Sunday, April 28, 2013

28 apr 2013

La BlanchisseuseHenri de Toulouse-Lautrec [Wikipedia]

La Blanchisseuse

Though she knows
smoothing cloth
how to smooth a cloth
on a flat surface

how to scrub a stain
how to warm the irons
to iron, bite off thread
tie a knot, restitch
a raveled seam

how to cut from yardage
the idea of a sleeve
to fashion a shirt
for someone else

though washing
sewing, she’s looking off
beyond a world
of fingers on cloth
of lye, of steam

undermining
the weave of labor
the dour distraction
of indoors.

Noah Eli Gordon [rob mclennan's blog]


Are You Ashamed of the Indifference with Which You 
Greet the News of the Death of Pinochet

Lyrically, country & western music is a combination of the trials
& successes of everyday life. Gilbert & Sullivan are a combination,
but the satirizing of society of the Victorian period hardly seems relevant
to our present concern. Pitched lower than a trumpet & higher than a tuba,

the French horn is not a combination. What, exactly, is fearful symmetry?
The two largest individual optical telescopes on Earth sitting atop Mauna Kea?
Thousands of small photographs combining to form the image of a wolf?
An object held in one’s hand having potential energy, a combination

turning motion, position, & mass into a balanced definition? I’ve never held
a French horn, but think I would enjoy the equilibrium of its potential heft?

The Year of the Rooster [excerpt]

. . .

(––––––––––––––––If you ask
(––––––––––––––––when Rooster’s talking
(––––––––––––––––your listening
(––––––––––––––––isn’t apt enough
(––––––––––––––––to hear it

. . .

Two seasons later
it’s the shell of a beetle
baking in the sun

brittle in the sun

I watch over you because you need me

Forgive the systematic contortion
of removals, from a coarseness comes
a fiery magnetism, from an anxious dream
an encroaching boredom

After four hours
dawdling with the wardrobe, I leave furiously
a city & its wintering sheen, remove
the hens, then those for whom
the remaining space is responsible

. . .

          It’s my fault
rummaging through dead-ends of daily experience
                 capitalizes on gratuitous snowfall
                         to sculpt some metonymic purity

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