EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Twenty, the number which “stood for the Sun-God in his archetypal office of Perfect Man for the ancient Mayans”, according to my ‘bible’, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. So, much to live up to.
A lot has happened since we last went to press. Scotland said No for one, but given the way the Westminster establishment pulled out all the stops to scare the Scots into staying in the UK, that was hardly surprising. However, the victory was probably a hollow one for Westminster because, although they won the referendum, they appear to have lost Scotland. And, of course, the biggest losers of all are the Labour Party who, because they sided with the Tories on this issue, have lost most of their voters in Scotland. Irony, sweet irony, I love you.
The interesting thing is the demographics. The young and the working-class overwhelmingly for independence, the old and the middle-class not. So the referendum has really resolved nothing. The political ferment that took place in Scotland, especially in working-class areas, is not going to die down. And as far as I am concerned, long may it live.
Elsewhere, one interesting development is the new love-in between America and Cuba. Cuba is ripe for the plucking. Now diplomatic relations have been restored, Cubans should be prepared for an influx of the late Milton Friedman's Chicago Boys, who'll teach them all about free market economics. Then there will be no looking back. They'll go the way of Pinochet's Chile, the Generals' Argentina, Thatcher's Britain, Yeltsin's Russia, Deng's China, Dubya's Iraq, you name it. All those Cuban doctors now fighting Ebola in West Africa will just have to look for a job elsewhere because by the time the Chicago Boys have made Cuba ripe for investment, there'll be no healthcare infrastructure left for them to return to. Not to worry, the number of McDonald's hamburger joints will more than make up for that.
I'm not optimistic. In fact I have this recurring nightmare that nothing will ever change, but I do keep my fingers crossed. There sometimes seems to be glimmers of hope, but they are just glimmers. Perhaps, it's just better to shut up and die. But life goes on and, and isn't it wonderful; we live in a world where all things are bright and beautiful - from the rich man in his castle to the poor man at his gate. Why then should anything change?
Apart from this, for the rest of this issue I intend to take a back seat because there is nothing else in particular I want to get off my chest. I hope of course that you enjoy the issue. And do remember, I am always looking for new contributions - poetry, prose, illustrations and so on. And again, more women would be welcome.
_________________________
QUOTE – Ludwig Feuerbach
“The new is always received with contempt, for it takes shape in secret. Its obscurity is also its protecting spirit. Imperceptibly, it turns into a force. Were it to attract attention from the very outset, the old would mobilise all its power to nip it in the bud.”
_________________________
CONTENTS
Poems by Edward Mycue
Autobiographical Prose by David Plumb
Poems by David Waddilove
Quote by Charles Bukowski
Poem by Eric Chaet
Poems by Paul Murphey
Short Story by Channie Greenberg
Poems by Neil Fulwood
Review by Paul Murphy
POEMS - Edward Mycue
November
Childhood desire turns life’s wheels,
these large hoops, propelling them with sticks
under the tall park elm trees. Movement of
wheels.
Everyone there is here now
within you and all of your
kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to
flower and to fly and to sail this sea of
thickening light.
Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering
of parts, rationing of emotions: I hear voices:
they live here now without forgetting the way
back under the surface of consciousness, the
bungled aspirations, of leprosy as a model,
and grim ire.
Life pushes, photography wins over
time, and over the mind a brown shale.
This is November.
I Sense My Boatman Waiting.
River of life life river the river life life a river bed all pass through Our
earth is a riverbed our river of life River Styx forms a boundary between
life, death Charon, the ferryman, carries souls across
Dante says there are five rivers and that Styx is for the
greatest damned living their wrath cursing war with each other for all
eternity
The Farthest Shore
My mischances shaped my apprenticeship-muscles
When you are young you don’t know what’s coming
Life is not the same poetry now, just verse
My inner sanctum let joy become lost in Cairo
I grasped failures through a lengthy history
Wanting to learn dying before severing life’s link
Welcome the far shore before you miss it
Notice the far shore before you reach it.
Edward Mycue, About
A life-long poet, his work started to become well-known in the 1970s.
Since that time, he has become one of the world’s best-known avant-garde and experimental poets.
He has worked in a wide variety of genres, including text, visual poetry, graphics, sound and performance poetry, mail art, film and media, and has collaborated with other writers and artists from around the globe.
Mycue’s Yale Beinecke Rare Book and MSS collection includes copies of published work, books and magazines -- gathering his publications up through the year 2010.
120 oversize and miscellaneous boxes and folders both oversize with the smallest being banker boxes, and not in chronological order. These include materials that did not fit in the main collection, encompassing publications, other material, correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, holographs fliers, artworks.
The Yale University Libraries collection includes Mycue’s involvement with Panjandrum Press (he was partner with Dennis Koran and Lawrence Fixel), with Mother’s Hen Press, and in the late 1980’s when he established his TOOK magazine and his Norton-Coker Press (co-editor Richard Steger, artistic editorial director). (More will be added to Mycue’s archives beginning 2015.)
The collection will be of value not only for studying the work of Edward Mycue and Richard Steger, and exploring the work of writers and artists (Dennis Koran, Lawrence Fixel etc.) Jim Watson-Gove and Mycue collaborated in the Minotaur Editions subset of the Norton-Coker Press books throughout the 1990's and the 2000's first decade. (Jim, earlier went by Gove before his marriage to potter-poet Eleanor Watson, is possibly the oldest small press & magazine publisher alive. He is in his early 80's and first began publishing magazines way back there.)
Childhood desire turns life’s wheels,
these large hoops, propelling them with sticks
under the tall park elm trees. Movement of
wheels.
Everyone there is here now
within you and all of your
kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to
flower and to fly and to sail this sea of
thickening light.
Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering
of parts, rationing of emotions: I hear voices:
they live here now without forgetting the way
back under the surface of consciousness, the
bungled aspirations, of leprosy as a model,
and grim ire.
Life pushes, photography wins over
time, and over the mind a brown shale.
This is November.
I Sense My Boatman Waiting.
River of life life river the river life life a river bed all pass through Our
earth is a riverbed our river of life River Styx forms a boundary between
life, death Charon, the ferryman, carries souls across
Dante says there are five rivers and that Styx is for the
greatest damned living their wrath cursing war with each other for all
eternity
The Farthest Shore
My mischances shaped my apprenticeship-muscles
When you are young you don’t know what’s coming
Life is not the same poetry now, just verse
My inner sanctum let joy become lost in Cairo
I grasped failures through a lengthy history
Wanting to learn dying before severing life’s link
Welcome the far shore before you miss it
Notice the far shore before you reach it.
Edward Mycue, About
A life-long poet, his work started to become well-known in the 1970s.
Since that time, he has become one of the world’s best-known avant-garde and experimental poets.
He has worked in a wide variety of genres, including text, visual poetry, graphics, sound and performance poetry, mail art, film and media, and has collaborated with other writers and artists from around the globe.
Mycue’s Yale Beinecke Rare Book and MSS collection includes copies of published work, books and magazines -- gathering his publications up through the year 2010.
120 oversize and miscellaneous boxes and folders both oversize with the smallest being banker boxes, and not in chronological order. These include materials that did not fit in the main collection, encompassing publications, other material, correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, holographs fliers, artworks.
The Yale University Libraries collection includes Mycue’s involvement with Panjandrum Press (he was partner with Dennis Koran and Lawrence Fixel), with Mother’s Hen Press, and in the late 1980’s when he established his TOOK magazine and his Norton-Coker Press (co-editor Richard Steger, artistic editorial director). (More will be added to Mycue’s archives beginning 2015.)
