·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

“The coughing cacophony”, no one wants to hear a poem
About a cold, no one wants to write a poem about a cold,
Everyone I know has a cold, or is getting over one or knows
They will have one. In the day time it’s socially bearable, acceptable
To talk about your cold, but at night, with nobody there
But the body beside you, the involuntary coughing of both of you, a music,
Its jagged edges cut out thought, cut out dream:
A dentist with a drill touching the nerve. Who in the hell wants to read
A poem about this, the poet who makes music out of fucking coughing,
Strained muscles around the chest and not capable of saying anything
On top of which it is too cold to get up and make tea, or drink water,
Or suck on sweet lozenges; it’s just an unroyal pain when, finally,
You fall asleep only to dream you are in a weight room lifting 500 pounds
Worth of barbells. Somehow you have gotten the load of steel high
Above your head but there’s no way to breathe or bring the bells down;
You wake up stunned, and again, cannot fall asleep, while the mind’s eye
Cannot keep from a monumental white fringed wave, a 100 foot high
Wall of water on “home video” on a beach in Sri Lanka about to crash
Followed by bodies and buses at float equally in the swirl of waters
And how can you be sweating the intimate pain of a cold between sheets
While the “forces of nature”, these quakes and ocean forces, ripped open
The earth’s skin to which Lear’s ‘but flies to the gods” is not at all
A useful quote in that these, these children, families and so-called
“Tourists” are not flies, but human beings dying there, dying right there
On the TV screen and there is absolutely not one thing (not one spell, not
Any medicine, not any “great military nation”, not even one honest ballot,
Not one goddamn thing that anyone can do about it; there’s not even a music
That one will ever write, other than its own strange, terrible music, one
In which one suspects the world was once first born, and for that witness,
That knowledge - so awesome, so terrible - maybe one can be grateful,
humble & charitable, or maybe not; for the dead remain really dead and,
Beyond the grief of so many, there is a silence around the bodies, a silence
To which no one can speak, an unbearable silence that cannot but claim us
Into which and where we know not a thing.

Walk a certain street for signage
Walk another for perspective
Walk another to ignore everything
Walk another to meet yourself:
This gray kitten. This black & grey raccoon
This animal with a fat butt
This animal with black and white wing tips
Out and up from nose and eye:

Walk further
Meet Downy Red Woodpecker
Pecker on the Pepper tree
Peck Peck Peck & Peck again
Slide your torso round the limb
Scoot up & down
Borrow the eye, borrow the eye
What you don’t peck
Fly back round again:

Walk walk
The sound in the burrow of the bark
The sound in one’s heart, liver & spleen
Thump thump the new Doctor goes
Releases his forefinger snap against the skin:

There’s no way out
There’s no way in
Rich or poor
Skin within skin
Walk & walk
Up hill & down
Round corner & bend:

You & You
& You, too
New Year (walk, walk)
Once again
Amen.

A couple more “senusals’ from Sleeping With Sappho:

105.A

As white as the flesh on a skinned pear
Sliced in half, tilted on the white saucer:
There is not a bent finger not ready to reach.

105,B

Not different than the Hawthorn’s red berries on the City Street
Young boys grab and throw them:
The first ‘pitter-patter’ on a young girl’s back.

****
Well, it is that season. The Political Collective life is so down these days -
capped by Time Magazine calling George Bush ‘the man of the year’ - there is, I sense, a large refusal of the spirit to participate in any way that might reflect approval on our ‘leaders’ and their corporate allies in the economy. Buy small, give authentic, etc. seems code. Make gifts of your own signature - a. It’s otherwise very drab out there. Celebate with friends in small gatherings full of good food. Like small tribal fires outside the walls of D.C. Babylon. Indeed, on a psychological level, this country does seem to have taken on the concrete bunker sense of Baghdad’s so-called “Green Zone.” Even in we are not, we are told to
behave as if mortars are about to fall and we should barricade our lives and no longer go out into the world unless suspicious and well protected against a sense of invisible threat. Who are these people who have given us this nation and self-destructive vision. I suspect this is going to go much worse than the McCarthy period of the Cold War in the Fifties. Dark, dark, the vision given is so dark.

Minimally, light a candle this shortest day of the year. A breath of hope.

(16.Alt)

One woman says a soldier with a goat

Another says a soldier with a fox

And I say it is rarely the one you are with

But how you hold new love in your arms

It is difficult not to be confused

I have been defeated by many

Less beautiful (Sylvia)

Who found me not

Nor would she sail to Crete

For me nor our other lovers

Nor did she offer clear wine or Iris –

Out on her own

The dark

Her shadow faint

I must forget everyone:

Why she would not rather see my wanting face

The cut light across the peach in my hand:

Rather the fat soldier exiled from Ithaca

Routed and scarred purple by Odysseus

] may that she not return

]

] part my arms

]

] outward

]

