la rive gouache

Vermillion. Or
crimson. Washed
through. The
linkages are. Not
primaries. Re-
lated to. Within
the continuum
of the mnemonic.
Painterly. J.M.W.
(-esque). Threads
used to tie. Sea
to sky. To land.
Pictorial implications.
Colour against
colour. The binders
form or common
borders. Unlike. Words.
Use other words.
The. Spaces. In
between. Much
like. Life. The
comparing of one
experience against
another. The matching
the. Marrying up
the. Placing of. Them.
Pass by & re-
arrange the past
in passing.
Some colour.
Occasional song. In
between. The spaces.

today

the
desire to
write is underwhelming

Kirsten Kaschock's

a southern: needs to souls at NEGATIVE WINGSPAN has a soul-pricking magick to it.

&, sidestepping - sleighting - slightly, Steven J. Stewart at the sidereality editors' weblog writes in a brief review of her Unfathoms:

"This is probably the best English-language book of poetry I've read this year. If she doesn't leave a lasting mark on the world of contemporary American poetry it's only because we aren't ready for her."

The Allegrezza Ficcione, Part 17

He had never passed through an international terminal so quickly before. It was almost aformal; things were done with an efficiency that he guessed had a great deal to do with his companion even though his companion never spoke, was never spoken to.

He picked up his tickets, a ridiculously low price which he paid for with travellers' cheques, deciding to keep as much cash on him as he could; was told to take his luggage with him – "The plane's fairly empty, & luggage has a tendency to get lost if there are connecting flights."

Only when they were in the Emigration area did the suit speak, asking for Allegrezza's passport which he took over to an official who stamped it. Then, after glancing up at a monitor giving flight information, he set off towards what turned out to be the most distant gate in the terminal.

The plane was boarding when they got there. The suit held out his hand, said "Go with joy, Allegrezza." They shook hands, & then the suit turned & headed back up the corridor.

The flight to Tashkent wasn't that bad, but the flight to Bukhara was all that the Iranian had intimated. There were no cabin crew. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to get the engines up to a thrust necessary for takeoff; & even then it seemed they became airborne just metres before the end of the runway. This with only a half-load of passengers. Allegrezza didn't want to think about what it would be like with a full load.

Just over an hour later they were descending again. It seemed too early to be landing, so he asked someone nearby what was happening. "Samarkand" came the answer. Allegrezza swore quietly to himself. He had been unaware that it wasn't a direct flight to Bukhara, made even more annoying by the fact that all he would see of this other fabled city of the Silk Road was the low terminal building. Through passengers weren't allowed off the plane; so he sat there for half an hour, with the engines still running & fumes coming in the open door.

They took off again, more easily it seemed this time – fewer passengers, less fuel? But half an hour later the left-hand engine started spluttering, fell silent, spluttered again then came back on. Stayed that way until they were descending towards Bukhara then gave up totally. The plane veered, was brought back on course, touched down with an expertise that seemed to indicate single-engine landings were something the pilot had experienced before.

He was the first person off the plane. Realised how much he was shaken & shaking when his legs almost failed to support him as he stepped onto the tarmac.

"Are you alright, Signor Allegrezza?" The question was asked by someone standing near the bottom of the stairs who appeared to be Indian. Brown-skinned, wearing a white shirt, levis & white joggers. On his head was a four-angled tyubiteyka, a duppi, white with black piping, & a red spot in the front that resembled a caste mark.

Allegrezza nodded. "Just wait a minute until I get my balance back."

The Indian smiled. "It is indeed a rough ride. I’m here to drive you to where you have to go. It'll be almost as rough, but not frightening."

He took the larger of Allegrezza's bags, & they set off across the tarmac, towards a small separate building near the airport's perimeter. The Indian knocked quickly on the door & opened it. There was a single occupant in the room, but his military uniform had enough bars & stars & decorations to have covered the whole of the Uzbek Army.