The collection will be of value not only for studying the work of Edward Mycue and Richard Steger, and exploring the work of writers and artists (Dennis Koran, Lawrence Fixel etc.) Jim Watson-Gove and Mycue collaborated in the Minotaur Editions subset of the Norton-Coker Press books throughout the 1990's and the 2000's first decade. (Jim, earlier went by Gove before his marriage to potter-poet Eleanor Watson, is possibly the oldest small press & magazine publisher alive. He is in his early 80's and first began publishing magazines way back there.)
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE
David Plumb
CHASING A BANK ROBBER
Am I looking for trouble? No way. I’m taking a break from my lesson plan to make a bank deposit. It’s your basic mid-afternoon errand. Seven minutes later I’m driving into the parking lot at Bayview and Sunrise Boulevard. There’s a parking spot right in front of the bank. YES, I say out loud.
I pull halfway into the space when the door on the driver’s side of the fat green sedan parked to my right swings open. Patience, I say to myself. Patience. A pair of pale skinny legs appear. They can’t seem to find the pavement. I think they must belong to a little old lady who’s having trouble with the heavy car door. The legs rock up and out. Suddenly, a rumpled man with a thin brown moustache climbs out and stands in my parking space with his back to me. Trouble, I think. He proceeds to hike up his fat trousers while he stuffs the front half of his feet into dirty white tennis shoes. The man’s drunk, I think. Big trouble. I back out and park a couple of spaces down.
When I get out of my car, he’s disappeared. As I walk past his car, I hear his engine running. Now he’s locked himself out. He’ll have to call the Triple A. I should call the cops and have him taken off the road. Big trouble, this guy. He’s a menace. Where did he go? Where’s the cops when you need them? I decide he wouldn’t go into the Fort Lauderdale Business College next door in the shape he’s in, so he must have gone into the bank.
Sure enough he’s hunkered over the teller window up in the left corner of the room. I see he’s wearing baggy green pants, a loose white shirt half out at the waist, a light jacket and a baseball cap. I’m thinking, this guy’s been on a three day toot, maybe holed up in a motel for a week. Now he’s in the bank for some cash. Enough to keep the buzz. Stay fried. Escape. He’s a housepainter who left his wife. He’s on vacation. He’s from Miami maybe. New Jersey? Tennessee?
Three tellers down, I deposit my check. I finish up. The woman says “Thank you, Mr. Barnes,” for which I’m most grateful. When they say, “Thank you, Harry,” I want to kill. I move alongside the gray cord leading left and out when the big guy turns around with his right fist full of cash and storms past me. I’m thinking it’s strange to see a man carrying that much money in one hand. Suddenly the moment feels dreamy. Milky. Wrong. Tilted. Then I see the thin, brown-haired bank teller. Her face is melting in terror. The guy robbed the bank.
I forget trouble. I forget, period. I don’t even know if he’s armed. I run out the door, but I don’t see him. I look everywhere for the car. Suddenly a car backs right at me and brakes. It’s the big, dark green sedan. I get the license plate number. It’s a South Carolina plate. The dark green, round-backed, four door with tinted windows and no clear markings tears out of the lot toward the Citgo Station and Sunrise Boulevard. I race back in the bank with the number 526-565. I have them write it down. Someone hands me a scrap of paper and I write 526-565 again and stick it in my wallet.
I spend the next hour or so in the locked bank with the police. Someone tells me the man had a gun under his jacket. An officer with dark hair and a heavy gut paces back and forth in his brown uniform asking me more questions. I feel trapped. I want to help. I don’t want to help. I don’t want any trouble. Someone places three identification sheets in front of me. One has a series of profiles, eyes, hairlines and chins. I fill them out as best I can. Did his eyes bulge? Sag? I wonder if my eyes are bulging.
I glance at the front door where the “Temporarily Closed” signs have been pasted. A TV camera points through the glass door. It’s Dinosaur ONE, Your Violence News Network. It’s “The Girls from Jurassic Park.”
I call them “The Girls from Jurassic Park,” because the two women on the evening news remind me of the raptors in the kitchen of the Spielberg movie climbing over everything, knocking down order, or any semblance of sanity, any container of logic. They dress somewhere between post Sergeant Pepper, New-Nutcracker and Contemporary Hang Glider. I tell the bank officer, with the blond wavy hair and the loose yellow shirt that I would very much love NOT to have to speak to these people. He agrees. I tell the bank officer every time you talk to them it never seems to come out right. That when you see yourself on TV you always end up feeling that they were there and you weren’t.
Like the time I walked onto the Golden Gate Bridge with 250,000 people for its 50th Anniversary in 1987. Then we couldn’t get off, because more people were trying to get on. The bridge began to sway. It even buckled at the North tower. I remember looking down at the water, way, way down and seeing my feet rocking with the bridge and hearing the bridge lamps clanging and whipping in the wind. A woman had a heart attack a few feet away. No one could get out to help her. A young woman to the left of me had a Belgian Hare on a leash. There were clusters of quiet chaos. Children began crying. There were long vigilant silences. There were great momentary waves of pushing that somehow stayed in check. There was a collective heroism that day that I’ve never seen before. One man went berserk and tried to bust through the crowd, but he became stuck in a strait jacket of his own making. I kept trying to convince myself, “I’m NOT claustrophobic !”. I thought the bridge would collapse. That I was going to die on the bridge. Later, I was interviewed by NBC and I told them what had happened. The five o’clock news deleted my commentary and waxed on about what a beautiful day it was out there on the bridge and how we all had such a great time. As I watched the TV, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I wasn’t really there at all. Whose truth was that?
The cop with the gut says he doesn’t want to talk to them either. The bank officer says he’ll let me out the back door. Will I wait for the FBI? Sure I’ll wait for the FBI.
In comes the short dark-haired FBI agent. White shirt. Tie. Receding hairline. Swift. Pragmatic. This man with a gun in his right hip takes me to a side desk and asks me to repeat the story nine times plus. He is patient. I’m uneasy.
The whole thing is not easy. I find the failure of the human mind, or at least my mind, amusing and somewhat distressing. Part of my brain is absolutely sure. Another side swims in possibilities. I try to interest the agent in my dilemma of being torn between comedy and tragedy. He isn’t buying into it.
I feel strangely embarrassed that my ordinary sense of truth feels shaky. I feel buzzy. Shocky. And I don’t like being interrogated. I always get the feeling I’m being asked about something I did rather than helping the cause at hand.
I’ll give the truth another try. Yes, I want to help.
The FBI agent wants to know what I do for a living. As I tell him, I teach College English, part of me wonders if I should tell him that sometimes I wake up at four in the morning convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that I’m really incompetent, that after years of writing and studying, I know nothing. That I don’t feel like an academic. That I much prefer staring at the ocean, or the night sky. That writing keeps me alive. That sometimes between publications, I feel like I’m not a writer. That I once barked like a dog under a man’s window for twenty minutes to get him to stop his three dogs from barking day and night and missed a job interview the next day, because I couldn’t talk. That I have days when I cannot believe anyone would allow me to stand in front of a group of college students, or anybody else for that matter and tell them anything. That I’m not perfect.
That I don’t talk about it. That I really am a fraud. That I’m compassionate and angry and mad and loveable and cruel and sweet and full of bull, and arrogant and vulnerable and mushy all at the same time. That there are days when I don’t fit, don’t belong, lack wisdom, intelligence, wit. That my jokes aren’t really funny. Maybe this is one of those days. I can see the agent’s not laughing.