] expectant

I went to the San Francisco flea market today, the one that fills the Allemany Farmers’ market space every Sunday. Filled with vendors and a ragtag mix of “up” and “down” class buyers, I suspect many of us are drawn here because we are looking for “raw” finds, ones with the patina of age, authenticity, and the aura of a fresh sense of surprise that only a sense of antiquity (even relatively recent) can provide.
Or, as an alternative approach, there is my companion who gets a kick out of looking for provocative kitsch: “Look for the stuff that’s most likely to make intellectuals grit their teeth,” he laughs and declares as part of his day’s ambition. Soon he points at a varnished artwork painted on the two-foot wide surface of the cross-section of an oblong piece of a Redwood’s trunk. The image is a pale, pink-hued Bambi-like landscape of trees, snow and an iced-over pond. Gratefully he does not buy it. A few stands later, my friend quotes the early 20th century German collagist Kurt Schwitter’s dictum, who said, “Find objects that have no obvious intention.” For a dollar I watch him buy a garden trowel with a mottled orange wooden handle and a pointed rust covered blade. Indeed – like Marcel Duchamp’s shovel and hat rack “readymade” art objects, the trowel dislodged from a bunch of other old tools and held up in the air - looks attractive and curiously ornamental. As a trowel, it is definitely not ready for any re-use in a garden, besides, in any case, my friend has no garden. Next time I am in his Victorian flat, I am sure it will be somewhere up a mantle or ledge.

I am more interested in going to Alvin’s - the aging hippie, a little overweight with long blond hair loosely curled-up and rolling out from under his hat – who always appears to sit comfortably while he oversees a stable of several tables of boxes of photographs, books and ephemera. Alvin has a
great eye for snap shots. In fact, Robert Johnson, curator of prints at the Achenbach Foundation and the author of ANONYMOUS - a new, oversized Thames & Hudson art book based on Johnson’s personal snapshot collection – is known to frequent the Alemany Flea Market. Alvin’s space, I suspect, was undoubtedly the trough from which Johnson acquired several photos found in the book. Indeed - ever since San Francisco’s 1998 Museum of Modern Art Show, “Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life,” - flea market vendors began to put the individual photographs over whiteboards into glycene envelopes and up went the prices; what used to loosely piled on a table and sell for $1 or $2 maximum is now priced at anywhere between $10 and $50. Equally interesting is that flea market vendors, like Alvin, have also become snapshot curators, ones that make the initial choices and determination of value of what comes to market.

Alvin’s curatorial choices - and I suspect that with few exceptions – have become quite influential and emulated by other vendors in flea markets through out the Bay Area, and maybe beyond. Three years ago, at his stand, the favored photographs most often included include dark shadows, or figures in silhouette. A kind of severe Realism of whites versus darks, and a solid sense of delineation between subjects (dark side of house versus illuminated figure) were par for the course of works you might find in any box, and the most expensive.

Today at Alvin’s, however, the asthetic has changed. The focus of the photographs now instead appears to be on a kind of artsy sense of the ephemeral. Figures - say two standing persons in one photo with their faces close together - dissolve into white light so as to suggest a mystery within the facial gesture (terror, eroticism. aging, etc.) Other images include overexposures, or action shots, the “mistakes” of which developed into a rippled appearing texture of dark and white blurs. Instead of photographs with solid black and white contrasts, images with hidden mysteries were now the dominant aesthetic.

Alvin - in his days of clearing people’s storage lockers, garages or buying estates outright - had clearly evolved from the earlier aesthetic and was making different choices. Instead of $10 prices, the pieces were now in the $15 to $30 dollar range. Alvin had progressed – it seemed - from a commitment to stark realismto some cross between a luminism and tonalism. Who knows - I wondered - what had caused his switch in taste and how these new choices might have already impacted private collectors, galleries and museums – those figures and institutions beyond us “bottom fishers” in the flea market. Indeed, who knows, Robert Johnson’s aesthetic proclivities and buying habits might have influenced Alvin to change - though I much doubt whether Johnson, with his apparent genius for bottom-fishing, would ever identify his own professional calling to any vendor.

Ironically - in the process of doing my own fishing into one of the boxes - I happen to discover a vertical 3″ by 5″ photograph of the cross-section of a spiral blade on a large industrial steel drill. The eye of the photographer had focused the camera at a slight upward angle to catch the light and darkened undertones across the slanted breadth of the curved blade, its spiral descent supported with the darker, welded metal hinge folds that attach to the drills central and cleanly illuminated white post. In fact - at the right upper part of the blade - a metal vice clamp is holding part of blade on to one of the steel folds. When I look even closer - in the top background - I see the dark elements of a wooden scaffold. The drilled is apparently being built or repaired inside a workshop.

In the still frame of the photograph, the power and severity of the drill’s capacity to cut into the ground, or whatever material, is uncompromised by any artistic affect other than its own sheer presence. I and my companion find it stunning.

And only $8!

“That’s a surprising choice,” says Alvin. Apparently I had betrayed his expectations, or the aesthetic of the day.