"Passport", he grunted. Allegrezza gave it to him. The General looked through it until he came to the Uzbekistan visa, stamped the page & gave it back. "Permitted to stay indefinitely."

"Who the hell was that?" asked Allegrezza when they were outside.

"A friend, who just happened to be visiting the airport."

The Indian walked towards an old righthand drive Landrover parked by itself, put the bag in the back, opened the passenger door for Allegrezza then went around to the other side. The engine caught immediately, purred almost, with an intimation of power that belied the age of the vehicle, that indicated that what was now beneath the hood was not what had originally been there.

"It's about a half hour's drive. South-east towards Qarshi, then south towards the Turkmenistan border. Unfortunately there's not much to see. Most of the country is the same. Flat. Dry. It's only when you head towards Afghanistan that it changes."

The house, when they came to it, was isolated & large. Two storeys high, with a satellite dish on two of the four corners. A covered balcony ran all the way around the first floor, a porch round the ground floor. There was a two-metre wide strip of garden &, almost incongruous in this landscape, an expanse of lawn with a few trees, oaks & sycamores, scattered across it plus a large pergola & what looked like, from a distance, a Henry Moore reclining nude. There was an orchard off to one side, & on the other a number of outbuildings, possibly garages & barns. He could hear a generator running somewhere.

A small man hurried out from the house as they drew up. He opened Allegrezza's door & held out his hand. "My dear Umberto. What a pleasure it is to meet you at last. Come inside. For the time being you can call me Aram Saroyan, or Yossarian – there are many names I answer to. We will have dinner soon. We will eat in the courtyard. There are fresh clothes that should fit in the room we have prepared for you. You will probably want to have a bath before you eat. Anil, show our guest the way."

He wandered back inside & had disappeared by the time Allegrezza followed the Indian in. They walked through an entry space & out into an internal courtyard paved with what Allegrezza thought of as Alhambra tiles. Large, shady, small flower beds & a small fountain which fell into a pool in which koi swam & water lilies grew. Again a covered first floor balcony with stairs leading up to it on each side of the courtyard. The house itself was apparently only one room deep all round, the rooms externally connected.

"Aram Saroyan? Yossarian?"

"He will tell you his true name in good time."

Previous Part / Next Part

Well worth checking out

Nominate the miraculous, the dead, at the last-minute with double threads deli, maybe mayo, lettuce; combat that outlasts ozone is the third sickle. Dead. Say day, unearth it. Vaults bees touche a woman tracery that methane loves; borders scorch refraction; halberd euphemism superimposed. Who valence, complacent, allots? A troubleshooter whose witch fringes music, and throatiness. A blow sickness. This.

A terrific post at the anonymous Hoth's The Red Dragon & The Black Beast

My congratulations

to Ron Silliman on the occasion of the 200,000th visitor to his site (it was 27 short of that number when I called by last night).

According to my calculations it will be 2014 before I achieve this milestone. By which time, of course, Ron will be receiving his two-millionth visitor. & R.D.'s H.D. book edited by R.S. will be going into its third printing. Or pressing.

a weather report

Rain, finally, after months of dry. Bucketing down. So dark I turn the lights on at 1.30 p.m. only to have them go out five minutes later as the power goes off. Thunder & lightning, directly overhead, only nanoseconds between flash & crash, not even enough time to count to one. I sit in the open area beneath the house, some metres back but not far enough to escape the rain which sweeps in everywhere. I do not care. The gutters flood. Through a blurring curtain falling off the roof I watch the water start to lap over the edges of the pool. Ten minutes ago it was several centimetres lower down. The cat cowers under another chair. The turtles of the Woolwash Lagoon will be hurrying to lay their eggs. At the first sign of rain...Branches break off trees. There are no birds.

