13:00 - Saturday 22 February 2020 - {6} -
And then we discussed the B-flat world
She said she thought it denoted comfort
It was our first date, I demurred —
It's true I sleep better when it rains
I dream of boys slowly herding giant frogs.
So I said I thought it was about sleep.
Didn't mention my scattered ideas of
Vuvuzelas blatting out of automobiles
World-wide air-conditioners, hums of dullness
Like neutered bees working for no honey
In the ordinary winds of the world.
Then I cut it back, listened for another note
Looking at my wall at the Tibetan mask
Hanging there in blood and ringed in skulls.
What is it that can be important to you?
What are you being reminded of and forgetting?
Could it be, I thought, the sound of visitors
From a planet where music communicates?
Or else it is the oceans' insistence upon us
That they wish to help supply our memories?
Or is it the steady march of all the insect world
That we're so outnumbered by their vibrations?
Hard to know this as anything but benevolent.
Music of course has responded since the time of rain
The fires and winds, the friction of moving parts
And now the daily machinery of our lives —
But it's a message or appeal that's lost us.
Meanwhile other notes just sound silent and stare.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
03:29 - Monday 30 August 2010 - {0} -
The honest sentiment – the Romantic
If you must – that you looked hard for.
And music was the club you joined
The pure sound you looked for all your life.
Miles said, Don’t waste any phrases.
He also said relax and listen to the streets.
But you don’t want perfected sound —
You yearn for key changes and discord
Jarring the elbow and shaking the brain.
How could she say, Don’t waste my time
When she really meant, Give me your best.
Putting it together, nonsense in a hundred faces.
You saying that it was very likely too late
An ordinary happiness was not an option.
Around you the invisible senses swarm
Occasionally one is a fly on your skin.
You revisit all the times you wasted.
The lights change color. You cross.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
19:25 - Monday 23 August 2010 - {0} -
Damn your orthonym & heteronyms
Distracted from an unedifying life
The tips of multiple personalities
Like coast-lines from a faraway ship
I saw you in the very dark one night
At the end of a winter lane, waiting
To greet your poets as they stumbled home
And one by one each tried to salute you
One of them grabbed your jacket, pulled
You in close, breathed a noxious identity
You, he says, You have landed me in trouble
My wife no longer believes that I am me
She raves at me as if I were Pessoa
I don’t really like you, she shrieks at me
And now I find myself looking at ships
Asking around about any jobs I can do
A silly ardor has tampered with my soul
My constituent parts need more air
You once lived your terrible life as if
Maleficent creatures all felt the same
Now I’ll be grateful if you gave her a call.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
15:24 - Wednesday 4 August 2010 - {0} -
Jamie Mcdonald/GettyImages
18:30 - Monday 12 July 2010 - {0} -
13:11 - Sunday 4 July 2010 - {0} -
This week the Germans lifted steins
As they drank to a kind of imagination
That owes a little more to cupidity
Than to the demands of extra time;
And I guess that tonight by a campfire
On the high plains of Argentina
Gauchos were arguing the off-side rule
And if there’s really such a thing as free.
The wireless crackles, the boys debate
Whether a penalty may not result in death
And several sharp knives are unsheathed
In demonstration of traditional scorn;
At last Andreas curves an old ball high into the dark
(Their long beef ribs were burnt mostly black)
Now the herd is slowly moving it around
And occasionally a perfect goal is scored.
World Cup 2006
©ROB SCHACKNE (2006)
19:48 - Monday 28 June 2010 - {0} -
I can't believe that I thought that I knew
she was smart, as smart as I pictured her
putting the shining wash on a white line
watering the plants, sprinkling the chickens
in a pale blue dress with no underwear —
come to bed at night with only a sexy moan.
OK. Erase that likeness. She was plenty smart.
Proud house plants wilted under the stress
and the chickens all one day fled for the trees.
The underwear was wrapped three times around.
OK. She was smart enough to hide her feelings.
She sprinkled me enough that I climbed away
while I believed she was smart. OK. Not that.
I believed I was smart to know when a blue dress
looks like it should come off it sometimes doesn't.
Hiding my feelings about that makes me smart.
Scotch that. It makes me almost smart enough
to read a pale blue dress, so well, so well.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
11:57 - Friday 28 May 2010 - {1} -
Currently reading:
David Mitchell (GBR), Cloud Atlas, 2003
Currently listening:
Röyksopp (NOR), Junior, 2009
03:07 - Thursday 27 May 2010 - {0} -
Shahid Reads His Own Palm
I come from the cracked hands of men who used
the smoldering ends of blunts to blow shotguns,
men who arranged their lives around the mystery
of the moon breaking a street corner in half.
I come from "Swann Road" written in a child's
slanted block letters across a playground fence,
the orange globe with black stripes in Bishop's left
hand, untethered and rolling to the sideline,
a crowd openmouthed, waiting to see the end
of the sweetest crossover in a Virginia state pen.
I come from Friday night's humid and musty air,
Junk Yard Band cranking in a stolen Bonneville,
a tilted bottle of Wild Irish Rose against my lips
and King Hedley's secret written in the lines of my palm.
I come from beneath a cloud of white smoke, a lit pipe
and the way glass heats rocks into a piece of heaven,
from the weight of nothing in my palm,
a bullet in an unfired snub-nosed revolver.
And every day the small muscles in my finger threaten to pull
a trigger, slight and curved like my woman's eyelashes.
(2010)
http://www.rdwaynebetts.com/
23:20 - Wednesday 26 May 2010 - {1} -
Now that we know the muons declared themselves for our side of matter at The Big Bang, we can now explain our existence in the universe...and I for one will breathe lots easier, having been feeling lately that everything around me was much too random — especially after last night at The Drop Inn — and our entire lot was just a dumb event that not even people much smarter than me could understand. So, in the spirit of this discovery — please remember, boys and girls, this is courtesy of Science — let's now revisit an old poem of his...
If there should be galaxies without stars
Preemptive pockets with only dark matter
We might discover this evidence for ourselves
But you’d have to sigh for the bloody mind of that
And you might think about the unseen discoverables
And wonder about who or what plundered it all.
Anti-matter, anti-meaning, all the consequences
Of knowing where or why you’re not, in parallel
Multiverses bubbling over like busted washing machines
Sure you’re going to bloody well miss them, the laundry too
If there are eleven different dimensions — but you’re dreaming
If you think that any dark matter will be missing you.
String theory was once just a sound theory about string
When you pulled it hard it stretched hard everywhere
Hell, we know that everything complains about being pulled
50 million light-years later it now stretches radio telescope
Theories of a deep and empty space, of yours, of hers, of mine
Dark energies indeed, when you’re in a dark time alone.
Poetry suddenly provokes what science takes time proving
What every bugger scans the moonlight for light enough to see
Past the pollution of every single one of our star-lit days —
So when the thought drops on you like a parallel coconut
After you read about it and think about it and talk about it
Sure, it’s always been very much like you suspected.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2005)
04:05 - Sunday 23 May 2010 - {0} -
How the anvil gets hit night after night
But the last night all of us were there
It seems we were kept on drumming
Until everybody's spectacles were gone
So at last we saw only blurred features
Of attractive people we knew before
Some like cows and some like monsters
A woman I hated more beautiful than the sun
Another whom I'd loved was just a skull
And we couldn't stop looking for true faces
A nose here or there but what about the eyes
Peering back and asking not for forgiveness
But for water. Truly none of us had any.
One was trying to read the future and its mind
Startled to find so much blank. She kissed me.
I saw her friends dancing through the market.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
23:35 - Sunday 16 May 2010 - {0} -
Maybe it's best to keep this process to yourself — at least until the collectors come. Streets clean for another day, maybe we dream it doesn't happen — or if it did, then we'll only have been dreaming of some other place. Men learned to put their moods away. But how else to measure the soul that’s lost, than when all is still?
Garbage in the streets, loose.
For a moment the rats are still.
This picture is without smell.
Accumulate how hunger
is turned to waste. Discard
the late heat of what we loved.
The Easter-time of insects
makes the refuse-body One.
Walk away the garbage.
Morning, streets swept,
nocturnal vehicles disconnect
down alleys ripped of memory.
One word of love is missed.
Creatures gather everything.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
13:16 - Sunday 9 May 2010 - {0} -
Painting by William Barnes Wollen
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/opinion/09dalrymple.html?th&emc=th
12:56 - Sunday 9 May 2010 - {0} -
http://www.tctype.com/?page_id=114
17:42 - Wednesday 5 May 2010 - {0} -
Magic is the thing we know that happens
when we’re looking at our shoes or hands.