“Let me tell you, Alvin,” I pretend to pontificate, “this is a first rate example of ‘Precisionism.’” Perhaps demonically, I thought I would throw out the term that would give him an authoritative means of ascribing value to a different kind of photograph, and, perhaps, question his embrace of fuzzy, atmospheric images. “This is like work from the thirties,” I go on, “where artists painted and photographed factories, like the work of Charles Scheeler. That was art and photography done back in days when people took pride in the architecture and the tools associated with industry.”

“Oh,” he responded. ‘I’ve got lots more of those in the photos from the same guy: pictures of screws, bolts, pliers. All the machinery and parts that you can imagine”

“Bring ‘em next time. I will be happy to have a look.”

Who knows - if he experiments and finds a market - maybe Alvin will again change snapshot aesthetics. Or, ever alternatively, what Alvin prizes as significant will always be his own independent and changing taste. I am very happy with what I got for $8. And, as with my friend, I will be first to complain when he marks up the prices on similar work. I doubt if I would have paid $30 for the “screw.” Indeed, it is funny how the flea market permits ones own inner-aristocrat to join hands with ones own inner-cheapskate and then make this fun dance around folks like Alvin.

I am sure Alvin knows our game real well - and that’s part of his vendor pleasure.

What follows - as well as in the previous few blog entries - are new Sappho pieces. Previous such work is collected in a faux ebook volume,
Sleeping With Sappho, easily gotten to at:
http://www.fauxpress.com/e/vincent/

30.

]noon

Guys
Morning to night
Refuse to take a look
Even with the lupine bushes in our hair
And the occasional slap you give me on the butt
We should go take a room and fall asleep
Or wrap our arms around the old men
Already drunk and fast asleep on the City benches
]
If there is a bird in anybody’s pants
It’s lost its beak.

31.

She is neither equal nor a god
She is perhaps most like you
Mute, overlooking the cliff
There’s no sugar on her tongue

A rasp for a whisper
Shakes nothing loose in my heart
I look away, desperate
Where is someone I can speak to?

Yes, the one with the pomegranate jewel
Bright red in her dark hair:
I am no longer blinded
There are honey hives in my ear

A chill separates from my skin
Released, marble turns liquid
Copper and white
If I look closely there is a bleeding

What cuts close to the bone
A swallow – kind – in the breathing.

44.
Andrew
The joker dropped
Melissa a dead letter
]
the near east burns the looser
Quentin rejects the shy boy
Out of Delphi without a prayer
Indelicate Jane confuses seaweed with rope
Burnt. Copper anklets and starched jeans
Without smell, varnished tools
Or white plates spare and smooth,
So she shut up. Soon after, her mother caved in.
No one hears anything, travel a naysayer.
Then, the daughters of Athena released the horses
The studs for the gripped legs of Epidore’s finest
The young men with taut ribbed torsos
That they would climb mountains, traverse rivers, ravines

]unlike to us
]not particular to the gods

To arrive Attica
What is bitter in the tambourine and snare
Ill-fitted to the false speech of outsiders
Will grovel the lips of disturbed lovers
A chorus in which anguish transforms no one:
Such sad, mean sounds
The streets filled with broken bricks
Folded down, broken statuary
Bitterroot and dry compost
The young on their horses in tears
The women in shredded pale silk
No one can call on anyone, absolutely
No one. The instruments fail. Every eye
And chin dropped an ode for infinite loss,
Infinite forgiveness.

(c) Stephen Vincent

24.A

]
]in old age
]she forgets
some things
]
]terrible
]
]gone
]

24.C

]
]silent harmonies
]
]without shift
]
]no
]
[risk]
]

24.D

]
]
]
]the rising, full arch
]
]

26.

]time to time
]against the few
Rudely rejected are the very ones
]who love her
]rational
]
]
]
]her, she refuses
]cherish

]why does she not
ignore this
]
]
]

27.

]
]
]
]no, old man
]don’t speak
]don’t terrify us
]the proximity [death

Each fears a funeral. Do you
know this? Please, delay the calling,
tell the reaper to bury the iron tool

]may we have new gods
]men, women, children
fresh on the porch, above the step.

A new winter Sappho from Sleeping With Sappho. Actually, after the fact, I realize it’s a perfect 17 sylable Haiku!

136.

Forebode no winter:
Crow voice cut your volume
The bellow in your wings.

If Sappho had actually written Haiku, would she have been less prolific? And/Or, would the compactness of the work have been more likely to have survived in whole form? That is, the fragile papyrus - even though fragmenting into several pieces - would have been more likely to have preserved the whole, relatively tiny haiku. Think of it, then we would have had an ancient form called ‘Sappku’ - or some nominal such.

But then, I suspect, the form would have given us a completely different personae than one with which we are now familiar. No fragments, no elaborations upon elablorations, then inexplicable terminations. We would not be given the postmodern sense of a body work that continues to exist and magnetically engage us in the form of a puzzle without a center, or container. In which only small pieces can be brought together for a moment. Translated and then released only to be retranslated. Who is she? It remains impossible to say. As much is also true of anyone we might think we know including one’s self.

The poem is but a momentary signal among many.