Jan Dean

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jan Dean lives at Cardiff, Lake Macquarie. Her work has been published in newspapers, journals and anthologies including The Australian, Blue Dog, Famous Reporter, Hecate, Quadrant, Southerly, Sunweight (NPP Anthology) 2005); The Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Inc); The Best Australian Poetry 2004 (UQP). Interactive Press published Jan’s poetry collection With One Brush as winner of IP Picks Best First Book in 2007; it was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award in 2008.

Cranes fly on my blue and white porcelain brooch

Kiyomizu Temple Precinct, Kyoto

People take several paths and transformations

to find and leave a closer view of the summit.

Some wait until mid-morning. Others

depart with pilgrims and lose themselves

in the mists of dawn. None may go further

than halfway. The summit is simply a frame

for platforms that cling to the slope.

I began at the launch pad and proceeded on foot

up the river of light, reminiscent of a ramp

on the face of a Mayan temple.

Close to the entrance souvenir shops crowd

the road into an avenue, confetti-bright.

Kindly avoid temptation until the return journey.

A few, as feathers floated by a gentle breeze

take the thin path on the left hand side facing the city.

In which case, they choose the time

of ancestor reverence, when final resting spots

marked by tall stones of charcoal flecked with white

diffused over the vast curve, enjoy blessings;

single red roses, mingling with companions

            to set the sweep ablaze.

The right path is narrow and steep enough

to persuade a caterpillar persona. It is pleasurable

however inclement the weather. Rain,

may increase your chances of being charmed

by sheen on cobblestones, heel-clack & feet-shuffle

or navy & white noren, damp yet aflutter

and the women

who surge into doorways and turn to face you

as parasols collapse into narrow vees

under facades; compact, mature, ghostly.

Back on level ground, you should meander over

to Gion in time for twilight, when lit paper lanterns

proclaim trainee geishas, who perfect their art

of fragility hovering on platform shoes.

Ruby lips and mime-like faces emit no emotion

yet receive the respect reserved for dolls

preserved in museums. They pose then disappear

silk kimonos rustling rainbows, and somewhere

along the way, I found my prize.

Note: A noren is a “doorway curtain” hanging in front of a shop to announce

the specialty within.

The Red Room Nightmare

Somewhere in Europe, 1925

A painting I saw in Paris provoked

this: A stranger persuades me

to strip to the skin, removing

all the protective layers, worn

whenever I venture outdoors

and follow him into his studio

with just a light robe to cover

my innocence.

Inside, I see red on everything;

the carpet, ceiling, tablecloth

and walls, only broken by swirls

of black and blue

which should warn me

what is in store.

The maid arranges food

on the table; a light snack

she says, which consists of fruit

wine and bread rolls, before

she departs and I am left

alone with him.

The man is a BEAST:

He rips off my robe

and tickles my nipples

with a paint brush

which sends me wobbly;

all the easier to bend.

The room is PASSION

but I’ll remember it as BLOOD

on my pale and perfect skin

lost and never restored.

Patrick Rosal

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry as well as the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. Awarded a Fulbright grant as a Senior U.S. Scholar to the Philippines in 2009, he has had poems and essays published widely in journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, Ninth Letter, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction, the Beacon Best and Language for a New Century. His work has been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net, among others. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won

the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken.

He has served as visiting writer at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, and the University of Texas, Austin. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. He has read his poems and performed around the United States, Argentina, the UK, the Philippines and South Africa. His poems have been featured in film and media projects screened in Germany, Italy, Argentina, New York and Los Angeles.

Boneshepherds’ Lament

A boy who played Chopin for my parents one afternoon

led another boy to the woods and hacked him in the neck

forty-two times with a knife

hoping squirrels would run off with the skull.

He and his buddy went back with slip joint pliers

to twist and yank, but they couldn’t pull out the teeth.

When the fat-fisted teachers of my childhood spoke,

they told us the soul’s ushered finally

to some bright space beyond a grand entry

where anonymity is a kind of wealth.

The sentinels, they said, are neither benevolent

nor cruel, though, as a fee, they take your name

in exchange for spending all of eternity looking at God.

So I aspired to be nameless and eternal

until the day I got enough balls to tell

those nuns and brothers in baggy cassocks

to go to hell, and in doing so, I was really committing them

to perpetual memory, the inferno being a place

where such spirits are never forgotten.

Let me begin again.

In the barrios of Ilocos Norte

there are precisely two words for slaughter.