I won’t tell him I’m a poet. Don’t do that. Don’t tell him that sometimes I drive around late at night listening to Puccini, Paul Simon and Ray Lynch’s, “Deep Breakfast” over and over again, but not necessarily in that order, searching for new ways in, or out of my history or how to like it. Somewhere between the TV news and the FBI lies my truth and at the moment, it sure as hell does sound fuzzy. What was that license number?
Who do you tell the truth to if one can ever really know what it is? To your wife? Your lover? The lawyer? The doctor who tells you the truth when he tells you you’re dying of cancer? A guru? A President? The woman sitting next to you on the plane? The FBI?
In the bank, in Fort Lauderdale, on Sunrise and Bayview Boulevard I search for answers. It was a South Carolina license plate, but what number? The FBI agent just listens.
I watch his mind probe, dart and listen to the silences between my words. It clicks, turns, switch gears, searches the moment for concrete words, meanings, events it can track down, tie down.
“Did the robber say anything? What color were his clothes? Did he need a shave? What color was the moustache? Did he wear a jacket? A hat? What color was the jacket? What kind of shoes? The car? A GM product? Are you sure? What door did he go out? Which parking space did he use? How do you know he was drunk?”
He staggered, I say. The FBI agent writes my chain of events down on the yellow pad. He adds to them. We compare license numbers, written and spoken. The dark green car could be blue. Could be a Lumina, A Buick an Oldsmobile. Another agent suggests it might have been a Sable. I remember I haven’t finished my lesson plan. Too small for a Sable I say. A Sable is a pretty big car the guy says. It wasn’t a Sable, I say. A Taurus somebody says? The FBI agent and I agree the robber is an amateur, a law abiding guy. Why else would he drive in and park the car nose up to the curb when he was going to rob a bank?
The FBI agent manages a thin smile. It makes me feel uncertain about my thoughts. My reason for talking to him. My being there, PERIOD.
I leave via the back door. No more trouble. Your basic celebrity avoids the masses. I walk around front. Not a soul anywhere. I take forty bucks out of the ATM and put gas in the car at the Citgo station at the end of the lot. Right up at the next set of pumps I spot a white Buick. It’s the shape of the robber’s blue car. I ask the big man in Levis and another thin brown moustache what year it is. Ninety-one he says. I tell him the bank was robbed by a blue Buick like his and he laughs it off. I’m thinking the inference wasn’t such a hot idea.
I go back to the bank, quite certain it was a Buick and they let me in. The FBI agent and I go over another piece of paper. There is an F with 5 written over it.
“Did you write that?” he asks.
I realize that I have no idea if it’s my handwriting. What happened? Think, Harry. Think. Then I remembered that when I first saw the license plate, I thought there was an F and dismissed it. Then I said “five,” and wrote five. Five starts with F.
Six is the letter G. I translated the phonetics and not the number. Possible, the agent says studying the scrap of paper. We still aren’t sure about the car. The FBI agent settles for Buick. He’ll call me when he knows for sure. After he runs a check on me, I think rightly. I thank him and leave.
What gets into me? I drive up Bayview to Oakland Boulevard where I know I’ll find the blue car in front of a bar. I know where the bank robber went. I cruise both sides of Oakland Boulevard’s strip malls for several blocks. I check big blank and pink, Coral Ridge Mall for some sign of the bank robber. I cruise the giant parking lot. My brow is narrow. I squint. I peruse. I scan. I tug the brim of my fedora. Agent Barnes is on the job. Yes! I’ll spot the car and call it in. YES! I feel a slight pang in my belly.
I decide I’m not feeling so brave what with the guy carrying a gun. Suddenly I feel whipped. I still have the lesson plan to finish. It’s almost five and I’ve missed the “Heat of the Night” rerun. But I get to thinking. What possessed this man in dirty white sneakers, this doughy, sweaty man five- foot ten inch, fifty year old plus or minus, to risk his life; to amble into a bank and walk out with his fistful of cash?
Maybe he needed money for the wife’s operation, the kid’s shoes, the groceries, the carburetor, the father’s nursing home, a good bed for his back? Maybe he needed to get drunk? Maybe the light at the end of his tunnel was a train.
I try to remember his eyes. Did they bulge? Were they milky white? Was it really a double chin, or a dimpled chin? Maybe the car was a Lumina? A Taurus?
I drive around looking for him. Am I crazy playing sleuth? What makes me think I know where guys like him hang out? Do I want to be good? Be a hero? Get shot? What truth am I after? The part that wanted once to be an FBI agent? The intuitive me that sometimes knows what someone is going to do ten minutes before they do it. Me, the secret outlaw in the fedora, the slippery, good looking white boy who tight ropes razor blades and chases down this man on a toot, or a freak-out; this man betrayed by himself, life or godless Sundays. Me, chasing down the bad guy with my unfinished lesson plan waiting at home.
Was the number actually F and 5 or 5 for F or S for 6 plus 595? One sheet of paper had the F covered over with a five. My primitive, terrified brain picked up part of the phonetics and translated the numbers to letters. Translated, FSF was 595. Why didn’t I get it right the first time? What was I doing chasing a bank robber out of a bank?
I drive west on Sunrise Boulevard through the thick traffic, punctuated by endless steams of traffic lights. I feel sorry for this rumpled daytime bandit without a mask, a good set of legs, a clear mind a parachute, or a key to heaven. On the other hand, if I got the license number and put the man in jail, maybe this odd Wednesday afternoon will make sense, but I feel too tired, too wired, too crazy. Like a little round bald headed man in a big square world. Like a skinny kid lost in the big city. Like Camus’ Adulteress", or The Stranger, or Kafka. Maybe I just acted. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe it was a Buick.
Whatever, it was, I drive west on Sunrise Boulevard through the thick traffic, punctuated by endless streams of traffic lights to home, to my lesson plan, to late Wednesday, to any good dream at all.
Am I looking for trouble? No way. I’m taking a break from my lesson plan to make a bank deposit. It’s your basic mid-afternoon errand. Seven minutes later I’m driving into the parking lot at Bayview and Sunrise Boulevard. There’s a parking spot right in front of the bank. YES, I say out loud.
I pull halfway into the space when the door on the driver’s side of the fat green sedan parked to my right swings open. Patience, I say to myself. Patience. A pair of pale skinny legs appear. They can’t seem to find the pavement. I think they must belong to a little old lady who’s having trouble with the heavy car door. The legs rock up and out. Suddenly, a rumpled man with a thin brown moustache climbs out and stands in my parking space with his back to me. Trouble, I think. He proceeds to hike up his fat trousers while he stuffs the front half of his feet into dirty white tennis shoes. The man’s drunk, I think. Big trouble. I back out and park a couple of spaces down.
When I get out of my car, he’s disappeared. As I walk past his car, I hear his engine running. Now he’s locked himself out. He’ll have to call the Triple A. I should call the cops and have him taken off the road. Big trouble, this guy. He’s a menace. Where did he go? Where’s the cops when you need them? I decide he wouldn’t go into the Fort Lauderdale Business College next door in the shape he’s in, so he must have gone into the bank.
Sure enough he’s hunkered over the teller window up in the left corner of the room. I see he’s wearing baggy green pants, a loose white shirt half out at the waist, a light jacket and a baseball cap. I’m thinking, this guy’s been on a three day toot, maybe holed up in a motel for a week. Now he’s in the bank for some cash. Enough to keep the buzz. Stay fried. Escape. He’s a housepainter who left his wife. He’s on vacation. He’s from Miami maybe. New Jersey? Tennessee?