We watch the magician twist our souls
at some distance from our concerns.
He makes the bird turn blue and vanish.
He changes solid matter into white confetti
and then makes big thunder when we applaud.
But these small matters are almost routine.
Asked to contemplate disappearing coins
(although this one we knew is pretty easy)
the indirections of wardrobe and scarves
and all the tricks we might almost do
to get it all back into perfect shape.
He makes his female helper disappear
behind a blanket, she then shows him eggs,
her lolling head independent of their selves
and the black card he pulls from his mouth.
Any direction from the Black Dog is what
we really want to see — his teething problems
and his fractions reassembled elsewhere,
the hammer thrown from a mountain-top
two hands and two million other places to be.
Sure we're magicians of a minor order
like of the prosecution of war where
there was never war before we came
where the birds just grew quieter...
And the audience sometimes grins at
the woman who changes her mini-skirt for
a wedding gown before she lies back down,
those dreams we make more wish of
disappearing ourselves at last from fear.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
13:24 - Monday 3 May 2010 - {0} -
Not being very much into the politics of translation or that odd interface of identity and culture called exclusion, my heart grows heavy whenever I hear from the local birds that it's impossible to translate any Chinese literature (especially poetry) very well into English — for in the smugness of this attitude, in this cultural distancing, I can only see an overweening and non-productive pride. I was reminded of this the other day as I was re-reading Malcolm Lowry's magnificent (and harrowing) novel Under The Volcano (1947), at the start of which, you'll recall, are 3 quotations, one from John Bunyan and one from Goethe. But the first one is taken from Sophocles' Antigone, written around 440 BCE. Sophocles, that fine Athenian who (legend has it) might have been one of the very few men in history to die of happiness, aged 91. His work is a cracker in any language, at any time, and its immediacy (in translation) transcends both its period and its culture. So, what can we know about how and what it was to strike the big note nearly 2500 years ago? Wait a minute. A translation from the late 19th century? Well, funny you should ask...
Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair it is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.
And speech, and wind-swept thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escape.
(Tr. R.C. Jebb, 1893)
12:37 - Saturday 1 May 2010 - {0} -
April is the cruellest month. But you know that line is a conflicted one. In America it is National Poetry Month. (When, alas, the poets — who typically just need to pay their bills more often — will traditionally not be missed.) This month we're urged to read and/or write a poem a day...but how often will we wonder why?
If I could write
one poem a day
for an entire month
I could also lift
my weight in gold
and be acclaimed
by the housewive's
union of the world
for my good looks
and not do (alas)
what I usually do
like a pensive fool
just standing lost
at the broken curb
and watching fly
the plastic bags
and wishing they
were balloons.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
21:10 - Friday 30 April 2010 - {0} -
The day security cameras
that caught her carelessly
knocking over someone else's
parked and rusted bicycle
and just speeding away
also caught someone else
walking a bike (apparently)
very much the wrong way
in a wrong lane too slowly
thinking about the busted chain
the recent unexpected prize
all the favourable reviews
of his compassionate first book
"...true to our difficult age"
and to neither one were
any sanctions applied
spring now salting new
growth on pruned trees
the day security cameras
switched off for the night.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
14:44 - Saturday 24 April 2010 - {0} -
Everybody knows that
every table has a story
serviettes raised against
the fate of conversation
and we also know where
the food of love goes
that it’s at least as far
as the hand that feeds it
even further (we hope)
than the precious moment
when a soft taste buds
to bring in a burst of heat
and we even know about
the errant meal that’s made
with hatred all gone wrong
many years before it is set
upon the table — that spreads
faster than the thicket of
two fools when they meet
and maybe we know by now
many start by sitting down
their white bibs tucked in
arms spread wide with hope
but something obdurate
comes when love looks in
though it never serves them right
and every time this happens
it’s so tragic and distasteful.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
22:27 - Monday 19 April 2010 - {0} -
Atropos, fledgling, confined
To a basement, knife out
So thrilled about her gift
Says we can read the book
Read our lives like everything
It will now make sense to us
But all that is just conjecture
From the false end of time
Because in the second chapter
He will fall in love forever —
And when bliss bites hard
And all the King's horses
Put the moments back together
Steady into the fourth bit
When no man was an island
It will look like very dread
It will look like Chapter 6
The bruises and bites of Chapter 8
The contusions of tomorrow
The blessèd sweet loves
That came, she said, so finally
In the last one — the portion expires
You had no right to be cheerful then.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
05:59 - Monday 19 April 2010 - {0} -
She's not particularly new
But she is particularly young
Who takes my simple order
And saunters to the counter
Looks over her shoulder at me
Lifts her shirt above the jeans
Scratches the ass that's visible
And wisely I go back to reading
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Later she brings me Brazilian coffee
With the Jameson whiskey I like
Goes back looks at me again
Turns her back brushes her front
She leans against a table corner
She's rubbing it against misuse
Then does her shirt thing again
And allows me even deeper
One thought straining to feel
One mystery is almost real
I return to my complicated book
Grateful a world I don't know
Is still avidly connecting.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
21:44 - Sunday 18 April 2010 - {0} -
 Notes From The Forest
Cut an animal tongue to turn
the body to gold. Figure burst whole from fruit,
then bent back in. The skin
is fresh, the bruise but a moment
and fine. The man, his hand sunk in the sea,
anchors nothing. One woman at another,
small blade at her eye. These are the stories
we do not want to tell. To swell (a mother),
to retract into fugitive sleep.
Embed a word in a single rib & live
eighty years longer than the rest. Tie cloth
around the eyes. A body swathed in blue
will be safe, the eyes turn up on cue.
What is severed, what kneeling,
what waiting just past the gate.
Unveil the mannequin's legs in glee. This is not
a feast and at least one lack cannot
be avenged. Fallen persimmons
quiet the eyes. What climbs, what steals,
what severs in threes. One opening
breaks into the next. This is only a mouth.
I'm sure you know the rest. To break,
to liquefy, to drink the answer down.
I for one have given. "Send the butcher back
when he arrives at the gate." A paper
bird can only melt in the rain. Its rider
stares death in the mouth and can't speak.
A figure of light, a lie, a woman so pure
children only believe. To sow, to steep,
to follow unthinking. Animal love a tree too much.
Be killed by what it has planted.
(2010)
12:45 - Sunday 18 April 2010 - {0} -
After Reading Lao Tzu
The one who speaks does not know.
The one who knows does not speak,
wrote the old master, which perhaps describes
the situation. Meaning we were all sad.
Meaning that when you were seized by desire,
it was nothing more than flesh, bared above the collarbone
she poured the long night of herself
into empty coffee cans and cornfields
and brushed by air. Meaning: It's chemical. So
that when the moon rears its parched head,
her eyes a mask on her face, the livestock snorting and pacing,
her absent husband...she died young
when you feel a finger grazing your neck,
it's only wind created by the movement of
her daughter crying and lighting
fires under the bed
your own body. Downdraft. Live
stock. Because sadness is multiplied
don't worry, she told me,
you can’t inherit this
by sadness. A cradle of no compare.
Loose conspiracy of mind and body,
dough swelling over the edge of the bowl,
the yeasty smell of it, a disease that is
a blanket over the window
a pillow over the face
known and not spoken and
also the other one,
who speaks and does not know
what to say.
(2009)
03:49 - Saturday 17 April 2010 - {0} -
Cornell Capa/Getty Images
James Agee's classic work, A Death in the Family, has undergone a fortuitous transubstantiation — the result of a patient and meticulous re-editing of his manuscript (see the link below). Successfully published in 1957, 2 years after his death, it's about his Tennessee childhood and his family. Michael A. Lofaro's new edition comes as a tender gift to fans of Agee's fine "incantatory" writing, where the consonants do sound like drum beats and the vowels just keep on arguing the beat. NYT reviewer Will Blythe misses such writing in the prevailing style of today, when most people prefer to write books for bucks:
"“One by one, million by million, in the prescience of dawn, every leaf in that part of the world was moved.” Why don’t our novelists write in Agee’s tender high style these days? Either something has gone out of the world, or something has gone out of them. His book reads like a prayer, an attempt to breathe life into the dead through mighty exertions of language. Everything is consecrated. Trees move in their sleep, stars tremble like lanterns, and a butterfly — yes, a butterfly — alights on a coffin."