In some languages, there is only one word for the sound of the tides’

trillion dice set loose on shores. In other languages

it is the sound of smashing chandeliers . My parents were born

on an archipelago where they worship salvation and ruin,

where, even if you can’t see the waves,

you can keep the sound of shattering glass on either side of you

and never be completely lost

though sometimes

you can wake up half way around the world

in the middle of the night, in a barrio of Ilocos Norte where you hear

an infant cry but see instead two men in jeans and flip flops,

hoisting onto their shoulders a 200-pound sow

bound to a spit, which howls all the way from pen to block.

The men, then, laughing, will slay, bloodlet, and gut the hog,

which gurgles, which is the same sound, my cousins say,

that is pressed from a man’s chest

during one drunken night of bad karaoke,

when he is stabbed five times through the armpit

until he’s leaking like a bad jar.

It’s true. You can ask a dead man’s son, watch him sweep

the masonry floor to his father’s crypt,

as he buffs their tiles into the kind of deep

blue that fills up small, unlit rooms by the sea

just before a typhoon starts swinging

its massive hammers down.

You might never get a second chance

to interrogate the accomplice, so ask him too,

and you’ll know the accomplice is telling you the truth

if he hands you by the neck that dead man’s only guitar,

all the bone inlay pried off, the body painted blue.

I know who killed his father. I’ll never say. 

Have you ever taken a gun

out of the hands of a murderer

as a gift,

just to shoot a few live rounds into some slapdash target

fashioned from calabash and deadwood?

And in return do your ancestors expect you

to simply shutup and bring to the murderer a bottle of rum

and—god help you—a song?

I don’t remember much about the Chopin that one boy played

or much about the other boy he killed, except

he had brown hair and was the only white kid on the field

during our pick-up football games.

I remember the summer he went missing,

I stopped going to mass. And then I fell in love

with a girl as faithless as me, how she could sing

the devil into a Jersey cathedral choir.

Sometimes I dream of a city inside me, specifically

the edge of one, where a few low-wage grunts marshal

through hip-deep waters of a flooded street

a flock of bobbing carnage, bloated to sea-deep proportions of pink.

No one in the dream asks where they’ve come from.

No one mentions where they’re headed, and the workers,

they’re too exhausted by shift’s end

for more than a crude joke or a six-pack

and a half hour of Chopin on public radio. 

I once stood twice that time in front of a Goya painting

in which soldier and civilian alike face off, point-

blank in a skirmish. They shoot and slash one another down,

their eyes wide and juvenile, the tender yowl

of their faces, their soft bodies rallied to battle – they seem boys

of snarling matter. They are men, women too, darkened

under the sky’s forty-day gray. In the far background,

on a hill, a single figure of ash appears to raise

both hands, the human pose of victory and surrender,

and maybe what Goya wants us to see from this distance

aren’t arms flung up — but wings: an angel

waiting to transport the grave bodies off the battlefield,

over the bright hill where he stands,

where no one will see them in good light.

Naima

Mothers,
a sudden fog of honeysuckle
will guarantee you
no sadness
you can deny your children.

Let me tell you a story.

If you know how the A train gores
the dark with a steady hum,
perhaps you’ve come across
an old Caribbean man
patting his ass, his lapels,
first his front pockets
then again the back, looking
apparently, for a wad of bills.

He mumbles inward,

then reports to you,
Three hundred dollars.
I had three hundred dollars.
He looks you in the eye to assure you
he’s known crueler losses,
and even though heaven likes to bore us,
a woman dressed in tattered
black makes her entrance
as the old Caribbean leaves, and
 
at the same time

a trio of gradeschool boys
(the first chaos of spring in them
about to erupt)
fling down
a canvas sack

foaming with fresh-cut honeysuckle.
 
They place, too,
on the subway car’s floor
a radio. They bounce
on their toes

with a kind of pre-fight
jitter. The woman in black, in fact,
has a boxer’s under-bite

and announces herself
like this: Ladies and Gentleman, please
find it in your hearts to help a starving artist.

So you can’t blame the biggest boy
for slapping the middle boy
on the back of the neck
when the younger one reaches
for the radio’s play button,
can’t blame the older one
who sucks his teeth
at the younger one

as if to say: Let her sing.

By now,
you’ve almost completely forgotten
the Caribbean man,
when this woman eases out
her first, perfect, raspy sob;

there are only a few of us who don’t
recognize the tune,

and since we think we can own
what’s beautiful
by disdaining it,
we try to pretend we can’t hear
the city’s legacies of misery
trembling the tunnel walls.