The storm moves away. The birds return. The power doesn't come back on for another twenty minutes.

from Alan Ramsey's column, Sydney Morning Herald, 10/16/04

Here are (extracts from) two letters from readers. The first said:
"In times like these I tend to reread Albert Camus' Notebooks  and one entry, from August 1937, haunts me. It reads: 'Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble - yes, gamble - with a whole part of their life and their so-called vital interests .'"

The second. "Yet another fear campaign. Next time someone utters that hoary old line, 'never underestimate the intelligence of the voter', the response should be - after you've stopped laughing - 'but never overestimate their social conscience'. Hugh Mackay has noted a hardening of the heart in recent years. Well, we've got the perfect leader.
"The notion this is the land of the 'fair go, mateship, the Anzac spirit', is a myth. Australia is an insular, insecure country, uncertain of its place in the world, clinging to old allegiances; a land of 'what's in it for me?' and 'bugger the rest of you'. Where real estate agents, stockbrokers, managers and hairdressers are lionised. Where extreme, ignorant, intolerant media opinions proliferate and are applauded.
"And overarching all this is Howard. When first elected, I thought this place would be too big of heart, too full of spirit, for such a small person. However, four (terms) on the trot, lies and twists et al, he is the man! J.W.Howard, this country's choice as leader. Think on that.
"Yours in utter despair."

This poem

was originally the dedication & epigraph for Blues for New Lovers (see below)

for Amiri Baraka

                  & twenty
volumes later ( but
how many thus far
gone?)
             you will be buried
in unhallowed ground,
black man /
                       whom I love.

The Sunday Archive

Blues for new lovers

Above the midnight the invisible bird of day looks down.
MAX ERNST: Beyond Painting

   1
The day washed out
& now the black
moves in. Lolling tongue
of night that dribbles
against the window like a
shut-out animal. Persistent
softness of the rain, of
narrow branches
that drift across the
iron roof ...
                  & other
branches. The shape of them
reflected on the window
until the wind
brushes them away. Ephemeral
chinese paintings beside
& beneath & around which
the animal stalks. Is now
resting, paws thrust out,
like twin rivers.

   2
Inside,
apart from it,
we
also
rest.

This is all
too immediate, too
violent
to be devoured. Dis-
solved. Resurrected
as memory, some time,
times later.

If it had
continuity, a certain
pattern perhaps, we might
follow it, return to it
as one returns to a
melody, faintly
remembered.

                        & all this
night, shards, charred
fragments of music
would fall as flowers
fall, the colour
drained out.

   3
Your voice seems endless: &
carries my, after the moment,
shattered
body
      like an ambulance.
                              Black
journeys that I come out of
with the movements of a
drowning man, gasping for air.
Words crowd like birds
round the broken water.

   4
That you should go
so gracefully
through this room
is incredible.
That you should have
such poise, such
presentation in this new
setting, with the

black light behind you
is likewise. A rare
event.

         Before, as we
lay, matched & matchless,
your face was pitted
with black shadows.
                              Have I
instilled you with this
new beauty? Or are you
suffused with dreams, the
disproportionate magic
of the gods?

   5
The rain has
stopped now:
                        & my thoughts
move away with its drift,
with the wind, down
through the pine trees.

You, too, are distant.
& silent. Have
stopped moving & now
sit, abstracted, in a
corner chair where your body
glistens eerily before
my eyes.

            Have you
recovered? or learnt
where you are?
                        Your thoughts
& how you gather them. Like
flowers. Placed
in the vase
your fingers make.
                  The
new
      set of responses. Not
grace. Or beauty. Not new
skills, but a rearrangement
of them. A
reformation.

   6
& now your fingers
find me. & graze my skin.
In the soft light
form flickering shadow-patterns
that you move through. Towards
me. Gliding like a boat
caught in the tide's
drift.
         & as you slowly
lower yourself, the night pauses.
White lilies glint. Trains
howl in the distant forest.

            The land
outside
is a mountain
                  of mad moonlight.