I suppose the last thing our novelists want is to spend too much time honing remarkable and disturbing edges no one notices. This writer doesn't know. But a reader who knows how to read, who enjoys the music of words, he also knows how to drink good wine and contemplate the stars. Out of this world. Recommended.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/books/review/Blythe-t.html?8bu&emc=bub1
21:55 - Thursday 15 April 2010 - {2} -
LOST
A cry was heard among the trees,
not a man's, something deeper.
The forest extended up one side
the mountain and down the other.
None wanted to ask what had made
the cry. A bird, one wanted to say,
although he knew it wasn't a bird.
The sun climbed to the mountaintop,
and slid back down the other side.
The black treetops against the sky
were like teeth on a saw. They waited
for it to come a second time. It's lost,
one said. Each thought of being lost
and all the years that stretched behind.
Where had wrong turns been made?
Soon the cry came again. Closer now.
(2010)
14:24 - Sunday 11 April 2010 - {0} -
This piece is either very funny or very sad, depending on what
mood you're in. SLATE writer sets out to retrieve some Amazon.com
readers' reviews of the classics, books that many of us have already
deemed are OK. But then these are some of the classic works that
she happens to like very much, so her informing methodology was
maybe a tad suspect. I don't think that when you're hungry you
should be casting a net that is just going to get you lots of rotting
fish, so I'll suggest that if you want to do this experiment, you wait
till you've eaten, then cast for the really dead ones that no one wants.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/04/02/mean_amazon_reviews_open2010?source=newsletter
12:57 - Monday 5 April 2010 - {0} -
A STORY
Everyone loves a story. Let's begin with a house.
We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the rooms
with things—tables, chairs, cupboards, drawers
closed to hide tiny beds where children once slept
or big drawers that yawn open to reveal
precisely folded garments washed half to death,
unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out.
There must be a kitchen, and the kitchen
must have a stove, perhaps a big iron one
with a fat black pipe that vanishes into the ceiling
to reach the sky and exhale its smells and collusions.
This was the center of whatever family life
was here, this and the sink gone yellow
around the drain where the water, dirty or pure,
ran off with no explanation, somehow like the point
of this, the story we promised and may yet deliver.
Make no mistake, a family was here. You see
the path worn into the linoleum where the wood,
gray and certainly pine, shows through.
Father stood there in the middle of his life
to call to the heavens he imagined above the roof
must surely be listening. When no one answered
you can see where his heel came down again
and again, even though he'd been taught
never to demand. Not that life was especially cruel;
they had well water they pumped at first,
a stove that gave heat, a mother who stood
at the sink at all hours and gazed longingly
to where the woods once held the voices
of small bears—themselves a family—and the songs
of birds long fled once the deep woods surrendered
one tree at a time after the workmen arrived
with jugs of hot coffee. The worn spot on the sill
is where Mother rested her head when no one saw,
those two stained ridges were handholds
she relied on; they never let her down.
Where is she now? You think you have a right
to know everything? The children tiny enough
to inhabit cupboards, large enough to have rooms
of their own and to abandon them, the father
with his right hand raised against the sky?
If those questions are too personal, then tell us,
where are the woods? They had to have been
because the continent was clothed in trees.
We all read that in school and knew it to be true.
Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.
(2009)
03:27 - Friday 2 April 2010 - {0} -
Lay Back The Darkness
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.
Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.
Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,
an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night
without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,
though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,
But a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,
to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.
(2003)
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/157
02:45 - Friday 2 April 2010 - {0} -
Snake Wine is a 100-page selection of Rob Schackne's
China poems written between 2002-2006. Readers,
reviewers and publishers are all most cordially invited
to reach out to: robschackne@hotmail.com.
About him, even allowing for fabrication in matters
biographical, this much we know is probably true:
Born in New York in the middle of the last century
during a relatively peaceful era, growing up
there and in several South American countries,
this continued in Barbados, in Spain, Switzerland,
the U.S. again, and then Australia — which
last place finally took him in. He attended a few
universities, serving a complicated apprenticeship
in the humanities. He says he enjoys the unusual
insights of intelligent discourse. He now works as a
Foreign Expert EFL teacher in a big city in China.
There were many sports once, viz. track and
field, ice-hockey, rock-climbing, Goju-ryu karate,
Alpine skiing, squash, scuba diving, soccer,
middle-distance running and long-distance
bushwalking. He now plays (mostly) respectable
chess and pool -- and hits the gym when his
body permits. He listens to The Grateful Dead.
He claims he can read Shakespeare in the original.
E basta così.
10:15 - Thursday 1 April 2010 - {3} -
Hold the line even if it kills you
Telling everybody you're fine
With edges less at right angles
Than just greasy simplicity —
Though all these simpletons
They almost have you beat
Look back and make peace
With the diminishing plantations
Of a restless, slowing heart
Even if it's killing you to admit
The days are losing purchase —
If when Rachel calls to say hello
There's not much future in her voice
And even smaller you're not sure
You're on a boat or on the shore
The sound that has no beginning
Holding fast to another minute
Slowing wave cracks on the shore
Here it is, this one, good night.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
Caspar David Friedrich, "The Monk By The Sea" (1809)
22:16 - Sunday 28 March 2010 - {1} -
Currently reading:
Don DeLillo (US), Point Omega, 2010
Currently listening:
Muzsikás (HUN), Máramaros - The Lost Jewish Music Of Transylvania, 1993
http://www.klezmershack.com/bands/muzsikas/lost/muzsikas.lost.html
14:45 - Thursday 18 March 2010 - {0} -
Thomas Cole (U.S.), Destruction, from The Course Of Empire, 1833-36
I am not by nature inclined toward an alarmist view of history. I prefer
things to be in a groove and to swing steadily. But a fine recent essay in
Foreign Affairs looks at some of the historiographical equivalents of a
lost game. Lately we've been seeing many tropes of the final days, pieces
on the eschatology of political domination — and on the collapse of the
American Imperium. Although I believe much of that to be considerably
overstated, if not improbably premature, I also believe this study by
Niall Ferguson to be well worth pondering.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65987/niall-ferguson/complexity-and-collapse
13:44 - Wednesday 17 March 2010 - {0} -
I am safe. I trust more; I fear less. I am centered and grounded.
— On a New Age prayer flag in a Melbourne suburb
What does it mean to read
From sorrow to more sorrow
Or from swirling dust to God?
Whether love is really like a bellows
That whispers was it actually that?
Was the issue ever decided
(The unequivocal tragedy
We'll call it dirty realism)
Carefully tending people's lies?
Irredeemable as the waterfall
Suddenly charging horizontal
Under quiet crater lake pressure
Unimagined till the spray hits you
Without shoes high in the Owen-Stanleys —
Meanwhile in a suburban backyard
Six old trees, ten different birdsongs
Held by one summer's fierce blue light
Soft black flies landing on your arm.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
22:57 - Monday 8 March 2010 - {0} -
Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
(7 January, 1916)
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/thomas
19:16 - Monday 8 March 2010 - {0} -
Currently reading:
Roberto Bolaño (CHL), Nazi Literature In The Americas, 1996 (tr. Chris Andrews, 2008)
Currently listening:
Four Tet (UK), Everything Ecstatic, 2005
15:07 - Tuesday 2 March 2010 - {0} -
Here again in no order at all is what he claims he brought back recently from Australia. Our man says he's got eclectic tastes. But I think there are lots of other things going on here too.
BOOKS
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature In The Americas
David Simon, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Raymond Carver, Beginners
Don DeLillo, Point Omega
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
David Malouf, Ransom
Helen Garner, The Spare Room
Tim Winton, Breath
MUSIC
Bobby Womack, The Poet
Monty Alexander, Stir It Up
Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté, Ali And Toumani
Babylon Circus, La Belle Étoile
The Skatalites, Occupation Ska!