Three tellers down, I deposit my check. I finish up. The woman says “Thank you, Mr. Barnes,” for which I’m most grateful. When they say, “Thank you, Harry,” I want to kill. I move alongside the gray cord leading left and out when the big guy turns around with his right fist full of cash and storms past me. I’m thinking it’s strange to see a man carrying that much money in one hand. Suddenly the moment feels dreamy. Milky. Wrong. Tilted. Then I see the thin, brown-haired bank teller. Her face is melting in terror. The guy robbed the bank.
I forget trouble. I forget, period. I don’t even know if he’s armed. I run out the door, but I don’t see him. I look everywhere for the car. Suddenly a car backs right at me and brakes. It’s the big, dark green sedan. I get the license plate number. It’s a South Carolina plate. The dark green, round-backed, four door with tinted windows and no clear markings tears out of the lot toward the Citgo Station and Sunrise Boulevard. I race back in the bank with the number 526-565. I have them write it down. Someone hands me a scrap of paper and I write 526-565 again and stick it in my wallet.
I spend the next hour or so in the locked bank with the police. Someone tells me the man had a gun under his jacket. An officer with dark hair and a heavy gut paces back and forth in his brown uniform asking me more questions. I feel trapped. I want to help. I don’t want to help. I don’t want any trouble. Someone places three identification sheets in front of me. One has a series of profiles, eyes, hairlines and chins. I fill them out as best I can. Did his eyes bulge? Sag? I wonder if my eyes are bulging.
I glance at the front door where the “Temporarily Closed” signs have been pasted. A TV camera points through the glass door. It’s Dinosaur ONE, Your Violence News Network. It’s “The Girls from Jurassic Park.”
I call them “The Girls from Jurassic Park,” because the two women on the evening news remind me of the raptors in the kitchen of the Spielberg movie climbing over everything, knocking down order, or any semblance of sanity, any container of logic. They dress somewhere between post Sergeant Pepper, New-Nutcracker and Contemporary Hang Glider. I tell the bank officer, with the blond wavy hair and the loose yellow shirt that I would very much love NOT to have to speak to these people. He agrees. I tell the bank officer every time you talk to them it never seems to come out right. That when you see yourself on TV you always end up feeling that they were there and you weren’t.
Like the time I walked onto the Golden Gate Bridge with 250,000 people for its 50th Anniversary in 1987. Then we couldn’t get off, because more people were trying to get on. The bridge began to sway. It even buckled at the North tower. I remember looking down at the water, way, way down and seeing my feet rocking with the bridge and hearing the bridge lamps clanging and whipping in the wind. A woman had a heart attack a few feet away. No one could get out to help her. A young woman to the left of me had a Belgian Hare on a leash. There were clusters of quiet chaos. Children began crying. There were long vigilant silences. There were great momentary waves of pushing that somehow stayed in check. There was a collective heroism that day that I’ve never seen before. One man went berserk and tried to bust through the crowd, but he became stuck in a strait jacket of his own making. I kept trying to convince myself, “I’m NOT claustrophobic !”. I thought the bridge would collapse. That I was going to die on the bridge. Later, I was interviewed by NBC and I told them what had happened. The five o’clock news deleted my commentary and waxed on about what a beautiful day it was out there on the bridge and how we all had such a great time. As I watched the TV, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I wasn’t really there at all. Whose truth was that?
The cop with the gut says he doesn’t want to talk to them either. The bank officer says he’ll let me out the back door. Will I wait for the FBI? Sure I’ll wait for the FBI.
In comes the short dark-haired FBI agent. White shirt. Tie. Receding hairline. Swift. Pragmatic. This man with a gun in his right hip takes me to a side desk and asks me to repeat the story nine times plus. He is patient. I’m uneasy.
The whole thing is not easy. I find the failure of the human mind, or at least my mind, amusing and somewhat distressing. Part of my brain is absolutely sure. Another side swims in possibilities. I try to interest the agent in my dilemma of being torn between comedy and tragedy. He isn’t buying into it.
I feel strangely embarrassed that my ordinary sense of truth feels shaky. I feel buzzy. Shocky. And I don’t like being interrogated. I always get the feeling I’m being asked about something I did rather than helping the cause at hand.
I’ll give the truth another try. Yes, I want to help.
The FBI agent wants to know what I do for a living. As I tell him, I teach College English, part of me wonders if I should tell him that sometimes I wake up at four in the morning convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that I’m really incompetent, that after years of writing and studying, I know nothing. That I don’t feel like an academic. That I much prefer staring at the ocean, or the night sky. That writing keeps me alive. That sometimes between publications, I feel like I’m not a writer. That I once barked like a dog under a man’s window for twenty minutes to get him to stop his three dogs from barking day and night and missed a job interview the next day, because I couldn’t talk. That I have days when I cannot believe anyone would allow me to stand in front of a group of college students, or anybody else for that matter and tell them anything. That I’m not perfect.
That I don’t talk about it. That I really am a fraud. That I’m compassionate and angry and mad and loveable and cruel and sweet and full of bull, and arrogant and vulnerable and mushy all at the same time. That there are days when I don’t fit, don’t belong, lack wisdom, intelligence, wit. That my jokes aren’t really funny. Maybe this is one of those days. I can see the agent’s not laughing.
I won’t tell him I’m a poet. Don’t do that. Don’t tell him that sometimes I drive around late at night listening to Puccini, Paul Simon and Ray Lynch’s, “Deep Breakfast” over and over again, but not necessarily in that order, searching for new ways in, or out of my history or how to like it. Somewhere between the TV news and the FBI lies my truth and at the moment, it sure as hell does sound fuzzy. What was that license number?
Who do you tell the truth to if one can ever really know what it is? To your wife? Your lover? The lawyer? The doctor who tells you the truth when he tells you you’re dying of cancer? A guru? A President? The woman sitting next to you on the plane? The FBI?
In the bank, in Fort Lauderdale, on Sunrise and Bayview Boulevard I search for answers. It was a South Carolina license plate, but what number? The FBI agent just listens.
I watch his mind probe, dart and listen to the silences between my words. It clicks, turns, switch gears, searches the moment for concrete words, meanings, events it can track down, tie down.
“Did the robber say anything? What color were his clothes? Did he need a shave? What color was the moustache? Did he wear a jacket? A hat? What color was the jacket? What kind of shoes? The car? A GM product? Are you sure? What door did he go out? Which parking space did he use? How do you know he was drunk?”
He staggered, I say. The FBI agent writes my chain of events down on the yellow pad. He adds to them. We compare license numbers, written and spoken. The dark green car could be blue. Could be a Lumina, A Buick an Oldsmobile. Another agent suggests it might have been a Sable. I remember I haven’t finished my lesson plan. Too small for a Sable I say. A Sable is a pretty big car the guy says. It wasn’t a Sable, I say. A Taurus somebody says? The FBI agent and I agree the robber is an amateur, a law abiding guy. Why else would he drive in and park the car nose up to the curb when he was going to rob a bank?
The FBI agent manages a thin smile. It makes me feel uncertain about my thoughts. My reason for talking to him. My being there, PERIOD.
I leave via the back door. No more trouble. Your basic celebrity avoids the masses. I walk around front. Not a soul anywhere. I take forty bucks out of the ATM and put gas in the car at the Citgo station at the end of the lot. Right up at the next set of pumps I spot a white Buick. It’s the shape of the robber’s blue car. I ask the big man in Levis and another thin brown moustache what year it is. Ninety-one he says. I tell him the bank was robbed by a blue Buick like his and he laughs it off. I’m thinking the inference wasn’t such a hot idea.
I go back to the bank, quite certain it was a Buick and they let me in. The FBI agent and I go over another piece of paper. There is an F with 5 written over it.
