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terça-feira, 31 de janeiro de 2023
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segunda-feira, 30 de janeiro de 2023
Meditações - fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times
Eightfold Chant
Church of broken toasters and singed fuses,
church of the dripping roof and chipped chimney stack,
of the flooded garage and its split door,
gas-hissing pipes and sibilant water heaters,
church of piss-poor light and shaky ladders
where I unchoke windows and dislodge chopsticks
from pipes, smooth curled up wallpaper and key the locks,
fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times,
church where wings of dead flies drift like petals
from cobwebs, ghosts sift through floorboards
and the homeless sleep in compost, steeping like tea bags
pungent from the leaves' damp weight.
Church where I am summoned by the door's clatter of brass
to the brown-toothed vagrant who spreads open
her overcoat; to the chattering man who communes
with pines and brooms the stairs; to the bent, old Japanese
woman
who forgets her keys, waits for me to twist the lock free
so she can scrub floors with Murphy wood soap
and a toothbrush, wobble atop a ladder and polish the
two-ton bell.
On this path I am my uncle setting cubes of cheese into jaws
of traps, and my grandmother stirring peas into a pan of fried
rice,
and my grandfather padding the halls in slippers and gloves,
the cold globes of his breath a string of prayer beads
weaving me, a mixed-blood grandson, into them.
domingo, 29 de janeiro de 2023
Janela para o passado - Porto - Lisboa de motociclo, em 11 horas 26 minutos e 13 segundos, 1902
Sobre José Caetano Tavares de Melo da Costa Lobo, ver aqui
Meditações - Men of the six-clock give way to those of nine
Our Big City
Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain.
To paint half a man on a half a horse. To paint a dolphin in a forest. To color feathers on a beast. To grant a maid a fish's waist. To graft or to wax, whether clay, whether nether. As men graft their gods upon empires.
Then we build mirrors to better understand ourselves, to better understand our souls, and we ask ourselves reflectively, Where? then Who? Woe unto us, we are building our city from our urine. Maintaining it with our fardels and with facts. The burbs we raise to the ranks of birds. Then we furnish them with words that wilt, like oak and elm and ash.
Busily we build our city. Toilsomely we lay the bricks. Men of the six-clock give way to those of nine, those of the nine to the generation of twelve, and those of the twelve tend to disappear, making room for the more fashionable folks who make the two-o-clock noon in the middle of day by the greedy ill will of pills.
Toilsomely we build our city. Burdensomely we tow the line. Those ministers who refuse to tow we quickly omit. Then, when the city is complete, we sit back in the stadium bleachers and wonder how the generated world can be so excellent. How the emulated world can be so grand. How the phone pole stands in for its form. How matter is glued to the elements of ideals.
Then, when the city is complete, we sit at the edge of our great new void, like frogs at edge of a pond, like birds whose nests are littered with knots. Here, we live here in the syllables of our screams where vowels hang like fish hang on hooks. Out of the water. Like consonants with their scales scraped off. And because we fear our world is growing weary, we fill our homes with booty and with loot.
Then our big city crawls into the country, dragging its mountains right along with it. Like death that extends itself with golden planks, we hang ourselves by silk, by twine, by telephone cords. The religious tongue becomes the last supper that we swallow greedily and without chewing. Like death. That is the supreme fortune of man. This is a studied and digested truth.
A couple of hours later, we find ourselves at the junction of shanties where prairies host the sprawling city of Denver, that long lost city of long lost ghosts who haunt the long lost plains, that lifeless and wifeless city, in contrast, of course, to the Big Apple, that city of violated treaties, that wailing city set for the protection of infinity, so like the city of the seven gods, so like Rome, so with its epithets, with its alphabetical locomotives. There, only dogs can find the grisly burbs where the grisly grass slowly grows. Where savage canoes now blossom into lilies.
Montgomery says it's not a place of roof and of walls, it's more like a company, it's more like a corporation. But what is the city but its steeples and domes? What is a city but its spires and its clocks? Time, the people of the city. Time, the bluntest eye, the lion's padded paws.
Sea dreams and my flowering germander eyes droop at the factoried gloom. Bank rates are a codex to the cross. This is the religious box body. This is the largest corporation in the world. This, with a sprinkling of poetry and a poetic moat.
Sea dreams, a new born clerk, all raised and bred. A maze of cuneiform streets spread like a spider's web. Not dapper, but cricket-like. Not coned, but molded. The lot is posted for the dock. Violets are sold at a hundred a piece and marshals ride on horseback while Homer makes his slow way home.
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
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