Lightnin' Hopkins, Lightnin' Hopkins
Mulatu Astatke, The Heliocentrics
Alejandro Escovedo, With These Hands
The Flatlanders, Wheels Of Fortune
09:38 - Tuesday 2 March 2010 - {0} -
http://www.tctype.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Winter10.pdf
09:18 - Tuesday 2 March 2010 - {0} -
Give yourself a moment
prop yourself up on the sink
watch that face in the mirror
practise that three or four times
and go out into the world
drive to where there's a cliff
park and practise parking again
wait for the sunset to finish
practise this several times
remember how you did that
go home now go home again
say hello to them say it again
you practised it so much
copying the countless ways
you have copied everything
give yourself a moment.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
16:16 - Wednesday 17 February 2010 - {0} -
That day when warring finally
was harnessed to fireworks
while the generals sipped their teas
and tutted about fire discipline
the new children's model was found
to explode without warning too
and the fingers and the faces
wore a little of the invention
that whistled death to so many
meanwhile angry parents screamed
against the irreverent technology
and said it was only superstition
to believe that ghosts needed blood
said it was time for quiet now —
but the damage had been done
every year the demons must have their noise
and tired generals sit down pleased
and continue to lick their plates.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
05:04 - Sunday 14 February 2010 - {0} -
In Jorge Luis Borges
We hear the falling cadence
Of an obstinate man, largely blind
With maybe only ten years left
Fluent enough to remember horrors
And how well the will preserves
The images of that, and Love —
Whereas we the patient learners
Turn his old stories like a field
Sharp into our own stubbornness
Till we too are reading by candlelight
The parables of not life, not death
With just one last pitiful learning
About uncountable gruesome worlds
With as many dreams as grains of sand
For which we thank you, muy estimado.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
19:30 - Saturday 13 February 2010 - {0} -
 Traffic Lights
Fifty phantom motorcyclists
all in black
crash-helmeted outriders
faceless behind tinted visors
come thundering from one end of the road
and go roaring down the other
shattering the petrified silence of the night
like a delirium of rock-drills
preceded by a wailing cherry-top
and followed by a faceless president
in a deathly white Mercedes
coming from the airport and going downtown
raising a storm of protest in its wake
from angry scraps of paper and dry leaves
but unobserved by traffic lights
that seem to have eyes only for each other
and who like ill-starred lovers
fated never to meet
but condemned to live forever and ever
in each other's sight
continue to send signals to each other
throughout the night
and burn with the cold passion of rubies
separated by an empty street.
(1932 - 2004)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview32
14:43 - Saturday 13 February 2010 - {0} -
Currently reading:
Jorge Luis Borges (ARG), The Book Of Sand & Shakespeare's Memory, 1989 (tr. Andrew Hurley, 2001)
Currently listening:
Debashish Bhattacharya & Bob Brozman (IND & USA), Mahima, 2005
03:42 - Saturday 13 February 2010 - {0} -
Young, gifted and usually unused
that day he scored the goals that won
the final game that won the season
the other champions lifted him up
in the street the cars were honking
he was famous throughout Melbourne
people cheered all his moves after that
when he sobered up he'd had enough
his knees were shot or his body just said no
he went bush and sat among the trees
the abstraction was finally put to rest
came down the mountain and took another look
at last got back all his breath and grew his hair long
started to write his stories and poems
and he started a printing business
mostly young poetry risking it all.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
13:35 - Monday 8 February 2010 - {1} -
"I really should go back to Barber School..."
-- Doug Sahm (1969)
Didn't feel your gaze
as fractious security door
or like an iron balcony
till nightime penthouse
was an open moment
rain steadily changing
clothes trying to fly
just fifty meters away
a felicitous cigarette
because of watching you
putting telescope down
at an open window
smoking a cigarette too
and looking at the rain
was falling between us —
later leave the party
almost leave umbrella
say to a passing friend
clearly is hard the getting in
but why so hard the getting out.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
23:35 - Sunday 7 February 2010 - {0} -
TO KNOW THE INVISIBLE
The Americans tried and tried to see
the invisible Indians in the deeper jungle
of Brazil. Finally they put things in the clearing
and waited. They waited for months,
maybe for years. Until a knife and a pot
disappeared. They put out other things
and some of those vanished. Then one morning
there was a jungle offering sitting on the ground.
Gradually they began to know the invisible
by the jungle's choices. Even when nothing
replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing.
Like the woman you camp outside of, at the five portals.
Attending the conduits that tunnel from the apparatus
down to the capital of her. Through the body
and its weather, to the mind and heart, to the spirit
beyond. To the mystery. And gradually to the ghosts
coming and leaving. To the difference between
the nightingale and the Japanese nightingale
which is not a nightingale. Getting lost in the treachery
of language, waylaid by the rain dancing its pavane
in the bruised light of winter afternoons.
By the flesh, luminous and transparent in the silent
clearing of her. Love as two spirits flickering
at the edge of meeting. An apartment on the third
floor without an elevator, white walls and almost
no furniture. Water seen through pine trees.
Love like the smell of basil. Richness beyond
anyone's ability to cope with. The way love is after fifty.
(2009)
11:37 - Monday 1 February 2010 - {1} -
pace Thomas Lynch
I can't help writing this.
I'm sorry. Forgive me.
Did you strangle all delicacy
In a single careless moment?
Did you chase her away with music
You gave her to sit down and listen to
Which alas contained a secret song?
Was your every night a fretful one
When you slept like the grateful dead
Did you punch and kick your legs
As if beauty was still your enemy?
Now of course all demons rest −−
Freedom from her was hard-won.
Though the scratching you begin to hear
Is like a heavy gate upon the skin.
Did you think you could get away with it?
I’m sorry. Forgive me.
I can’t help writing this.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
03:39 - Friday 29 January 2010 - {0} -
FOR THE EX-WIFE ON THE OCCASION OF HER BIRTHDAY
Let me say outright that I bear you no
unusual malice anymore. Nor
do I wish for you tumors or loose stools,
blood in your urine, oozings from any orifice.
The list is endless of those ills I do not pray befall you:
night sweats, occasional itching, PMS,
fits, starts, ticks, boils, bad vibes, vaginal odors,
emotional upheavals or hormonal disorders;
green discharges, lumps, growths, nor tell-tale signs of gray;
dry heaves, hiccups, heartbreaks, fallen ovaries
nor cramps—before, during, or after. I pray you only
laughter in the face of your mortality
and freedom from the ravages of middle age:
bummers, boredom, cellulite, toxic shock and pregnancies;
migraines, glandular problems, the growth of facial hair,
sagging breasts, bladder infections, menopausal rage,
flatulence or overdoses, hot flashes or constant nausea,
uterine collapse or loss of life or limb or faith
in the face of what might seem considerable debilities.
Think of your life not as half-spent but as half-full
of possibilities. The Arts maybe, or
Music, Modern Dance, or Hard Rock Videos.
Whatever, this is to say I hereby recant
all former bitterness and proffer only all the best
in the way of Happy Birthday wishes.
I no longer want your mother committed,
your friends banished, your donkey lovers taken out and shot
or spayed or dragged behind some Chevrolet of doom.
I pray you find that space or room or whatever it is
you and your shrink have always claimed you’d need
to spread your wings and realize your insuperable potential.
Godspeed is what I say, and good credentials:
what with your background in fashions and aerobics,
you’d make a fairly bouncy brain surgeon
or well-dressed astronaut or disc jockey.
The children and I will be watching with interest
and wouldn’t mind a note from time to time
to say you’ve overcome all obstacles this time;
overcome your own half-hearted upbringing,
a skimpy wardrobe, your lowly self-esteem,
the oppression of women and dismal horoscopes;
overcome an overly dependent personality,
stretch marks, self-doubt, a bad appendix scar,
the best years of your life misspent on wifing and mothering.
So let us know exactly how you are once
you have triumphed, after all. Poised and ready
on the brink of, shall we say, your middle years,
send word when you have gained by the luck of the draw,
the kindness of strangers, or by dint of will itself
if not great fame then self-sufficiency.
Really, now that I’ve my hard-won riddance of you
signed and sealed and cooling on the books against
your banks and creditors; now that I no
longer need endure your whining discontent,
your daylong, nightlong carping over lost youth,
bum luck, spilt milk, what you might have been,
or pining not so quietly for a new life in
New York with new men; now that I have been
more or less officially relieved of
all those hapless duties husbanding
a woman of your disenchantments came to be,
I bid you No Deposits, No Returns,
but otherwise a very Happy Birthday.
And while this mayn’t sound exactly like good will
in some important ways it could be worse.
The ancients in my family had a way with words
and overzealous habits of revenge
whereby the likes of you were turned to birds
and made to nest among the mounds of dung
that rose up in the wake of cattle herds
grazing their way across those bygone parishes
where all that ever came with age was wisdom.
(1986)
03:22 - Friday 29 January 2010 - {0} -
03:10 - Friday 29 January 2010 - {0} -
for Philip Robert Nash
Listening to Of Montreal
Their record The Gay Parade
And reading Bolaño's Amulet
Very possibly conflating
The astounding terms of both
There's no story without courage
And so no song without a mask
That cannot be removed —
And all of them wait for fear
Churning permutations of desire
The lists of bravado before we sleep
That are universally troublesome
Shall we write about writing?