“Did you write that?” he asks.
I realize that I have no idea if it’s my handwriting. What happened? Think, Harry. Think. Then I remembered that when I first saw the license plate, I thought there was an F and dismissed it. Then I said “five,” and wrote five. Five starts with F.
Six is the letter G. I translated the phonetics and not the number. Possible, the agent says studying the scrap of paper. We still aren’t sure about the car. The FBI agent settles for Buick. He’ll call me when he knows for sure. After he runs a check on me, I think rightly. I thank him and leave.
What gets into me? I drive up Bayview to Oakland Boulevard where I know I’ll find the blue car in front of a bar. I know where the bank robber went. I cruise both sides of Oakland Boulevard’s strip malls for several blocks. I check big blank and pink, Coral Ridge Mall for some sign of the bank robber. I cruise the giant parking lot. My brow is narrow. I squint. I peruse. I scan. I tug the brim of my fedora. Agent Barnes is on the job. Yes! I’ll spot the car and call it in. YES! I feel a slight pang in my belly.
I decide I’m not feeling so brave what with the guy carrying a gun. Suddenly I feel whipped. I still have the lesson plan to finish. It’s almost five and I’ve missed the “Heat of the Night” rerun. But I get to thinking. What possessed this man in dirty white sneakers, this doughy, sweaty man five- foot ten inch, fifty year old plus or minus, to risk his life; to amble into a bank and walk out with his fistful of cash?
Maybe he needed money for the wife’s operation, the kid’s shoes, the groceries, the carburetor, the father’s nursing home, a good bed for his back? Maybe he needed to get drunk? Maybe the light at the end of his tunnel was a train.
I try to remember his eyes. Did they bulge? Were they milky white? Was it really a double chin, or a dimpled chin? Maybe the car was a Lumina? A Taurus?
I drive around looking for him. Am I crazy playing sleuth? What makes me think I know where guys like him hang out? Do I want to be good? Be a hero? Get shot? What truth am I after? The part that wanted once to be an FBI agent? The intuitive me that sometimes knows what someone is going to do ten minutes before they do it. Me, the secret outlaw in the fedora, the slippery, good looking white boy who tight ropes razor blades and chases down this man on a toot, or a freak-out; this man betrayed by himself, life or godless Sundays. Me, chasing down the bad guy with my unfinished lesson plan waiting at home.
Was the number actually F and 5 or 5 for F or S for 6 plus 595? One sheet of paper had the F covered over with a five. My primitive, terrified brain picked up part of the phonetics and translated the numbers to letters. Translated, FSF was 595. Why didn’t I get it right the first time? What was I doing chasing a bank robber out of a bank?
I drive west on Sunrise Boulevard through the thick traffic, punctuated by endless steams of traffic lights. I feel sorry for this rumpled daytime bandit without a mask, a good set of legs, a clear mind a parachute, or a key to heaven. On the other hand, if I got the license number and put the man in jail, maybe this odd Wednesday afternoon will make sense, but I feel too tired, too wired, too crazy. Like a little round bald headed man in a big square world. Like a skinny kid lost in the big city. Like Camus’ Adulteress", or The Stranger, or Kafka. Maybe I just acted. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe it was a Buick.
Whatever, it was, I drive west on Sunrise Boulevard through the thick traffic, punctuated by endless streams of traffic lights to home, to my lesson plan, to late Wednesday, to any good dream at all.
POEMS - David Waddilove
A Mexican Dish
the empty world dish
full
the bowl, containing jewels,
mud, malachite, sperm
and lapis: feasting
the mistakes, generating
beauty, birthing
delight
incarnating
the mental reptile
sunning
on stones and errors
in changing climates
with timeline hate
and timeline pain they
took him out and
rough musick'd him
and so pointing at the thing
that is reflection deathly
twitching unreal
and so to take the idol
strap in across the back
stumble sideways
the vetch in the wall's
crannies fragile piecemeal
memory
of building
the recrudescence of
some known form
birthing itself in shabbiness
and when the products had gone
we sold ourselves
as bait
to the other
the mortar dissolves
between the bricks: the
rain's unending intention
and at one sitting he
rights and writes the world
and words outliving him
and so he entered their
assumptive worlds was
overcooked
then eaten
repeating a few dull formulas
habit and the time of day
pass
the mechanical representation
of what once passed for
loving
misunderstood as
loving
bequeathing portions of emptiness
a lack of dissembling, a gain
Undone
undone. and
with the
lack of
eyes
summon no
digital response
disconnected
ambiguous controlling
frame me with other
looks and holding design
frame history and trees
undone by touch or
the lack of touch by the
viking demand for open
flesh the quaker for
self abnegation both
misled
undone by
casuistry and planning the
invading senses raging
at the silent beaches
by music undone the
grief unsullied and
fragile stumbling through
slurry detritus of the unlived
undone in the type and
choice of circumstance the
drawing towards
catastrophe embracing the
catastrophic and the insoluble
undone by children's love and
hurt their need
for power and reward what
difference there
give me back the
mundane spite of
loving
Elegy for a romance
get a life she
said they sell
them at fat
face
trails and
tendrils
crystalising
human scree
Profile
in the fitful and
malleable ghost
form of identity
they purchase
themselves and each
other photographing the
moment when no-one is
present but distracted by
reference the
potential facebook of
themselves unreal
hypothesis a presentation of
lies to
liars and
those calling themselves
names like
realist
the empty world dish
full
the bowl, containing jewels,
mud, malachite, sperm
and lapis: feasting
the mistakes, generating
beauty, birthing
delight
incarnating
the mental reptile
sunning
on stones and errors
in changing climates
with timeline hate
and timeline pain they
took him out and
rough musick'd him
and so pointing at the thing
that is reflection deathly
twitching unreal
and so to take the idol
strap in across the back
stumble sideways
the vetch in the wall's
crannies fragile piecemeal
memory
of building
the recrudescence of
some known form
birthing itself in shabbiness
and when the products had gone
we sold ourselves
as bait
to the other
the mortar dissolves
between the bricks: the
rain's unending intention
and at one sitting he
rights and writes the world
and words outliving him
and so he entered their
assumptive worlds was
overcooked
then eaten
repeating a few dull formulas
habit and the time of day
pass
the mechanical representation
of what once passed for
loving
misunderstood as
loving
bequeathing portions of emptiness
a lack of dissembling, a gain
Undone
undone. and
with the
lack of
eyes
summon no
digital response
disconnected
ambiguous controlling
frame me with other
looks and holding design
frame history and trees
undone by touch or
the lack of touch by the
viking demand for open
flesh the quaker for
self abnegation both
misled
undone by
casuistry and planning the
invading senses raging
at the silent beaches
by music undone the
grief unsullied and
fragile stumbling through
slurry detritus of the unlived
undone in the type and
choice of circumstance the
drawing towards
catastrophe embracing the
catastrophic and the insoluble
undone by children's love and
hurt their need
for power and reward what
difference there
give me back the
mundane spite of
loving
Elegy for a romance
get a life she
said they sell
them at fat
face
trails and
tendrils
crystalising
human scree
Profile
in the fitful and
malleable ghost
form of identity
they purchase
themselves and each
other photographing the
moment when no-one is
present but distracted by
reference the
potential facebook of
themselves unreal
hypothesis a presentation of
lies to
liars and
those calling themselves
names like
realist
QUOTE - Charles Bukowski
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence."
POEM - Eric Chaet
Day before Thanksgiving, 2002
aged 57:
Sun came out & the river was at the same time
metallic & full of movement—scales--
not like musical scales, more like fish scales--
come to think of it, a lot like musical scales
major, minor, 3rds, 5ths, chords, trills, octaves
not quite silver or gold
some alloy of walleye & carp, I suppose--
& the trees had conveniently ditched their leaves
for clarity of the vision.
