yourself as if you were preparing your own obituary, as defining a paragraph as one from an encyclopedia waxing turgid on symbols.
 
You would have been Dorothea Brooks finding the mythology in the floral of the serif, loving and hating Middlemarch. You would have sat in a torn hoopskirt, legs slightly apart under the satin, crinoline showing, with a free reed hanging from the edge of your mouth like a dead branch. 


* This piece first appeared in Pinion Journal.

Dorothea Brooks in Hell’s Kitchen

“I’m coming over in an hour,” Gerard leaves another message. “The casserole smells great. Made a coconut cream pie as well, and hid some Ghirardelli squares in it too, the way you like it. Hey, maybe we should stay in this year and chill, y’know, hang out a bit? Looks like it’s about to pour outside. What say we watch a century go by from your living room?” His voice sounds soothing, like a flannel throw over my shoulders and back, falling past my waist.
 
Hanging on the bedpost is his pullover from the day he wrapped it around my neck and called it cashmere and a shawl. On the floor is a shoebox of his family photographs that he left behind because he didn’t want it in his apartment. And on the left of that, his diary from when he was in his teens into his twenties, only a few of its pages filled as if all the years in between had been hollow to him. The mirror ball he staple-gunned to the ceiling is still there, suspended above me.
 
Insert line: “blue is this little I know of you and how much blue is filled”. Break.
 
Insert ghost note to round off the image: “the fuller sense still”
 
I turn to the player to put on an audio reading of Daniel Deronda or Middlemarch, pausing, unable to decide. What choice in the matter of chance and destiny, the realism of the roulette, its fixed point of rotation, and ever turning?
 
The radio begins to play Oleta Adams’ “My (...)

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Invisibility

I like to be left of centre when it comes to consciousness. To be poor in spirit, even health, but not without faith since the sun has risen for me from the east every morning. And it’s not a grandiose sight or manifestation, just an everyday occurrence like going into the garden and watering the orchids, not pruning them because pruning them kills, then binds, and marks their recoil from the other branches. It’s a forest orchid I own. Its name escapes me, not that it matters. It climbs like a vine, its blooms like architectural trefoils or quatrefoils depending on how you look at them. I’ve named the plant Napolean as if it was a conqueror. At seven, Salvador Dalí wanted to be Napolean. A year before, he only wanted to be a cook. He was tracing his ambition, and look how he turned out. I wonder if Dalí ever travelled to Corsica, and sat down quietly to dig into a big trout filled with brocciu, the same ewe milk also used for a cake once. Brocciu is ready to eat, sort of like those Dalí reproductions on postcards and calendars. Already readymade when the original work was simply visionary, larger than life and imagination and all that. I wanted to be Napolean too, but I ended up temping as a book clerk, no less an angel to humanity. I wanted to be invisible – no one would see me, but they would feel my presence – like the morning light. I did make myself invisible, and skulked beside the magazines section, in the north corner of the town square too, or (...)

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Excerpts from Antediluvian Birdsong, After The Stormy Dark

They doused the salted field with iodine and dreams.
“Except for the barley, let those keep their gold and morning.”
Logos, but for letters.
 
~
 
There will be snow and rain, same day of fine things.
Mixed up. Mixed, enamel in champlevé
damascening like a dance, the curling, whey hope.
 
~
 
Not theory today, please.
Maybe that movie about Merritt typewriters feeling obsolete.
I’ll walk myself out, batch of bread and milk bagged.
 
~
 
“This is piction is eo ipso is an illustrated text.”
Why not more bay stories or rare ones at the lounge?
Because this is foreign, dialogue.


* This tweetfic sequence first appeared in the literary journal "Cricket Online Review".

Cipher

You would have known the signs of a harsher winter, and smelt it in the drier air. You would have sensed legacy in the ordinary. You would have known when the soil was ready for spring, and its brambles and bloodroot and later, the azaleas.
 
I have to return Gerard his favorite book. It’s by Richard Rorty: Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. It’s from the library, lots of upfront ownership, clarity, and talk of persuasive speech and pragmatism. All aching, and unsurprisingly, riddled with wit and irony. But very little poetry within because of the discourse, a banter really. Where’s the anapestic trimeter, the circling iambs like a rosary, its tinted circle? I want to count the sounds, and hear them trip over each other like ripples in a pool.  
 
Gerard wanted me to delete my eleventh line: “The love that says it like it is, a blue moon after sunset.” He didn’t like the bluing movement in it. It sounds like an afterthought, he said matter-of-factly.
 
I think I’ll leave the dining table and futon. And the clothesline of rugs, the barely used dinnerware. No one’s taking my big chair though, or the egg-and-muffin toaster. Those, and my giant Smurf, are coming with me to Queens.
 
I should have known. I should have seen the signs on the pallid faces, of the missing doorman, his freshly polished shoes tucked behind the row of mailboxes, at a right angle to the wall.
(...)

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