Terror befalling the unbefallen
Please don't make me laugh
Unless you are laughing too.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
12:53 - Tuesday 26 January 2010 - {0} -
Currently reading:
Roberto Bolaño (CHL), Amulet, 1999 (tr. Chris Andrews 2006)
Currently listening:
Of Montreal (USA), The Gay Parade, 1999
01:03 - Monday 25 January 2010 - {0} -
I cannot talk of love
but only of two hearts
flat against the other one
as if the beating surf
surges upon the shore
and the tide recedes —
distant clouds are white
he stands on the beach
distant clouds are dark
the wind grows heavy
his teeth are chattering
as he writes this poem.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)
16:01 - Tuesday 19 January 2010 - {0} -
This one could be read in the latest historical context of recent and
on-going searches for lost relatives — but then again, it might not.
Indented are the tiny bones
In the hapless fossil record
Vibrating an irritation
Down strange countless years —
A teenage boy holds
An exceptional surprise
The skeleton remains
Of a nervous spinal system;
Maybe unpredictably
Balanced with a tear
Everyone eschews their memory
Leaves old things undigested —
He feels maybe he can’t love fish
Frantic in understatement
Until he can hear their bones
Perfecting the continuous wave
Man, that system was really working
Crazy and open like a swirling sea
But when waters receded
Landing ancestors high and dry
They gave their augury to the earth
Left their lives behind on stone
Like the teeth of a billion frustrations —
Or nothing if not in the shape of bones.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2008)
02:41 - Saturday 16 January 2010 - {0} -
Punish Children
Who will curl forth honesty
and say that they would like to send their child back
to that sudden baby cave?
I fear having a boy
fore seeing the day I will stare into his skin
and have to say:
“You might unravel, son.
Do not try to prepare for this.
Know that I don’t know shit. No one does.”
I fear having a girl the most,
who will ask me what it’s like to die
and I will have to reply:
“Lose your virginity
and fall asleep in pain.
Be better than me.”
If that small, hairless, voteless tyrant says:
“Stop talking like you’re trying, Pop.
What is it really like to die?
Speak plain.”
I will say:
“Love writing with all your heart.
Then have kids
and write no more,
you wretched, screeching Leprechaun.”
She has that laugh ‘cause she has my sense of humor.
How strange that the woman you always wanted to meet
came out of your own body.
How egotistical and pure.
My past rushes through her like a river after winter.
I hope she fails history.
(2004)
www.brownpoetry.com
15:32 - Friday 15 January 2010 - {0} -
We all know people with an unlucky compulsion for public order. Some are clearly mad. But many are slobs who, if you ever circled back around, typically leave their tools, their machinery and their cars in bad shape, skidmarks in the toilet bowl—and a brief but unconsolable sorrow all over the world...
Victims of housekeeping
Know where everything should be
It's the dirt, never the politics
That is the enemy of order
A thousand years of genetic code
Exciting right angles and dust
Swirling straight up into heaven —
But I, in my truce with cockroaches
Will go straight to hell someday
Just like your perfect mother said
Where I'll sleep in an unmade bed
And wear yesterday's socks again.
My old trousers are neat pleated
Accumulations of the world —
Lord, I didn't wash the hands
That trouble my neighbour's sleep
How do unregenerates run free?
One day at a time, piece by piece
Putting coffee spoons in the honey
Errant coins spent under cushions
Strange notes to remind you forgot
The dirty clothes waiting on the floor
The dust that beckons outside the door
For just one more chance at you.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2008)
10:56 - Wednesday 13 January 2010 - {0} -
Águas de Março by Tom Jobim
|
Águas de Março
"É pau, é pedra,
é o fim do caminho
É um resto de toco,
é um pouco sozinho
É um caco de vidro,
é a vida, é o sol
É a noite, é a morte,
é o laço, é o anzol
É peroba do campo,
é o nó da madeira
Caingá candeia,
é o matita-pereira
É madeira de vento,
tombo da ribanceira
É o mistério profundo,
é o queira ou não queira
É o vento ventando,
é o fim da ladeira
É a viga, é o vão,
festa da cumeeira
É a chuva chovendo,
é conversa ribeira
Das águas de março,
é o fim da canseira
É o pé, é o chão,
é a marcha estradeira
Passarinho na mão,
pedra de atiradeira
É uma ave no céu,
é uma ave no chão
É um regato, é uma fonte,
é um pedaço de pão
É o fundo do poço,
é o fim do caminho
No rosto o desgosto,
é um pouco sozinho
É um estrepe, é um prego,
é uma ponta, é um ponto
É um pingo pingando,
é uma conta, é um conto
É um peixe, é um gesto,
é uma prata brilhando
É a luz da manhã,
é o tijolo chegando
É a lenha, é o dia,
é o fim da picada
É a garrafa de cana,
o estilhaço na estrada
É o projeto da casa,
é o corpo na cama
É o carro enguiçado,
é a lama, é a lama
É um passo, é uma ponte,
é um sapo, é uma rã
É um resto de mato,
na luz da manhã
São as águas de março
fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida
no teu coração
É uma cobra, é um pau,
é João, é José
É um espinho na mão,
é um corte no pé
São as águas de março
fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida
no teu coração
É pau, é pedra,
é o fim do caminho
É um resto de toco,
é um pouco sozinho
É um passo, é uma ponte,
é um sapo, é uma rã
É um belo horizonte,
é uma febre terçã
São as águas de março
fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida
no teu coração"
|
Waters of March
It's stick, it's stone,
It's the end of the road
It's a stump left behind,
It's a little alone
It's a shard of glass,
It is life, it's the sun
It is night, it is death,
It's the snare, it's the fishhook
It's peroba of the field,
It’s the knot in the wood
Lamp caingá tree,
It's the matita-pereira tree
It's wind in the wood,
Falls of the ravine
It's the profound mystery,
It's what you wish or you don’t
It's the wind blowing,
It's the end of the slope
It's the beam, it's the span,
The new roof party
It's the rain raining,
It’s riverbank talk
Of the waters of March,
It's the end of the struggle
It's the foot, it's the ground,
It's the walk on the road
Small bird in the hand,
A slingshot stone
It’s a bird in the sky,
It’s a bird on the ground
It's a creek, it's a fountain,
It's a piece of bread
It's the bottom of the well,
It's the end of the way
In the face the annoyance,
It's a little lonely
It's a thorn, it's a nail,
It's a point, it’s a dot
It's a drop dripping,
It's an tally, it’s a tale
It's a fish, it’s a gesture,
It's a silver shining
It's the morning’s light,
It's the brick arriving
It's the firewood, it's the day,
It's the end of the trail
It's the bottle of liquor,
Splinter in the road
It’s the house’s design,
It's the body in bed
It's the broken-down car,
It's the mud, it's the mud
It's a footstep, it's a bridge,
It's a toad, it's a frog
It's a hair left behind,
In the morning’s light
They are the waters of March
Closing the summer
It's the promise of life
In your heart
It's a snake, it’s a stick,
It's John, it's Joseph
It's a thorn in the hand,
It's the cut on the foot
They are the waters of March
Closing the summer
It's the promise of life
In your heart
It's stick, it's stone,
It's the end of the road
It's a resting stump,
It's a little alone
It's a footstep, a bridge,
It's a toad, it's a frog
It's a beautiful horizon,
It’s a trembling fever
They are the waters of March
Closing the summer
It's the promise of life
In your heart.
|
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waters_of_March
20:48 - Monday 11 January 2010 - {1} -
In Pataphysics Departments they study the science of exceptions. They're even thinking that exile might remove some key elements of fate. But this one, hell, I don't even get the title.
She looks towards the window
And she says it's very windy
I say please look at me —
I'm not a shipping magnate
We have studied Mme Butterfly
I'm really not a secret agent
But it's true there's too much rain
And any dreamer can skid on their ass
Slip up looking at a window glass
For final wisdom and disaffection
God and the smudges last a lifetime
The best minds of our generation
Busy washing themselves off
Pay for the lunch we didn't finish
And the many hands stretched outside
To the best minds of their generation
Beg for one long birthday noodle
A logistical pot and electrics —
We get up from the busy table
On a day won't be disconnected
From the best ends of us stretched out
Flying a kite straight up in the rain
Still don't know yet where it went.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
03:12 - Monday 11 January 2010 - {2} -
'Another day'
Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere
Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...
Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on
My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.
For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.