1967

A new issue

of BlazeVOX is up.

A Question of Doorways #2

A prisoner is facing execution. All avenues of appeal have been exhausted. They are prepped; & led into a room in which there are two doors in addition to the one through which they entered.

There is a uniformed guard in front of each of the two doors. The Prison Warden tells the condemned person that one of the guards is a pathological liar, the other invariably tells the truth. Behind each door is an electric chair, but only one of them is connected. The guards know which is which.

The Warden says to the prisoner that if they enter the room with the unconnected chair they will be set free immediately. There are two options. One is to pick a door at random & risk the 50-50 chance of choosing the live chair. The other option is to ask one question of one of the guards, & based on their answer enter the room where the dead chair is with certainty.

What is the question they should ask?

Not Apple Danish but Astral Finnish

from an email from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, 10/13/04

btw, Mark, we met you know, I saw a nice dream where you and I met, and you spoke Finnish ! That's all I can remember...

from an email from Karri Kokko, 10/15/04

For what it's worth, I wanted to tell you I saw you in my dream last night. As it happened, you were sitting beside the road in a residential area of Helsinki, just a block away from where I used to live as a teenager. You were sitting on the ground, cross-legged, and presumably reading a book or writing something in a journal. I've seen your picture, and although this guy looked nothing like you, I recognized you immediately. Walking up to you, I said: "Täällä se pelikaani vaan uneksii." You looked somewhat puzzled, at first, but soon enough picked up who I was. We started talking, in perfect Finnish, of course, just like two friends carrying on an old conversation, and eventually launched on a long, meaningless walking journey through the city. Nothing important happened, and I don't remember any specifics about our exchange, but the overall feeling of the dream was delightful and pleasant. Strange things happen over our collective internet, wired or not.

What's Finnish for spooky?

zotz

Malcolm Davidson visits the zoo where a cageful of capuchins are forthcoming. & fifth. & sixth. Gdansk, Malcolm.

is that a battery on your back, or are you displeased to see me

Have a look at the photos on Is Bush wired?

Many viewers thus saw a squarish bulge the size of a large battery pack under the back of Bush's suit jacket, with an S-shaped cord appearing to snake up the right side of his back.

There was a Robert Heinlein novel, The Puppet Masters, about aliens that clung to people's backs & took them over. & in the episode of Doctor Who I watched last evening - the Australian public broadcaster has been re-running every single one of the zillion episodes of the series; tonight we change Doctors to Tom Baker, my favourite - spiders from the planet Metabelis Three take people over in the same way once they've been transported to Earth by means of the mystical magical mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, the jewel lies in the lotus. Or was it the vibrator envigorates the vertabrae?

hey mr tambourine man

It's probably apt that I add Karri Kokko's Blonde on Blonde to the sidebar on the day when he posts a black piece.

The Allegrezza Ficcione, Part 16

Allegrezza almost stumbled as the door closed. He sat down in a chair, got up again, walked around the room, sat down, got up & went & stared out the window seeing only his own reflection.

He didn't know whether to leave Iran or to stay & see how things played themselves out. He felt he had discovered enough clues or, at least, hints to verify his ancestor's story, but things were not always what they seemed, stories were embellished, or deeds misrepresented.

He had a bath, he masturbated to try & ease his tension. It didn't help. He tried to pick up Idoru where he'd left off on the plane to Baku, but the first paragraph of the new chapter threw him.

"See how things work, Laney? 'What goes around, comes around?' Know those expressions, Laney? How some things get to be clichés because they touch on certain truths, Laney?"

He turned on the TV & watched the Government channel with the sound turned off, trying to lipread. It was all talking heads, very little pictorial stuff, only backdrops of maps & posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

At eleven o'clock the phone rang. He picked it up.

"There is a name on the list. You can sleep soundly. I will see you in the morning."

He could not sleep. He slept.

At nine there was a knock on the door. This time the suit was alone.