So late in life, I finally figure out
what the Dutch Republic was & when
& how it related to Spain & the Holy Roman Empire
Moors & Caliphs
Venice, Genoa, Florence
the Crusades & Columbus
Rumi & Maimonides
Pizarro, Cortez, Aztecs, Incas
Descartes & Cervantes
expulsion of the Muslims & Jews
Amsterdam’s pickled herring
the Baltic timber & grain trade
Bruegel, Spinoza, Rembrandt, & Locke
& the Reformation, &, of course
the English Revolution, & the American
& the French—& the Ottoman Empire
& the Russian Revolution, & the various
counter-revolutions & reprisals blatant or sly
& results of conflicting power assertions, & resistance:
no one gets everything as they’d wish.
By which time, distinct flakes of snow
stream horizontally, from across the river
from the big dark cloud of dirty wool
(they imported rough English woolen cloth
into Flanders & Holland
finished, dyed, & sold it
especially to the French)
that had gathered itself along the western horizon
behind the toy-like silo & the freight cars rattling south
like there’s no engine, caboose, or tomorrow--
& Sarah called laughing to report that she had just learned
never to shop for groceries the day before Thanksgiving:
the place was packed & the people all crabby.
aged 57:
Sun came out & the river was at the same time
metallic & full of movement—scales--
not like musical scales, more like fish scales--
come to think of it, a lot like musical scales
major, minor, 3rds, 5ths, chords, trills, octaves
not quite silver or gold
some alloy of walleye & carp, I suppose--
& the trees had conveniently ditched their leaves
for clarity of the vision.
So late in life, I finally figure out
what the Dutch Republic was & when
& how it related to Spain & the Holy Roman Empire
Moors & Caliphs
Venice, Genoa, Florence
the Crusades & Columbus
Rumi & Maimonides
Pizarro, Cortez, Aztecs, Incas
Descartes & Cervantes
expulsion of the Muslims & Jews
Amsterdam’s pickled herring
the Baltic timber & grain trade
Bruegel, Spinoza, Rembrandt, & Locke
& the Reformation, &, of course
the English Revolution, & the American
& the French—& the Ottoman Empire
& the Russian Revolution, & the various
counter-revolutions & reprisals blatant or sly
& results of conflicting power assertions, & resistance:
no one gets everything as they’d wish.
By which time, distinct flakes of snow
stream horizontally, from across the river
from the big dark cloud of dirty wool
(they imported rough English woolen cloth
into Flanders & Holland
finished, dyed, & sold it
especially to the French)
that had gathered itself along the western horizon
behind the toy-like silo & the freight cars rattling south
like there’s no engine, caboose, or tomorrow--
& Sarah called laughing to report that she had just learned
never to shop for groceries the day before Thanksgiving:
the place was packed & the people all crabby.
POEMS - Paul Murphy
The Black Square
After Kasimir Malevich
The superstitious millions flee
From the concentrated
Fear and anger
of the black square.
Logic and reason are sad
In the water like a dying moon.
The stars are underwater too,
flickering in the vortex.
Beyond the saddened
Desperation of deeply twilit,
Reddened nights,
Shunned by the galaxies.
The black square has wiped
Out certain memories
But the ones that are intact
First feeling of snow
First taste of lemon
First excited kiss….
Crocodile Street
In the summer of Constantine
(the nine lives ending in turbulence)
The seed of great theatrical suns,
The marble white mosques of Constantine.
Arched in anarchy and mayhem
The winter hills in the east.
The four horsemen have trampled
Down the west, a ball of flame
Dips into the salty nonchalance
Of the lagoon. The pattern changes
Is vanquished and the music
Is a shrill orchestra of competing voices.
Please play the music again, please paint the water blue
Please bring the distance closer, please give us rain
Stop the drumming and the drumming, the thunder
Is closer, the pale light is bitter, please send it away, away…
Because the sun is a ball of flame, because the music is shrill
The boom boom of backfires racking the night
That is glimmering under starlight…
Turn the lights off! Turn the lights off!
Turn the lights off! Turn the lights off!
SHORT STORY
Channie Greenberg
City Man
I have been to the city. I have seen the blood flowers. I have observed the viscera that vines between buildings. I have noticed the parking lots’ flecks of hair and hide, accenting the asphalt like otherworldly blooms.
As well, I have seen the people. Collars turned up, the city’s pedestrians pass such evidence of the happenstance with seeming disregard. Few inhabitants dare to smile, or even to chuckle softly. None overtly contest the current military vogue as long as they are not precluded from asking for coats or for bread. It’s just that most survivors are reluctant to speak unless it is officially permitted to do so.
Their offspring learn “street.” Those teens don’t study how to lift their limbs to drugs or how to bend their trunks to sexual tricks, as urchins in our day did. Rather, those would-be teeny boppers seek out methods of gleaning metal scraps and plastic bits. They hunt knowledge about recycling broken ceramics. They indenture themselves, for weeks at a time, to passersby who might know where mallows or dandelions still grow.
In contrast, our rural adolescents study how to be cantankerous. They complain about the acid rain and fret over the clay into which they are told to press seeds. They bend our plowshares into tools of war. While theft remains outlawed, at their hands, few eggs grow into chickens. Additionally, our orchards have become the province of those among the youths willing to risk high branches.
In view of that, during that fortnight when the city man warmed his limbs at our tin can fire, a few of them tried to fish his pockets. They fear no reprisal. They were as surprised as were we when he broke the wrist of one such young robber after they had denuded him of a sweater and of a pencil.
Later, he pulled the shirt sleeve from the injured perpetrator, tore it into strips and bandaged the break, all the while muttering, “adventure is to combat what research and development are to trade.” Most of us misunderstood his remark as we have nothing left with which to barter. Even if we were possessed of a book or a coin, it would take us a dangerous two days to march to the next claimed territory. As for the immature bandit, none of us cared.
Despite his healing expertise, the city man was pocked. His skin was smooth, but his countenance oozed in random places. Each of his sighs, as he sipped pine tea or as he chipped away at his fingernails with a rare switchblade, referenced striation in his gut. I wonder if he noticed there were no other men. Scars occur, too, though, when hate sits unchecked. The city man hated and told us as much.
His former band of supporters had crept site to site scouring blighted buildings for paper, for coffee, and for tin. They had parted from him one afternoon after he had admonished them for spending too much time at a particular place, a nuclear chemistry lab. It was not the possibility of radioactivity that had bothered him, but the fact that lingering in a single spot meant leaving more of that campus’ structures to competitors. He had had high hopes about the animal husbandry building and about the locker rooms in the sports complex.
We smiled while our visitor mused. Hard scramble allows for few distractions. The consequences of loosing too much work time to fireside tales could be far worse than starvation or the wasting disease, both of which were prevalent among us. Mainly worrisome was that our most ambulatory cohorts would swoon over his romantic notions of packaged foodstuffs or over his bespoken dreams of fine woven goods. We were already less than two dozen.
On the other hand, encountering such an individual, someone with enough verve to luxuriate in lament and exasperation, energized us. While the city man was amongst us, we dug new stands of wild onions and discovered enough rose hips to cache a portion thereof.
Despondence and conviction, in unequal measure, marked us. Among our circle was: a baker, who had been counting the years to her retirement; a heiress’ lone daughter, who claimed to have paper money in accounts hidden away at great distances; an herbalist, who had survived multiple wars, a handful of husbands and the loss of an eye; a former teenage punker, and a would-be sociology major. The rest of us had been housewives or farm hands, waitresses, corporate clones, proprietors of tourist traps, and ski bums.