—Tr. David Constantine
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)
03:06 - Monday 11 January 2010 - {0} -
Currently reading:
Roberto Bolaño (CHL), Last Evenings On Earth, 1997 (tr. Chris Andrews 2006)
Currently listening:
Midlake (USA), The Courage Of Others, 2010
10:17 - Sunday 10 January 2010 - {0} -
after Astor Piazzolla
It takes so little to get the three minutes
Or so much depending on where you are
Those three minutes might be sombre
They could be ecstatic or just be quiet
The only trick is to be there at the time
After that they who look back will say
Your life is never going to be the same
Three minutes of a battle or a burn or love
You were outside it and now you're in
Well what do they know it's not a club
You survive that and you survive the next
And the three minutes fall on like the rain
That keeps on getting louder and then it stops
Three minutes with reality float by like clouds
But I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
10:29 - Friday 1 January 2010 - {2} -
Limits
Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone
Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
For all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.
If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?
Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.
There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.
There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.
There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.
You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.
And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.
At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.
—Tr. Alastair Reid
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
10:00 - Sunday 27 December 2009 - {1} -
I had already known her
the most beautiful woman
in the world as shocking
as a very dangerous wire
exposed and waiting for a child —
she hates that she was so unready
sometimes weeping in the night
there is always so much wanting
she can't believe she's so different
drinking whiskey and choler
pleading to the sadly devout
someday they will really see
their baffled glasses failed them
and finally woken they'll lean
towards another beautiful light
where they forget she isn't there.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
09:28 - Sunday 27 December 2009 - {0} -
 In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events.
In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.
—David Eagleman, From "Sum" (2009)
11:56 - Saturday 26 December 2009 - {1} -
L'infinito
Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle
E questa siepe che da tanta parte
De'll ultimo orrizonte il guarde esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete,
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando; e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e'l suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
E'l naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-leopardi-1.html
10:25 - Thursday 24 December 2009 - {0} -
for Wim Wenders
I really don't care anymore.
My thoughts are debasing me
And I can no longer quiz
A smiling world with my songs —
Rocks below in the water and the wind
I have been falling all my life
There will be an end to this descent.
An old man is watching me carefully
Just twenty cold meters away —
He sits like me on the cliff edge
I must be still to get rid of him
And watch no more of this lonely world
There is no point in seagulls wheeling.
Suddenly he is sitting next to me.
Offer him a job in my little shop
Maybe introduce him to a lovely girl
If his constitution can stand it
There looks to be enough room
How do you live in this world without desire
When the stuff of stars is in your veins
Distant, cold and fine, but there?
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
10:56 - Wednesday 23 December 2009 - {1} -
Currently reading:
Ron Slate (USA), The Great Wave, 2009
Currently listening:
Arvo Pärt (EST), Orient & Occident, 2002
10:36 - Wednesday 23 December 2009 - {1} -
I've always thought the Rastafari have it about right. Even though I'm privileged and white, I still write quite alot about Babylon — if you don't know approximately where that is, then you might have a little trouble getting out of there and into here. As Max Romeo sings in "One Step Forward": "This is the time of decision/What is your plan?"
Temperance is the measure
You take before you go out
Weighing how little was decided
How often you bit your tongue
And didn’t argue about the seasons
A minor whisky is what you call it
Kaliyuga is what the others say is left
Four hundred twenty-six thousand
Nine hundred and eighty years
Of worsening misplaced zeal
Like the man said, I don’t think I can
Put up with this shit for much longer
How can the end of days last so long
How much else will intoxicate a man
As he walks straight in chattering crowds
Pausing before the massive walls of ire
Everyone is charging everybody else
For distractions no one can live without
If the truth, they say, lacks any substance
How blessèd then is the minute without heart?
©ROB SCHACKNE (2008)
11:14 - Thursday 17 December 2009 - {1} -
The vengeance of the Lord, the fall of the proud, the desolation of the rich and
powerful: but, beyond all these, surely a profound, passionate, poetic pleasure
in ruin as such. Out come the screech-owls, the dragons, the satyrs, the bitterns,
the serpents, the jackals, the bats, even the moles, all the familiar creatures of
ruin that haunt demolished cities and blooming fancy; the vineyards are trodden
down and laid waste, the briars and thorns spring up, houses, now great and
fair, shall stand desolate, the Lord shall hiss for flies from Egypt and bees
from Assyria, and they shall come and stay. As for Babylon… “wild beasts
of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures,
and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there, and the wild beasts
of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant
palaces: and her time is near to come… Thy pomp is brought down to
the graves, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee
and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,
son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground… I will also
make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water: and I will
sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts.”
—Rose Macaulay, from "Pleasure Of Ruins" (1996)
11:08 - Thursday 17 December 2009 - {0} -
I'm listening to La Bartoli
Sing magnificently of the castrato
And damned if I know that I can
Get my ears past any barber's knife
That promised to settle the future —
Why does a woman singing of dreams
Touch my battered soul like this?
It's almost Christmas this is true
When we hardly look a beggar in the eye
But adjust the sack on our shoulders
March on there's a word we didn't hear —
Beneath my gods the sweet angels
Have never stopped their singing.
Almost Christmas and almost snow
I probably wouldn't mention this
If today I hadn't seen so much kindness
Or if out of the corner of my eye
I didn't see you coming toward me
A voice as painful as all others
Speaking like some other angel
Moving somewhat awkwardly.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
02:52 - Thursday 17 December 2009 - {0} -
It's a fine pastime, putting
together lists of things
you really like. This book
that chapter, another verse
you don't quite remember
Always just beneath
the bough of breaking tastes
that go this way and that
it's all a man can do to keep up
with her latest last best book
Listening to a dream
recounted past good sense
we have to listen well
but you know a picnic
isn't exactly a fine meal
It's not actually a list
you can sit on for long either
there are ants on the way
one of them has already arrived
damn it's got a piece of paper too.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
22:14 - Wednesday 16 December 2009 - {0} -
 You know—it might not always be obvious, but I do give
some thought to this little site of mine. Sure, it's kind of a feverish literary
diary, into which I also put some of my own work as it gets done. But
one of the chief incidentals of this computer age is how much you can
learn (about as much as you can take) from some half-smart surfing.
There really are alot of terrific new poets out there. I say new because
I'd never heard of them before. Though I can add to these pages no more
than a tiny amount of the poetry of merit I fall across, I want for those
poems what any of their hard-luck writers want—for them to keep on
being read by the steadfast few of you who still value poetry. Having
served up this blog for over two years, now it's another type of Magic
Pudding,  the poetry growing, expanding on into the music
and some of the other arts I understand some. While I wouldn't claim that
The Tao That Can Be Named... has really got very much of a theme to
it—still, this being a rather instructive life, there it goes where it has to go.
Please keep working your own thing. Be of good heart. The work is
important because in the conduct of the life we have now there isn't
really a better alternative outside of the Small Lotus Cave. (I don't
know about you, but I'm not ready for that yet.) It's true enough that
writing all the way out here I sometimes feel like a banana without
a monkey—maybe you do too—so your support is very appreciated.
It helps to feed that energy that feeds each one of us. Thank you all.
Namaste. Good night, Julie.
12:35 - Monday 14 December 2009 - {3} -
Currently reading:
Nick Laird (GBR), Glover's Mistake, 2009
Currently listening:
Kid Cudi (USA), Man On The Moon: The End Of Day, 2009
11:51 - Monday 14 December 2009 - {0} -
Look at the center of things
Where you haven't been before
Half dreams of seeing sorrow
Half adept at believing delight —
When she slaps you in the face
Every time she climaxes
It's just a reflex action she says
And she always says she's so sorry
The mirror is delivered a little late
Of course you never see it coming
On the tatami mat and futon
Where your travelling dreams
Have rolled you far into the kitchen
Ten feet away on a hard foreign floor
And when you wake up with the moon
She has you covered with a quilt
She is snuggled close to you —
An alley cat is looking in the window.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
01:57 - Thursday 10 December 2009 - {0} -
Ark
One stormy night I will open by myself
The lonely locked room beside me
I may find a candle-stub, a box of matches
A bolt of spiritual lightning to set me shivering
A stone sinks in the ocean five hundred metres off shore
The soul of a bird nesting in the cliffs is fervent and imperilled
Yes, the ocean is nearby, one stormy night
I will listen to the pounding of the waves and light the candle
Write life’s sun on the land
And the death-date of all things
But I am a young man walking towards the sea
After experiencing hardships I will be fully fledged
Three knocks on the door reverberate in my heart
The tide leaps onto the sandy shore like a great host of turtles
This night’s dagger, this flotsam from a seaborne ship
I pat the ancient ark, the bright moon hangs high
One stormy night I will open by myself
The lonely locked room beside me
—Tr. Tao Naikan and Tony Prince
Xi Chuan
http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=15454
21:11 - Wednesday 9 December 2009 - {1} -
Lesser Evils
After a morning of work in separate rooms
she said she was going to the municipal pool
and he said he would walk along the river
for a while before they met back for their lunch
of tomatoes and cheese. But in fact she went
to the lobby of the Hôtel du Panthéon
to read the Herald Tribune and drink a cup
of the Irish tea she liked and he to
the little church of St. Médard. A couple
old women in housedresses knelt in the first pews.
