interior landscapes

                           






                              by






                  Donna Pucciani














A month after surgery,  the speculum
illuminates a new terrain
of black sutures not yet absorbed,
a colony of strange insects.


Surely after the removal
 of organs shaped like bulbs,
breaking the soil in this warmest of winters,
one can expect a lining of smooth silk
left behind,  a luminous pink.


But no,  the healing is slow,
says the doctor,  caught in a web
of hesitation.   She goes deeper
into the empty plot of land
seeking tissue softened and cured,
bloodless, scabless,  but finds only stitches
like dark pistils among swollen blossom.






















......

replete with.....

Soft Link 3







It’s names of places, cities, climates that haunt. Characters. Clear mornings, a fine rain that falls all day, rare images from elsewhere and America, two natural disasters that make us close ranks amid corpses, it’s quiet or violet acts, mortars, ice cubes in glasses at cocktail hour, noise of dishes or a slight stutter that momentarily torments, a slap, kiss, it’s names of cities like Venice or Reading, Tongue and Pueblo, names of characters Fabrice Laure or Emma. Words honed over years and novels, words we spoke with halting breath laughing spitting sucking an olive, verbs we add to the pleasure of lips, to success, to sure death. It’s words like cheek or knee and still others further than we can see that leave us teetering on the edge of the abyss, to stretch like cats in morning it’s words that keep us up till dawn or make us flag down a cab on a weekday night when the city’s asleep before midnight and solitude is caught like an abscess in the jaw. It’s words spoken from memory, in envy or pride often words uttered with love while layhing our hands behind the head or pouring a glass of port. It’s words whose etymology must be sought, then projected on a wall of sound so the cries of pain and sighs of pleasure that wander in dreams and documents lay siege to the mysterious darkness of the heart. It’s words like bay, hill, wadi, via, rue, strada, dispersed through the dictionary between flamboyancies and neons, burial mounds and forests. It’s words of the arms of the sea, ensembles of sense that claw or soft at our chests, cold shivers rivulets and fear abrupt in the back while we try to fissure the smooth time of the future with trenchant quotations. It’s words that swallow fire and life, who knows now if they’re Latin French Italian Sanskrit Mandarin Galician Arab or English, if they conceal a number an animal or old anguishes impatient to shoot up before our very eyes like cloned shadows replete with light and great myths.




                                                                          Nicole Brossard   ( originally in quebecois  )

LANDSCAPE

In an old brown photograph from the Civil War he notes pyramids of cannonballs piled in the foreground, in front of a stairway--actually an embankment--that leads up to a pocked field. The scene feels like an excavation. The earth is dark, the sky drained. The field, vacant, by a wood, is randomly scattered with shapes, which are dead bodies. The neatness of the piled cannonballs, the almost classical siting of the stairway, contrast starkly with the richness of the black soil, the superfluous shapes of the corpses. What was before ground of contention has become desecration, sinking beneath view, memorized into the riddled fabric of coincidence, of what was, in all its particularity. He is haunted by the irretrievability of this instant, instance, captured in such novel detail it appears to reveal more than it should, or rather promises to vouchsafe, or to discover, some clue that will lead in an unbroken line of descent to this moment of his existence, and so render a meaning, however oblique, to the act of his looking.












                                                                              Curtis Faville

taken from a comment stream relating to a youtube of Karl Richter playing Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in Cminor

There is no pain in my chest
The heart absorbed it all
 Turned it into minuscule arrows
Flowing relentless through my body
Not following any rules
A frenzy to feed on something other then
Red and white
They found their target
Black tar footprints behind me
Fading into earth
It feels so good to travel
On this flat thing called
Heart

tutube988

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The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks

It can be bitter here at times like this,
November wind sweeping across the border.
Its seeds of ice would cut you to the quick.
The whole town tucked up safe and dreaming,
even wild things gone to earth, and I
stuck up here in this grotto, without as much as
star or planet to ease my vigil.

The howling won’t let up. Trees
cavort in agony as if they would be free
and take off — ghost voyagers
on the wind that carries intimations
of garrison towns, walled cities, ghetto lanes
where men hunt each other and invoke
the various names of God as blessing
on their death tactics, their night manoeuvres.
Closer to home the wind sails over
dying lakes. I hear fish drowning.
I taste the stagnant water mingled
with turf smoke from outlying farms.


They call me Mary — Blessed, Holy, Virgin.
They fit me to a myth of a man crucified:
the scourging and the falling, and the falling again,
the thorny crown, the hammer blow of iron
into wrist and ankle, the sacred bleeding heart.
They name me Mother of all this grief
though mated to no mortal man.
They kneel before me and their prayers
fly up like sparks from a bonfire
that blaze a moment, then wink out.


It can be lovely here at times. Springtime,
early summer. Girls in Communion frocks
pale rivals to the riot in the hedgerows
of cow parsley and haw blossom, the perfume
from every rushy acre that’s left for hay
when the light swings longer with the sun’s push north.


Or the grace of a midsummer wedding
when the earth herself calls out for coupling
and I would break loose of my stony robes,
pure blue, pure white, as if they had robbed
a child’s sky for their colour. My being
cries out to be incarnate, incarnate,
maculate and tousled in a honeyed bed.


Even an autumn burial can work its own pageantry.
The hedges heavy with the burden of fruiting
crab, sloe, berry, hip; clouds scud east
pear scented, windfalls secret in long
orchard grasses, and some old soul is lowered
to his kin. Death is just another harvest
scripted to the season’s play.


But on this All Souls’ Night there is
no respite from the keening of the wind.
I would not be amazed if every corpse came risen
from the graveyard to join in exaltation with the gale,
a cacophony of bone imploring sky for judgement
and release from being the conscience of the town.


On a night like this I remember the child
who came with fifteen summers to her name,
and she lay down alone at my feet
without midwife or doctor or friend to hold her hand
and she pushed her secret out into the night,
far from the town tucked up in little scandals,
bargains struck, words broken, prayers, promises,
and though she cried out to me in extremis
I did not move,
I didn’t lift a finger to help her,
I didn’t intercede with heaven,
nor whisper the charmed word in God’s ear.


On a night like this I number the days to the solstice
and the turn back to the light.
O sun,
centre of our foolish dance,
burning heart of stone,
molten mother of us all,
hear me and have pity.










                                    Paula Meehan




















.....

Mid-day Morsel

 












   Poem   (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)
















 last night we went to a movie and came out,
                                                            Ionesco is greater


than Beckett, Vincent said, that’s what I think,
                                                            blueberry blintzes


and Khrushchev was probably being carped at
                                                            in Washington, no
                                                                                    politesse


Vincent tells me about his mother’s trip to Sweden
                                                                        Hans tells us


about his father’s life in Sweden, it sounds like
                                                                        Grace Hartigan’s


painting Sweden








                                                                Frank O'Hara

the medium is part of the message

http://vispo.com/animisms/enigman/enigman.htm#
















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