SNAPSHOTS 2

so little time  
            so many infinities

A PoetryEtc Project:
Week Two:
Wednesday May 7th

Each hour they grow fewer, the splayed
lipped, white drift of the apple blossoms
falling to the wind, the 90 lumens
of the brilliance of paper falling, shredded
to the floor, even incised with the black burning
of someone else's sacred defoliation, love is not
transitory enough but snail-like shapes
self to shell, or hooks like scorpion tail
in crevice or niche, long past luck or life.
Who wants to love forever? Love should fall
like the apple blossoms, die at the kiss
of a bee, learn to perish, come to an end.

Rebecca Seiferle
San Jose International Airport 10:20 am

SAY, NATHAN LYONS

Still remember that
a vivid recollection of that specific image,
years returning it.

Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, Maryland /
12:05 AM

Yeah, yeah

Information is the mountain, yeah
and the mirror is the dark, brilliant.

Eyes are scratched as words fall in
tick, tick, tick - decision.

Blinking suns crack the ceiling
below is backwash, below, below.

Wired, weary in beautiful waste
then they turn off the air, yeah.

Jill Jones

- Wed 7 May, 7pm, still in the office, Sydney, Australia

Transformations : living I'm purified as a troubadour and the cruelty worn
by him

She with them murmur and they

by them murmur clenched as falcons

no troubadours troubadours troubadours or jousters

despise cruelty of jousters, clenched and ridiculous jousters,

them as unsound they with I, they are jousters,

Apollo's jousters, jousters,

shown consideration, consideration, clenched of jousters,

As bards, poets they murmur and she will murmur warm

they murmur the murmur and unsounded mutual cruelty

when I am downstairs flowing I'm shortened

by troubadours and jousters, unrestrained

troubadours murmur

of Apollo's falconry

I'm rejected / purified in their visit of slight

shown living are troubadours with falcons,

many are downstairs as we speak

and clenched consideration locks

conformity by falconry, unrestrained conformity

they are not worn technology but floating birds

Indeed, and as the worn ridiculous poets

purified troubadours downstairs.

ridiculous poets recite their ideography as unusual cruelty

Geoffrey Gatza

the keyboard
in front of him
has turned into
a swirling ocean
all moving dragging
swirling sinking
pulling him down
he gasps for air
but his fingers
fighting the undertow
find no purchase
and he is gone.

patrick
raynes park london
7/may/0 3:04 PM

snow on the ground
sliding back from brown
grass on which
a more brown than white
rabbit crouches
ears twitching

& staring it seems
right at me
in the window far
above

but it just lies there
quiescent it might be

then i turn around &

it's gone

Doug Barbour, 06:45, Edmonton Alberta

the prime minister's been photo-shopped
to look like an angelic intellectual, sans
wings against a clear-blue backdrop, younger,
      thinner, honest and pale faced with concern,
while the foreign minister's taken a course
      in smiling, eyes and all, and appears in
the ads as a soft-spoken, good-humoured
spiritual leader, with non-
identifiable muzak of the softly
meditative kind playing non-stop
in the softly lit background -
and this trick's bloody working,
according to the gallups & such,
so now we must brace ourselves for yet
another four years of the old lies, the
old, devil-may-care exploitation
in the name of progress, seemingly
aimless, yet cruelly planned,
glossed over yet again with a fresh
coat of golden promises for fools ...

      With the endless
flood of pamphlets, an undeserved,
unexpected issue of Chicago Review
arrives by mail out of the blue
and saves the day with its
glorious cover by Tom Raworth
and Nate Dorward's great review
of Joyce, Trevor.
      All is not lost.

Árni Ibsen.
Hafnarfjördur, 07/05/03.

The Drought of '03

Do they know where
their next meal is coming from,
these birds in the park?
So hard is the season,
small parrots from the hills
have come into town.

At the weekend cottage
it was so quiet
you heard rose petals
flutter on to the tablecloth.

The drought blazed on.

Returned to the suburbs
you checked the back-garden,
goldfish and fountain,
falling asleep to its blurred
plashing, aching for
a big cool change.

When it came it lacked the drama
of fondly remembered rainstorms.
Those in the news with
livelihoods threatened
were still in harm's way.

The long cracks in the park turf
took days to heal over.

6.30am, Thursday 8 May 2003

Max Richards
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Cat flits in thru catflap
Sits and stares at me at computer
Waiting to be fed
Me into kitchen
Select plastic pouch and scissor open
Mash up contents
Feed Cat
Cat gobbles
Cat flits out thru catflap

 

Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset,
England 10:06pm

Layer upon layer: database access
wrapped in a COM component
bound by a meta-language
declaration to a service
description; the ISAPI
handler unbundling the goods;
above all that,
an ASP script extracting
a document ID
from the query string, and passing
it in to a method
invoked on a proxy.