He sat in the back, with the drunks or alone.
And at lunch she said terrible, the lanes
were filled with kids from the elementary school
or terrific, I had it to myself. And he said
a barge full of oyster shells. Then quiet sex
with the curtains drawn against the chemistry
students conducting their experiments in the building
across the street. Incremental triumphs
of exactitude and necessity. In the evenings
they liked to fire champagne corks at the vast
darkened laboratory windows. Imagining the mice
startling in their cages, imagining catastrophe.
Turning back to their tumors with relief.
(2009)
http://www.ronslate.com/and_so_poems_joel_brouwer_four_way_books
15:59 - Friday 4 December 2009 - {0} -
The electric lights, it may well be that the electric lights
will prevent the autumn fall
and the bird call at the window,
grey as an overcoat.
The jaw squeezes a verb
and no bird appears,
nothing happens: it’s the autumn
of the falling leaves, that’s all –
no verb can thus fall.
Only the bent,
welded, muffled, cold sound
of a tolling bell,
it may well be that the electric lights
and the stone blocks for example
may well prevent
the irregularity of pavements or the crushing
of hours against each other
it may well be that the shells
of the umbrellas that blur the city
may well draw your name
like in a musical
it may well be that the shops will stay
and the stone slabs will go
and it may well not be
that the rain will insist
in such an iniquitous way.
©Daniel Jonas, 2005
©Trans. Ana Hudson, 2009
http://portugal.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=15443
01:09 - Saturday 28 November 2009 - {1} -
The Rain
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
11:47 - Friday 27 November 2009 - {1} -
Currently reading:
Joseph O'Neill (IRL), Netherland, 2008
Currently listening:
The Bad Plus (USA), Prog, 2007
15:52 - Monday 23 November 2009 - {0} -
|
Thanks
|
|
| |
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
|
(1998)
|
01:25 - Friday 20 November 2009 - {0} -
Venus on a clear night. She doesn't blink.
Music lies gently upon the mind
Like light upon a fractious planet.
John Cage said he explored non-intention.
He composed music but it composed him.
But only two sounds, the high and the low:
There's a sound of the crack of rock
Somewhere ahead in the sandy gully
And cicadas rush in to cover the noise —
Which sounds shall be prosecuted
Till there is silence at the end of music
Till the just spell of love is a winter breath.
But what listens to you listening to it?
They all say conserve your energy.
How long do you think that will last?
Tonight you stay inside the light
Your heads are turned I think
As far as memory takes you back.
Cage asked: Which is more musical:
a truck passing by a factory
or a truck passing by a music school?
Maybe you know.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
15:38 - Saturday 14 November 2009 - {0} -
...in no real order, no order of merit, no publisher or publication dates:
J.G. Ballard, The Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard
Nick Laird, Glover's Mistake
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
Matthew Eck, The Farther Shore
Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot and The Great Wave
Paul Auster, Invisible
Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet and By Night in Chile and Last Evenings on Earth
James Agee, A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text
Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole
This will likely take him the better part of a year to get through. But it's likely better not to ask. (Update: Be it known that the esteemed California Mark has once again very kindly ferried back another weighty collection, which is now looking somewhat bemused in China.)
04:21 - Saturday 14 November 2009 - {0} -
The Passenger, the 1975 Antonioni film also known as Profession: Reporter, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, apparently protected from general release for years by rights-owner Nicholson, was finally let loose several years ago. I've watched this DVD three times in the past few days, and I think it's a ripper in every way. There's plenty of Lacanian analysis to be had, if you call that fun — but you'll find no spoilers here. Its dense action concerns escape, subterfuge, and no redemption; while its subtext concerns escape, subterfuge, and...almost no redemption. As unredemptive as the film is, Antonioni still gives his wise camera-eyes a regenerative chance to mirror the inaction and the action, and invites us to feel the motivational edge of its characters' drive for a kind of authenticity. Should the premise of giving up your own identity for someone else's doesn't resonate, it's quite likely that you'll feel able to identify with some of its special moments, whether it be in an uncomfortable and unpredictable relationship, on a road that goes on forever, or in the frustration with the heat and the buglife. "I used to be somebody else...but I traded myself in." So says David Locke, the unhappy protagonist. But telling ourselves that we wouldn't be him for a billion feckless bucks won't help us very much. Actually all of us are Locke. You won't miss the slow politics in the ending. Indemnity for faithlessness on the cusp of becoming a cause — where we imagine that in a small place on this planet, time was again so compressed by hope into memory that death itself could not exist. Whose revenge was that? It was probably only the living who missed it. Hell. Give it ten stars, each with a planet with more intelligent life than our own.
Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)
04:09 - Saturday 31 October 2009 - {1} -
Dispatch from the Home Front: Halloween 2001
like every other year I sit outside with a guitar
while kids roam in small packs
from lit door to lit door
the costumes tonight are not that frightening
angels and fairies and superheroes abound
a few bloodsuckers and ghouls
a sprinkling of skeletons
no terrorists
the adults pretend to be scared
jessie (the giraffe from across the street)
solemnly hands me M & Ms from her stash
when I put the Snickers in her pumpkin
“honey,” I tell her
“it’s not a trade – it‘s a gift”
and she solemnly takes them back
the young girl in the bathrobe and curlers
wearing the sign that says
I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON
says to me
“I want to hear you play your prettyful music”
so
I hand her candy
and I pick up my guitar
to play a song appropriate to the season
(a song by the Grateful Dead)
for this world’s recent ghosts
this world
where unimaginable ashes
sift down on children’s beds
in one part of this world
the very rocks and baseballs
smell of abrasives, jet fuel, burning rubber, corpses
in another part of this world
they are making the mail glow white
long enough to kill what lives on the words
in another part of this world
this guitar would be
illegal
in that country a shrouded woman
has been carefully picking food from a minefield
(food that was airdropped in my name)
she runs and lifts her child from the ground
raising his head high up onto her shoulder
vainly trying to keep the frightening blood from spilling too much
it will take her years to fall asleep again
when she does fall asleep
she will dream of picking up a yellow bomblet
wrapping it in swaddling clothes
suckling it until it blooms hot and bright
but she will not cry
as she holds him in that dream
we all dream that dream these days
we all hold our children closer
while holding back tears
a dream like that
is not a gift
it is a trade
we have all already given
more than enough in return for this one
and you do not let go of your tears
when tears are all you have left
Halloween night
I am pushing aside the veil between the worlds
a mourning person waiting for dawn
pretending to be scared to cover real fear
while I give sweets and prettyful music
to my neighbors’children
we are all a long way from home
if I knew the way
I would take you home
01:04 - Saturday 31 October 2009 - {1} -
Currently reading:
Gerald Seymour (GBR), The Untouchable, 2001
Currently listening:
Horace Andy/Ashley Beedle (JAM), Inspiration Information Vol. 2, 2009
19:03 - Friday 30 October 2009 - {0} -
for David Sylvian & Jack Gilbert & Z
I saw it I heard how you rejected her
Because one breast had been removed
She sent you a perfumed box of dead bees
Each one laid out with precious oils
I heard how you gave your dying wife
Perfect flowers and the falling petals
Kept her awake they reminded her of you
The massive Tibetan thangka I gave you
Which I asked that you take away from China
To show your very ailing mother in Kobe,
Keep safe between small mountains and the sea —
Why did you do that to me? You asked later
Miles west in Shanghai along the boulevard
Connected to some other perfidy of mine.
How one hand can give and another disregard
That intricate picture of awful trial and liberation
I did not want to fall into the hands of deaf ears —
You loved the sun and mourned your mother's passing
But there was really no answer I could give you then
Now I say that not every wall is the same, my love
And there are still a few things Buddha hasn't told us.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
21:30 - Saturday 24 October 2009 - {0} -
http://www.tctype.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Fall09.pdf
09:26 - Friday 23 October 2009 - {1} -
I live not according to the glass walls
in our Glass House, but in accordance with
the cool and visible perfection that boils
inside my bedroom and outside in the big trees
you can see. It's the living room's opposite.
I am not Johnson. But this is my home.