Each of us had had reasons or rationalizations for being in the country before the catastrophe. Half of us had returned to the city. Of that latter group, only the green witch and I had made it back to the land.
Earlier, before rockets seared the sky from two directions, when farms were cattle and cash crops, not broken walls of stone and charred pens, I had loved a city man. Together, we had sat in parks bordered with flower gardens, and had eaten in restaurants where the butter served came in tiny, gold foil packets adorned with pictures of red bulls. Although even a city girl knows that bulls yield no milk, I had found those individualized portions enchanting.
The dealer of herbs had told me, when we had run, that final time, away from the smoldering shopping malls, toward scorched fields, that she remembered, most clearly, the newspaper boys. Those preadolescents had flung plastic-wrapped papers onto porches or anywhere else in the proximity of homes’ front doors. They were like clockwork, however, whenever it was time for holiday tips.
One of our teenage members told the witch and I, together, as she wrapped us in community-owned blankets, and insisted that we sip the nettle soup pressed on us by the women who had found us shivering from hypothermia, from crossing the creek, that she best recalled arriving home before her parents and supervising no end of men who fixed facets and toilets, smoothed plaster, or deftly removed carpet stains. Her parents had hired many repairmen since they were preparing their apartment for sale. She suspected they were planning a divorce.
When healed, the herbalist and I replaced the used up nettle. We repaired the blankets’ rips. We were helpless, though, to transform any of our rescuers’ memories.
The city man continued to inspire us. While he was yet among us, we discovered the valley where wind had piled a copse of trees. We dried leaves for bedding. We hacked trunks and branches for firewood.
One night during his stay, our guest helped himself to that yet green timber. He spoke of birds and bovine, of natural abundance. While we toasted our fingertips over his flames, he pulled a fruit from his pocket and ate it, loudly, in front of us.
The baker, suddenly, bewailed her loss of sugar and of olive oil. A housewife mourned her TV. The coed, all the same, smiled slyly. Our visitor had proven to be heterosexual.
A former banker threw a handful of plant matter into the fire. Lavender-infused smoke wafted in one direction. Like the green witch, that woman knew poisons and understood a little about curative things.
Before the blaze was diminished to ashes, a tiny mouse crept from the shadows. It pursued the shell of a grass seed blown in from the darkness. I smiled at the small amusement that was constituted by its scampering. The city man, though, crushed it beneath a shoe.
He scraped its guts from his foot and threw bone and fur, alike, into the fire. An unfortunate smell of roasting blood soon overpowered that of the lavender.
As if in compensation, the city man pulled a small packet from his coat. Fully half of a box of ginger-flavored throat lozenges sat on his palm. The coed widened her eyes, but he shook his head at her. He distributed his gift, handing one small, medicated candy to each of the gals closest to him. When his packet was emptied, he tossed that hull into the fire. The box had not retained enough flecks of herbed sugar to spice the smoke.
In twos and threes, we left the city man with his malodorous flames. In the morning, we would seek more stone and saplings. The air was already cold enough to form our breath into minor clouds. The last of our plastic sheeting would soon be drafted into service; a wall of a nearby horse barn looked attractive as it was still three quarters whole.
A few days later, the city man disappeared. He seemed untroubled by our lore about wild gangs residing in our vicinity.
The coed cried for nearly a week. He had left her two gifts, one of which was a rare canister of healing ointment consisting mostly of arnica. Arnica had never grown in our part of the world.
POEMS - Neil Fulwood
Thank You Very Much, Goodnight
Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis
has left the building, the Big O
has downshifted to lower case,
inertia has settled on the Big Bopper
and Eddie Cochran is contemplating
those three steps and where they might lead.
It’s raining in somebody’s heart.
It’s over. Loneliness is a given.
In a night sky tattooed with lightning
a small aircraft is lost to stormclouds.
Ill weather ushers a car off the road.
A king’s mansion has many rooms,
many walk-in closets, hangers heavy
with rhinestone and gold lamé,
a million outfits for a single ghost.
Karajan In The Rush Hour
Symphony N° 1, first movement. This recording
from the maestro’s second Brahms cycle,
the 1970s account where worlds are destroyed
and mere mortals fall to their knees,
awe-struck. I’m in traffic, late in getting to a job
I hate, and my imagination shifts gears
between highbrow and lowbrow. I see myself
as Magento from the X-Men, only
divested of the cape and helmet. A baton instead.
But the gestures are the same: imperious,
commanding, dismissive of the unimportant things.
A movement of the wrist, a small flick
of the baton and the car in front of me upends,
is tossed aside. The white van: cast back
into whatever automotive netherworld spawned it.
The 'Apprentice'-fixated management type
in his red Porsche: an iron filing yanked towards
the magnet of its own conflagration.
The careful driver, he of 10mph less than the limit
and a six-car-length stopping distance:
a cube of scrap metal, no-claims bonus screwed.
Cyclists? Oh pray for them in their hour
of terror. Pray, indeed, for every bit of traffic
from here to where I don’t want to be.
And when I get there, that endless crescendo.
Island
Theirs for the day, this shoreline,
this stretch of white sand,
this view. Inland are palm trees
and a scribbling-in of greenery,
a hut in the shade. Theirs for the day
and the boat not till dusk.
They are the whole of each other
and the island a furnace of single-
day eternity. This is solitude
or something close. They don’t
notice the crabs throwing off
their disguise of sand, scattering,
racing for other entrenchments.
Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis
has left the building, the Big O
has downshifted to lower case,
inertia has settled on the Big Bopper
and Eddie Cochran is contemplating
those three steps and where they might lead.
It’s raining in somebody’s heart.
It’s over. Loneliness is a given.
In a night sky tattooed with lightning
a small aircraft is lost to stormclouds.
Ill weather ushers a car off the road.
A king’s mansion has many rooms,
many walk-in closets, hangers heavy
with rhinestone and gold lamé,
a million outfits for a single ghost.
Karajan In The Rush Hour
Symphony N° 1, first movement. This recording
from the maestro’s second Brahms cycle,
the 1970s account where worlds are destroyed
and mere mortals fall to their knees,
awe-struck. I’m in traffic, late in getting to a job
I hate, and my imagination shifts gears
between highbrow and lowbrow. I see myself
as Magento from the X-Men, only
divested of the cape and helmet. A baton instead.
But the gestures are the same: imperious,
commanding, dismissive of the unimportant things.
A movement of the wrist, a small flick
of the baton and the car in front of me upends,
is tossed aside. The white van: cast back
into whatever automotive netherworld spawned it.
The 'Apprentice'-fixated management type
in his red Porsche: an iron filing yanked towards
the magnet of its own conflagration.
The careful driver, he of 10mph less than the limit
and a six-car-length stopping distance:
a cube of scrap metal, no-claims bonus screwed.
Cyclists? Oh pray for them in their hour
of terror. Pray, indeed, for every bit of traffic
from here to where I don’t want to be.
And when I get there, that endless crescendo.
Island
Theirs for the day, this shoreline,
this stretch of white sand,
this view. Inland are palm trees
and a scribbling-in of greenery,
a hut in the shade. Theirs for the day
and the boat not till dusk.
They are the whole of each other
and the island a furnace of single-
day eternity. This is solitude
or something close. They don’t
notice the crabs throwing off
their disguise of sand, scattering,
racing for other entrenchments.