That's server-side.

The client calls out,
via HTTP, to the ASP
page and retrieves
the schema document,
which the validator factory
responsible for building
validators that build
objects of a class
that implements
ISpeakXML
uses to validate
those objects' fields.

* * *

The schema repository places data validation
rules under centralised control.
It owns the logos, but has naive
version control features. Authorised users
can check in new refinements, although a wholesale
remapping of the data space would make
everything break forever.

* * *

This is a system, a real one. I knocked
it up this afternoon. Systems aren't hard,
intrinsically. This one would take three times
as long to document as write again from scratch.
Systems like this are made of simple pieces.
Societies are not, although you can still
boil their constituent moving parts
down to a soup of quarks, if you've energy
enough to spare.
What's doing the serious work
where systems join with visions of the social
is metaphor. Much politics is the school of driving
one metaphor berserk, so that it rears
over the others, swipes,
smirches its claws. Such language, aroused,
agglutinates; buries the non sequitur
in a far-gone flow of glucose. Whereas
my son's chicken pox glowers through calamine
lotion patches, and is doing no serious
work; but threads through the social bond,
tunnels through protocols, does not noticeably
give a shit what's written on your ID.

(Virus time is not human time; virus
space is not human space, but space
invasion. Not the most exquisitely
nuanced and elaborated map of might-
meets-right can circumscribe its influence).

I come back to the limits of description, which are not
owing to a default of vocabulary. We can build
ontologies on the fly if needs be. That isn't
where we tumble into the pit. The insects that buzz
our dazed, prostrated persons are not mocking
our inattention at school.
The failure
to systematise is honourable, if it's what
was meant, and might be humoured if it
wasn't. Systems are for the enterprise, and adroit,
facile minds like mine that clutter afternoons
with overlapping abstracts, flow diagrams,
pronouncements about architectures. Off the holo-
deck, there's no-one to call out to
when the script buckles: no server and client sides,
nor "middleware broker for seamless integration
of legacy and cutting-edge deployment".

Dominic Fox, Leicester, UK

MY NEIGHBOR

The guy next door I never see
squats on his lawn extracting
the plague of weeds that's taken hold
this strangest of springtimes. May,
when by rights the sky should be white
with sunlight and the nearest moisture
(the unsalty kind)
400 miles away .  Strange to complain
about rain
in this desert. Each in its place, one wants
to say, and its place
is winter, or
what passes here. Meanwhile his mother, who planted
morning glories to smother
the rest of the neighborhood flowers, because
"I like them," she said, as if to say
the torture of cats, his mother invisible
within the house. The dutiful son
pulls weeds.

Mark Weiss, San Diego.

it's all in the digging

it's Wednesday and the whole house
is alive with colour. yellow bounces off boards.
metal soughs on a tin roof and a red rose
is solitary warmth amongst autumn's damp.
on the front steps it's time to eat
a pastiche of wholemeal bread, Strasburg polony,
egg and cheese (not all at once of course). there's a tangle
of hands for the crust. instead, fingers dip into cheesecake,
remembering the spring of their weekend thinking.
in the courtyard, the gardener walls in their conversation
with a lorry load of loam, turns the soil over the spade's
thin back - landscapes old agapanthus.
already the earth rustles with lavenders and whites.
it's a matter of how much he loves trees and solitude
the way he thuds the earth, pats it gently down.
it's a scene of propagation, each one pulsive in the digging
for words, flowers or love, but mostly
birds amplify the sound.

Helen Hagemann
Joondalup, Western Australia
Wednesday 1.30pm

/the mountain went up and down again

like the breast of a young girl

vertigo of man envy of woman/

 

/three poems to be sent for the wood/

 

/covering its abruptness its flanks with hidden still statues of a
drunken artist

i know where his heart is we come back and go encircle a pillow his voice/

 

/a day spent away/

 

/with the leitmotiv of a third tree or a snapshot in her head/

 

/for some reason for the same reason for other reasons, this is not
grammar, or mathematics, or logic)

 

/not even the salad the sore throat the feverish dream the idiosyncrasy

not the marbled view the plant or flower/

 

/nothing is in front of death when death has reaped life continues
fever as a layer rests above fever/

 

/the heat has struck

glues to the leaves sweats the walls dims lights/

 

/from one door to another room in a daedalean throb/

/are you all right my dear/

/how far how distant how weak life

life is/

 

wednesday from 11 to 11.38 pm.

 

anny ballardini