My glass house become a prayer of presence,
that it stick my feet upon the marble steps
and I shall bump my nose against the wall;
that I see into all the rooms I wasn’t meant to
and I'll look through glass as a meditation
of an emptiness I never knew before. Focus eyes
and unfocus them till I see the parting inbetween.
Reality in architecture? Who could build the thing?
I did not invent this space. I have played with space.
From still-curtained rooms on moonless nights
the boys and girls from the town dare themselves
to creep far into our lucid property. They watch.
They believe they can't be seen. Finally, because
living slowly in a glass house will remind you of fire,
how much presence born of great desire and cooling
longs for this transparency — that all, all will be clear.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2007)
02:12 - Sunday 4 October 2009 - {2} -
Currently reading:
Jack Gilbert (US), The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, 2008
Currently listening:
Goran Bregovic (BIH), Ederlezi, 1998
20:12 - Monday 28 September 2009 - {0} -
O it was only in the everyday it was
Pointing the way they said it was himself
Who never crossed against the slow lights,
Who never took the last beaming chocolate
From the big box, unless it was offered —
They said strange such a man became a poet.
But he meandered and he learned quite well
The Third Man factor, how pleasure defers
In the expense of a holy misery, or even love,
The mysterious source he sometimes sensed
Counting one-two past everything he knew —
Days are knife-sharp and nights are thunder.
He crawled to his window and looked at the stars
In the morning dark, aware that there was a form
Always within his reach, but there was a form
It was touched by, that knew when he was reached
He would skip across the street and take the jewel
Never look back a moment or give time thanks.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
12:08 - Monday 28 September 2009 - {0} -
20:22 - Sunday 20 September 2009 - {2} -
Death's Door
Of course the dead outnumber us
– How their recruiting armies grow!
My mother archaic now as Minos,
She who died forty years ago.
After their processing, the dead
Sit down in groups and watch TV,
In which they must be interested,
For on it they see you and me.
These four, who though they never met
Died in one month, sit side by side
Together in front of the same set
And all without a TV Guide.
Arms round each other's shoulders loosely,
Although they can feel nothing, who
When they unlearned their pain so sprucely
Let go of all sensation too.
Thus they watch friend and relative
And life here as they think it is
– In black and white, repetitive
As situation comedies.
With both delight and tears at first
They greet each programme on death's stations,
But in the end lose interest,
Their boredom turning to impatience.
"He misses me? He must be kidding
–This week he's sleeping with a cop."
"All she reads now is Little Gidding."
"They're getting old. I wish they'd stop."
The habit of companionship
Lapses – they break themselves of touch:
Edging apart at arm and hip,
Till separated on the couch
They woo amnesia, look away
As if they were not yet elsewhere,
But when snow blurs the picture they,
Turned, give it a belonging stare.
Snow blows out toward them, till their seat
Filling with flakes becomes instead
Snow-bank, snow-landscape, and in that
They find themselves with all the dead,
Where passive light from snow-crust shows them
Both Minos circling and my mother.
Yet none of the recruits now knows them,
Nor do they recognize each other,
They have been so superbly trained
Into the perfect discipline
Of an archaic host, and weaned
From memory briefly barracked in.
(1988)
01:53 - Sunday 20 September 2009 - {1} -
Robert Frank/Courtesy of SFMOMA
No argument about having lived an unperfected life
Or that there were stories that almost changed you —
You might have been the elevator girl or one of the men
Using their daily conveyance to sit still in their offices
Blurred sight of all that goes before and what awaits
A business kind of life maybe not so divorced from loneliness
She pauses for a moment fifteen years old already tired
The problem with the elevator today the plan for lunch
The limits of dialogue her sore feet her perfect legs
Her gravity — what is this dreaminess we care about?
Is reflection but a word we use to design ourselves
32 floors up and 32 down and again tomorrow, my love?
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
12:00 - Sunday 13 September 2009 - {0} -
A Postcard From The Volcano
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
(1936)
11:08 - Sunday 13 September 2009 - {0} -
 My dearest Julie,
Did you ever get that drawing I sent you? Looks good, doesn't it?
A thousand light-years from here, I climbed to the rim of Yasur volcano
on Tanna in Vanuatu and peered down into its awful fire. I looked down at
my feet and there was a red Coke can. I saw a postcard someone had dropped.
I picked it up. A terrific photo of some severely sharp snow-capped mountains.
On the other side someone had written: But what you don't like where you are,
you won't like here even more. Only this. Wish I'd been sent that postcard.
They showed us the film A Scanner Darkly the other day. Check it out.
It's about addiction and prevarication and everybody's itch has everybody
doing it. Tell your mother it's just about photography. There, in one scene,
our drug-addled heroes' car has broken down on this shitty California highway.
They lift the hood. They are peering at the hot engine, busy studying it, doing
their best to clamor and convict a mechanical part of intentional malice.
Finally, exhausting all paranoid leads, one shouts, Don't blame the drugs!
Which was the moment all of us had been waiting for. So we cheered.
Today we discussed the million drugs. For what? The beaters we drove?
The hunger for explanations so far beyond any conventional wisdom?
Hope the 12th grade is OK, and you're making friends with good people.
Happy birthday.
Love,
Dad
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
01:15 - Sunday 13 September 2009 - {0} -
Full Moon Variations Upon A Theme
How strange!
Freezing and thawing
The icy landscape hisses.
Opening the door to go outside
I startle some fleeing, gibbering creature.
Is it the mean-spirited woodcock
Now sounding like a cricket?
Ten feet tall in front of me for
A fraction of a second
It probably was a bat.
I've been told, "Bats are our friends"
No kidding man.
Mine let me drive drunk
Back when I used to do such things.
Well, no doubt I blamed it on a full moon
I like to think I harnessed the pull
To something other than a lunatic
A moon-flower or something
Like a turtle.
JGSKILL (2009)
19:13 - Friday 11 September 2009 - {16} -
 "[…] and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
15:16 - Sunday 6 September 2009 - {1} -
What you do instead of being quiet or holding her tight
You supply more words than a corporate box of soap
Though wishing and wishing to cleanse the situation
Every single breath is bringing you closer to disaster —
You should've just held her one minute against herself
Holding your own dictionary away and your woman tighter
Well, who could blame her for throwing historical principles
When you cannot be quiet or even look yourself up —
Perfection my precious still lives classically between us
Perhaps on a chilly mountain track whether silent or bold
The children are not playing there isn't much laughter
Time is a struggling bush and we take time to avoid it
What glistens there on the leaf is a tear is not a tear —
I don't walk silent I know we should hold tighter.
©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)
12:30 - Sunday 6 September 2009 - {1} -
 Photo by George Disario
Writing Off Argentina
This morning the peso is free-floating
above the unstable world of Borges.
He knew Buenos Aires was not a city
to die in. Geneva was that much closer
to the other world. When the system fails
the theory of the system becomes pure
and the housewives of Buenos Aires gather
outside Congress and bang their pots and pans,
and their husbands gather outside the courthouse
and jangle their car keys, proudly to ask,
What have you done to our good life?
Brazilian joke: Why do Argentines run outdoors
when there's lightning? Because they think God
is taking their photograph.
Borges asked, What man has never felt
that he has lost something infinite?
When the economy falls apart, you feel that loss,
plus your pesos deflate to illustrate.
Yesterday on the Avenida Borges, we lived
in this world, but what were we like?
We took our dollars to buy leather coats
at the shop of Esteban Umansky,
who gave each of us a hat and gloves.
The president himself attended
our reception, and the ex-president,
now under house arrest for the millions
in his Swiss account. So the Argentines
go to Switzerland to hoard and die,
and we go to Buenos Aires to shop and live.
When Borges went to Geneva to die
the Argentines thought it was some kind
of poetic conceit. They were too cocky to see
he had given up trying to express himself.
Something great had been lost, some treasure.
He had decided all men are benighted.
This morning of the wrecked and plundered
I am all-seeing but my soul is blind.
I feel very much like myself.
In pursuit of a deal in leather,
in pursuit of one's money in the shuttered banks,
we are forgetting how to be decently unhappy.
Learn from the global lenders, writing off
their bad Argentine debts. Their dual wisdom:
First, understanding the loss. Then,
understanding there's nothing to be done.
I understand and I love my odorous coat
and Esteban made me a jacket as well
at a price not to be believed.
From The Incentive of the Maggot, ©2006 Ron Slate
published by Mariner, Houghton Mifflin Books
09:08 - Friday 4 September 2009 - {1} -
ULYSSES
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From tha
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_-_ritr._A_Ferrazzi,_Recanati,_casa_Leopardi.jpg)
"[…] and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."