"Pack. Pay the bill. I will drive you. I saw in your passport there is a visa for Uzbekistan. Do you still have dollars? Or dollar Travellers’ Cheques?" Allegrezza nodded. "Good. The fare will be cheaper then. There is a plane leaving for Tashkent at noon. It is never full. From there you will fly back to Bukhara. We will stop in at a travel agent I know on the way to the airport to arrange for your tickets. We will talk in the car."

It was another fifteen minutes, after they were driving, that he spoke again.

"I am glad you do not ask questions because there are not many I could answer. But I am sending you to a man in Bukhara, an Armenian, who should be able to tell you a lot more. There will be a high price for his answers, but most likely one you will be willing to pay."

He pulled over, stopping outside the least likely travel agent Allegrezza had ever seen. It appeared to be a tea shop from the front, tables & chairs on the pavement, a counter open to the street. No greetings from the customers, but Allegrezza sensed a reaction of something more from them than a recognition of the suit, almost a mute military salute.

Allegrezza followed him inside, towards the back, then through a beaded curtain in the side wall & into a small room where two men sat in front of computers. The suit asked Allegrezza for his passport, gave it to one of the men whom he told – ordered – to book a seat to Bukhara through Tashkent.

The suit laughed. "If you thought Iran Air was bad, wait until you fly Air Uzbek. Old Antonovs, more of which fall from the sky than land. It's the only way they can get new planes, insuring them for more than they’re worth."

The man at the computer spoke. "The tickets are booked. You can pick them up at the airport. Pay for them there. Here’s your passport back."

They went out to the car. Once back in the traffic the suit continued talking.

"What I can tell you is that the name was on the list. Two names, in fact, a Christian one, Giovanni Allegrezza, & a Muslim one, Rashid al'Farah. The same person, but one who converted to the True Faith. That he served the Master well, with information & with scholarship. They had a contract, five years of service & then the Master would assist him to travel further East, would provide him with letters of introduction to people who would help, who also served the Master.

"I am sorry that you won't be following the same route as your ancestor. I would like to have driven you directly to Bukhara, travelling along the Silk Road, but the geo-political conditions of this modern world mean that I am persona non grata in Turkestan. So a different method of travel & a different way, further than you need to go & then back again. Nor will I give you any letters of introduction, or any names. I leave that up to those who will meet you. These days the committed word is a dangerous thing to carry round, to let loose in the air."

"This list you speak of," asked Allegrezza. "What is it? & if lists are unsafe then why do you keep it?"

The suit smiled again but this time there was little humour in it. "It's true I am the keeper of the list, but I keep it well away from me. It is a duty that was passed to me. Perhaps it is little more than an honorary title, for these days we are little more than, how is it you describe them, a Benevolent Society. Looking after the descendants of those who have served the Master. Certainly we still have some power, but it is covert, not overt. & we seek not to influence but to guide. We work within regimes, but are still looking for a regime that is stable enough to last for more than a few decades. When we find it perhaps then we can consolidate again.

"The overthrowing of regimes means that sometimes we may come down on the wrong side. I was a follower of the Ayatollah. The keeper of the list before me was a member of SAVAK, the Shah's hated secret police. He gave the list to me before he died, around the time when the Shah left the country."

"What happened to him?" asked Allegrezza.

"As an agitator for the Ayatollah I had no choice. I killed him. It was expected of me. He expected me to. Regimes change but Hassan endures. He made the sacrifice willingly."

There was no further conversation until the airport.

Previous Part / Next Part

a sort of milestone, or assorted millstones

Poem #50, The Red Model, has just been posted to Series Magritte.

The Poets' Corner

Anny Ballardini has done me the honour of including some of my poems in the Poets' Corner she curates at Fieralingue. It's a wonderful list to be part of. Many thanks, Anny.

The Lovers

Two paintings of the same name, done in the same year, of which this is one, at Series Magritte.