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The visual & the poetic.
July 31, 2012
The Building of a Homeless Culture by Steven McCabe
A memory is feeling a curved length of polished wood static in its
placement
Stars distant and alive except the ones that are dead
Memory swims in a dream montage seeing with a child’s eye
Thought seeing thought
Memory falling between stars turning round and round a leaf
Fell into my hands come from another world
May 7, 2012
Down The Pipe by Angye Gaona
Please refer to January 15, 2013 for a more in-depth treatment of this poem
I follow the way of the sternum,
I search for the origin of thirst,
I go to the bottom of a pipe of silver walls,
solid due to time,
moving when the flood,
when childhood, was freezing.
I collect the rootlets of thought.
I carry them on my eroded back
next to the wild oblivion falling from me.
They look out
from small caves,
the signs of pain,
and fast elude the looks
and hide again in the skin of the pipe.
Inscribed on the walls
are the undecipherable coordinates
of the prehistoric ray
that formed my face.
It is a time of depths,
a time without syllable,
when I am only a sound
in transit to fatigue.
I search for a spring
to bathe the question affixed on my history.
I search for a new-born life
and I find thirst.
I follow the way of the sternum.
Translated by Nicolás Suescún
Angye Gaona is a Colombian surrealist poet facing politically inspired legal difficulties.
March 5, 2012
Background Singers We Never Knew by Steven McCabe
Soaking you up like a sponge
A background singer’s nightingale voice warbles
“Sha-la-la”
Drying you like driftwood
Filming in Kabul, farming in Haiti,
Finally divorced in Montreal, a little cabaret
Here and there
Getting along
Getting older, getting greyer
A freighter docking in the fog
The voice you were in love with
“Do-wah do-wah”
Swoops and dips beneath a bridge
The brightest carnation in the lead singer’s jacket
Transmitted with static
Her voice spotlights the background –
A medieval painting exhausting perspective
The freighter crashes into a support
The bridge buckles
That beautiful song by the girl-group on the oldies station
Dissolves into chaos
You spread her legs
She hears the bridge collapse
“Doo-lang doo-lang”
Her mouth a half-hidden oval
Cloaking you with hope
Before Giotto or double-tracked stacked vocals
Or stone Buddhas in Afghanistan
Somebody discovered that wee spot
Where the Big Bang originated
Unlocking all of the voices sea-to-sea
“La-la-la” and “Shooby-shooby-do”
The background singers we never knew
Growing in strength and volume
And you betray the one you wanted
With an ice-age princess
Wearing an obsidian necklace
Lifting her hands wet with menstrual blood
Bleating into the moon’s aureole
In the still of the night a starburst of wonder preserved
An eye within the word seeing sound
Everything since shadows that voice
Translucent lamentations in three-part harmony
Initiated into the temple of voodoo
We are the background singers
Filling ourselves with slanted ale
The melody of those we never knew
Swooping in white satin or pink chiffon
Backing the lead singer
Smooth as a gleaming marble column
Shade cast from pillars washes across the working lips
The unison of singular
“Aahs”
Dipping into a groove
Swooping and sliding
Needles lift
Singles rise
And fall
Free falling
A collapsed bridge and a cloud of dust
Quieter than your lovemaking/ the soft absence
Of your beloved
You see the moon through a crack of stone
from Hierarchy of Loss – Ekstasis Editions – 2007
February 22, 2012
The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower by Dylan Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
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