REVIEW
Paul Murphy
Matisse: Cut Outs: Tate Modern: London: August 2014
Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) cut outs are pictorial icons of the Twentieth-Century avant-garde but this exhibition explains their evolution in terms of the context of Matisse’s ageing and declining health. In a sense Matisse’s rejection of painting was an aesthetic choice but since he was primarily a realist painter cut outs offered Matisse a new direction. Obviously they allowed him to re-assemble his images, to test out the composition, allowing him to re-establish his images and their contexts. However, cut outs were also a practical response to the artist’s loss of mobility which had been caused by a colostomy, (a medical cut out). Matisse found novel ways of overcoming declining health and immobility. Yet Matisse, the great rival of Picasso and along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp a key innovator in modern art, was creatively vital and energetic to the very end of his life.
Matisse’s initial attempts at cut outs (Matisse described his work as cutting into colour, indeed the cut outs are partly pictorial and partly sculptural.) were made in 1937, scenery and costumes for a ballet choreographed by Leonide Massine to Dimitri Shostakovitch’s Symphony #1. Choreographing serious symphonic works was a controversial innovation devised by Massine but it did produce Matisse’s first cut outs, made for the ballet. This led on to Matisse’s work Verve (1937), cover designs for a prestigious poetry journal and then to Jazz (1943-46) which began as a series of cut outs to illustrate a book of poems. Ultimately Matisse’s notes made to accompany the original cut out models (‘maquettes’) replaced the original text. The title was not devised by Matisse either but by his publisher Teriade, to depict the improvisational nature of the work. The work depicts circus figures and characters. There are many highlights, such as The Horse, the Rider and the Clown, many moments when colour itself becomes the subject as Matisse seems to create new colour or colour itself from startlingly unusual juxtapositions. Matisse seems to be aiming at naturalness and spontaneity rather than laboured technical effects which gives the works a child-like spontaneity and originality.
Jazz is the highpoint of the exhibition for it seems that when Matisse’s work became larger and more grandiose the colour effects dimmed and became less intense. Matisse was encouraged to continue with his cut out techniques through such works as Oceania (1946) which was itself a reflection of time spent in Tahiti in 1930. During the war Matisse lived near Nice, the lower storey of his house was requisitioned by the German occupation. Matisse’s daughter Marguerite was tortured in a Rennes prison, for she was active in the Resistance, but escaped when her train bound to Ravensbruck was bombed. Matisse and his family were involved in political events, even though Matisse himself was deeply unpolitical, but they survived the war. Then Matisse became involved in a new project connected to the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence near Nice. The nuns at the chapel had nursed Matisse through a serious illness so he agreed to complete several decorative artworks for the chapel but in the end decorated the entire chapel instead. Much of this work will never be seen since it is now in the possession of the Vatican but we do see The Blue Window (1947), the second maquette for the Apse, The Virgin and Child (circa 1950) and even designs for the priest’s clothes such as The Red Chasuble (1950-2). Matisse’s work in Vence was followed by works like Zulma (1950) and The Thousand and One Nights (based on the famous poem) which astounded contemporaries with its innovation even though it was exhibited among the work of artists half Matisse’s age.
In 1952 Matisse completed The Blue Nudes I – IV. These are works which are sculptural indeed they seem like muscular, monumental works that are simultaneously subtle yet also merely pieces of blue paper. The artist is able to infuse them with his personality but also breathes life into his work and combines it with incredible depths of blueness that zing off the canvas. Along with Matisse’s work The Snail they seem to be his last important works. The Snail offers us a child’s view of this slimy, fragile (and edible) creature yet the work is also a triumph of abstraction and minimalism, a kaleidoscope of colours that underscores the joy and simplicity of creation itself. Indeed creation seems to be the subject of The Snail not just the creation of an artwork but creation itself as a deeply metaphysical indeed possibly religious concept or a spiritual state or feeling that goes far beyond scissors, glue and pieces of paper.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, August 2014
Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) cut outs are pictorial icons of the Twentieth-Century avant-garde but this exhibition explains their evolution in terms of the context of Matisse’s ageing and declining health. In a sense Matisse’s rejection of painting was an aesthetic choice but since he was primarily a realist painter cut outs offered Matisse a new direction. Obviously they allowed him to re-assemble his images, to test out the composition, allowing him to re-establish his images and their contexts. However, cut outs were also a practical response to the artist’s loss of mobility which had been caused by a colostomy, (a medical cut out). Matisse found novel ways of overcoming declining health and immobility. Yet Matisse, the great rival of Picasso and along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp a key innovator in modern art, was creatively vital and energetic to the very end of his life.
Matisse’s initial attempts at cut outs (Matisse described his work as cutting into colour, indeed the cut outs are partly pictorial and partly sculptural.) were made in 1937, scenery and costumes for a ballet choreographed by Leonide Massine to Dimitri Shostakovitch’s Symphony #1. Choreographing serious symphonic works was a controversial innovation devised by Massine but it did produce Matisse’s first cut outs, made for the ballet. This led on to Matisse’s work Verve (1937), cover designs for a prestigious poetry journal and then to Jazz (1943-46) which began as a series of cut outs to illustrate a book of poems. Ultimately Matisse’s notes made to accompany the original cut out models (‘maquettes’) replaced the original text. The title was not devised by Matisse either but by his publisher Teriade, to depict the improvisational nature of the work. The work depicts circus figures and characters. There are many highlights, such as The Horse, the Rider and the Clown, many moments when colour itself becomes the subject as Matisse seems to create new colour or colour itself from startlingly unusual juxtapositions. Matisse seems to be aiming at naturalness and spontaneity rather than laboured technical effects which gives the works a child-like spontaneity and originality.
Jazz is the highpoint of the exhibition for it seems that when Matisse’s work became larger and more grandiose the colour effects dimmed and became less intense. Matisse was encouraged to continue with his cut out techniques through such works as Oceania (1946) which was itself a reflection of time spent in Tahiti in 1930. During the war Matisse lived near Nice, the lower storey of his house was requisitioned by the German occupation. Matisse’s daughter Marguerite was tortured in a Rennes prison, for she was active in the Resistance, but escaped when her train bound to Ravensbruck was bombed. Matisse and his family were involved in political events, even though Matisse himself was deeply unpolitical, but they survived the war. Then Matisse became involved in a new project connected to the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence near Nice. The nuns at the chapel had nursed Matisse through a serious illness so he agreed to complete several decorative artworks for the chapel but in the end decorated the entire chapel instead. Much of this work will never be seen since it is now in the possession of the Vatican but we do see The Blue Window (1947), the second maquette for the Apse, The Virgin and Child (circa 1950) and even designs for the priest’s clothes such as The Red Chasuble (1950-2). Matisse’s work in Vence was followed by works like Zulma (1950) and The Thousand and One Nights (based on the famous poem) which astounded contemporaries with its innovation even though it was exhibited among the work of artists half Matisse’s age.
In 1952 Matisse completed The Blue Nudes I – IV. These are works which are sculptural indeed they seem like muscular, monumental works that are simultaneously subtle yet also merely pieces of blue paper. The artist is able to infuse them with his personality but also breathes life into his work and combines it with incredible depths of blueness that zing off the canvas. Along with Matisse’s work The Snail they seem to be his last important works. The Snail offers us a child’s view of this slimy, fragile (and edible) creature yet the work is also a triumph of abstraction and minimalism, a kaleidoscope of colours that underscores the joy and simplicity of creation itself. Indeed creation seems to be the subject of The Snail not just the creation of an artwork but creation itself as a deeply metaphysical indeed possibly religious concept or a spiritual state or feeling that goes far beyond scissors, glue and pieces of paper.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, August 2014
