sábado, 28 de janeiro de 2023
Meditações - The wall clock's black, hitchy hands
Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone
Brachest, she called it, gentling grease
over blanching yolks with an expertise
honed from three decades of dawns
at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine,
where even the oldest in the old men's booth
swore as if it were scripture truth
they'd never had a breakfast better,
rapping a glass sharply to get her
attention when it went sorrowing
so far into some simple thing—
the jangly door or a crusted pan,
the wall clock's black, hitchy hands—
that she would startle, blink, then grin
as if discovering them all again.
Who remembers now when one died
the space that he had occupied
went unfilled for a day, then two, three,
until she unceremoniously
plunked plates down in the wrong places
and stared their wronged faces
back to banter she could hardly follow.
Unmarried, childless, homely, "slow,"
she knew coffee cut with chamomile
kept the grocer Paul's ulcer cool,
yarrow in gravy eased the islands
of lesions in Larry Borwick's hands,
and when some nightlong nameless urgency
sent him seeking human company
Brother Tom needed hash browns with cheese.
She knew to nod at the litany of cities
the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past,
to laugh when the hunters asked
if she'd pray for them or for the quail
they went laughing off to kill,
and then—envisioning one
rising so fast it seemed the sun
tugged at it—to do exactly that.
Who remembers where they all sat:
crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers,
VF'ers muttering through their wars,
night-shift roughnecks so caked in black
it seemed they made their way back
every morning from the dead.
Who remembers one word they said?
The Longhorn Diner's long torn down,
the gin and feedlots gone, the town
itself now nothing but a name
at which some bored boy has taken aim,
every letter light-pierced and partial.
Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill,
I picture you one dime-bright dawn
grown even brighter now for being gone
bustling amid the formica and chrome
of that small house we both called home
during the spring that was your last.
All stories stop: once more you're lost
in something I can merely see:
steam spiriting out of black
coffee,
the scorched pores of toast, a bowl
of apple butter like edible soil,
bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass,
my plate's gleaming, teeming emptiness.
sexta-feira, 27 de janeiro de 2023
Meditações - that clock that forbade you to move
The Idea of Revelation
It wasn't holy so let us not praise gods.
Let us not look to them for bread,
nor the cup that changed water to wine.
Let us look to the bend of the road
that reaches. A silver blur across
the skyline, woman standing on the farm.
In her grasp, the shine that is seed,
that is beginning. She will work
the earth, bounty in the vault
of cosmos above her, heat
lightning that lassoes in its manic
current. Man never existed
but to invite danger. Loveless one.
There was once an army of men,
saluting from bayonet to bomb.
They were expert at sabotage, hand combat.
You stop the clock in your paltry chest.
The one that says choose, choose.
Wind that desired backward. Ring
the alarm. When you wake, no more
pain. A mirror like a window looking out.
What can your past now say to you
that has never been said before? What
of that clock that forbade you to move
forward. What of the clock that asked
for nothing but passage, the minutes
careening into you like a fitful arrow.
What of the clock that summoned nothing,
not even mercy. Once you tired of wanting,
a face to break, you started the clock again.
quinta-feira, 26 de janeiro de 2023
Meditações - The steeple’s clock
Custodians
Retired from other trades, they wore
Work clothes again to mop the johns
And feed the furnace loads of coal.
Their roughened faces matched the bronze
Of the school bell the nun would swing
To start the day. They limped but smiled,
Explored the secret, oldest nooks:
The steeple’s clock, dark attics piled
With inkwell desks, the caves beneath
The stage on Bingo night. The pastor
Bowed to the powers in their hands:
Fuses and fire alarms, the plaster
Smoothing a flaking wall, the keys
To countless locks. They fixed the lights
In the crawl space above the nave
And tolled the bells for funeral rites.
Maintain what dead men made. Time blurs
Their scripted names and well-waxed floors,
Those keepers winking through the years
And whistling down the corridors.
quarta-feira, 25 de janeiro de 2023
Suíça com exportações relojoeiras ao nível pré-pandémico
A Suíça exportou em 2022 relógios num valor total de 24,8 mil milhões de francos (mais 11,4 por cento do que no ano anterior). Isto apesar de dois dos seus três principais mercados terem quebrado no ano passado.
A China, segundo mercado, importou menos 13,6 por cento; Hong Kong, terceiro mercado, importou menos 10,5 por cento. Os Estados Unidos, principal destino dos relógios suíços em 2022, importou mais 26,3 por cento.
Portugal terminou o ano como 28º mercado, com um aumento de 14,6 por cento.
Em quantidade, a indústria relojoeira suíça estabilizou, depois de anos de diminuição - 15,8 milhões de relógios (mais 0,3 por cento).
Meditações - ampulheta interna
A one ended boomerang
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
An hourglass constricted, the whore inside of me who is watching the clock, monitoring the time, this wasted time to get off, get going, lunar cycle gauge of tide and meridian. How I can hear the sand slip downward in my body clock? I need to be here, could be there, and not long ago the only place you wanted me to be was by your side ... maybe?
I am a pencil that cannot sharpen,
a one ended boomerang.
terça-feira, 24 de janeiro de 2023
Meditações - um gnómon de ausência...
Eclogue
I wonder if anyone ever thought
to tell time with them
know where their shadow
tipped on 3 o'clock
which floor which parking spot
from a window desk
or if they ever
stood completely over their own shade's dot
that moment they had no metered footprint;
a peek-a-boo we now find ticketed
as a before and an after
an either
side of a space the zero pulls into,
its long reserve wheel of nothing there.
Yet here a gnomon of absence bears its shadow
placement on some dial of brevity and cold
about life about
the footprint we may leave
empty of light
empty of even point to it.
Here it's flat and densely packed with people
unlike the empty open of the plain;
here our expanse
the grown over dumpsite
of the meadowlands wetlands or the shore
is corps of engineered
the bulldozer-beetle's
ball of dung shines in it and somewhere the body
hidden in our shit to fake us innocent...
one of our jokes sometimes things rise and float.
We
in the morning
catch, from the train, in the green garbage runoff,
sight of white herons and the cormorants.
When they’re there in the evening, we safely
assume the world hasn’t gone anywhere;
a take of bearings
the same the next morning
when we’d see the lit towers on the island
we were headed for
we see now the hour.
From the Jersey side we take a bearing, as
on mountains from the vantage of the plain,
on the towers from the vantage of the
dirt-stiffened, unyielding, tarmac of marsh
grass gray like
steel grayed a vegetable steel
from blur and the exhausts of the turnpike.
Position with regard to surrounding objects
here is unlike in the mountains which give
a bearing even from deep within them, let you
see them from inside their formation.
Climbing to the high plateau of the street
from the subway, we check the peaks downtown
or midtown
skyscrapers for direction.
Walk a few doors up the block they parallax
eclipsed by the postcard we no more see.
segunda-feira, 23 de janeiro de 2023
Em Paris, com os relógios Montblanc
Membro fundador do Clube Montblanc 4810, estamos por estes dias em Paris, para ver algumas das novidades relojoeiras da marca para 2024.