How explain you’re watching
a stranger hobble by
and  that you have to lift
your eyes twice
to make sure it isn’t
someone you love?

I’m old enough now to understand
every silence is remarkable
not the least of which
is the silence of boys
swaying side by side

as a woman in black
walks the length of a train
with each crystalline note
poised in the air that trails her

and there isn’t a scowl among us
when, behind her, the end-doors
gently smash,
 
signaling  the boys
to blast the train with a backbeat,
then throw their bodies
down

in dance
as if to translate everything
we’ve lost today
into a joy
we can finally comprehend.

The boys shut off their radio,
gather their capful of dollars

and rabble of white blossoms

and pounce out at the next stop
in single file, but not —
I swear to you–

without unfurling
the first four notes
to Coltrane’s gorgeous groan.

The subway doors close.

This is the end of the story.

We ascend one by one from the dark

and beneath us

Harlem’s steady moan resumes.

Finding Water

That was the year I cursed my father

for wanting to be alone
his entire life
and for falling into my arms so suddenly
one afternoon I felt the full brunt of a grown man’s weight
once he no longer breathed for himself,
 
but for the crowds of ghosts whose misfortunes
he’s pressed into the service of his name and mine,
 
phantoms who’ve abandoned love
the way one gives up salt or laughter
 
or the mad thrash of the heart
which is a fish
in a bucket of stones.
 
I too have given up on love
forty times
in the last week —
 
once when I saw myself in the breach between
the cupped hands of a beggar
and I dropped what I could into that empty space
to rid myself of that nothing,
as if a gesture could make me simply
disappear, as if I were nothing.
 
There are species of quiet I choose not to love,

the hesitation, for example, with which
a man will harvest berries he’ll feed his brother
in order to kill him
or bring him back from a long sleep,
or the way such berries sit
on countless tables of countless people
who can be blamed for the kinds of things
that merit punishment
far kinder than poisoning.
 
That my father’s brothers dug
their own graves is not a myth.

When people ask if
the imagination can return us to the scene
of its own crimes, I’ll say
I once walked with a woman toward water
without knowing where the water was.
I’ll say, the two of us turned around
without finding it,
and we sat together on a stoop
until it rained
 
and the fragrance of the bay
fell through a city whose sky
turns the color of berries
at dusk. I’ll tell them
I’ve walked since then with no one
but the ghosts of my forefathers.
I found the water.
And I wept for everything.
And I learned to tell the world
how gorgeous it is to be alone.

Ankur Betageri

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Ankur Betageri, (18/11/83), is a bilingual writer based in New Delhi. His poetry collection in English is titled The Sea of Silence (2000, C.V.G. Publications.) Two collections in Kannada are titled Hidida Usiru (Breath Caught, 2004, Abhinava Prakashana)and Idara Hesaru (It’s Name, 2006, Abhinava Prakashana) He has also published a collection of Japanese Haiku translations called Haladi Pustaka (The Yellow Book, 2009, Kanva Prakashana). He holds a Masters in Clinical Psychology from Christ College, Bangalore. He co-edits the journal Indian Literature published by Sahitya Akademi and is contributing editor(India) of the Singapore-based ezine writersconnect.org. Recently, he represented India as a Poet at the III International Delphic Games held at Jeju, South Korea.

The quiet and rising tension in the jaw of the common man

You are drinking chai in the office canteen
looking out the window absentmindedly
at the unreal summer shadows of trees
thrown about carelessly
with the occasional bird
lighting the bough
and preening its brilliant wings
when suddenly you hear someone StaMMeRinG!
 
You look around and see
your whole inner self
in all its trembling
irritably burning
nakedness
splayed out in the shuddering body
of the ‘boy’ who serves chai.
Racked by the nervous torment that being here
has become, he is stammering
unable to utter a sensible word,
he is stammering in a terrible frothing anger
at a bully customer
and –  I realize –  at a world that has failed him.

I see chai-drinking chootias around me
smiling; I gulp the chai and unable to make out
what is happening to me,
unable to contain the trembling which is possessing me,
unable to go on sitting at the table, on the chair
in this stable world, in this insanely stable world
which will continue to be stable even after my death,
unable to do anything that could stop
his quaking body from stammering,
unable to do anything about the laughter
which goes on quietly massacring,
I drink chai
chai-drinking, English-speaking, afsar-cunt that I am
I continue to drink chai as if nothing has happened,
as if nothing will ever happen,
as if the trembling within me has
nothing to do with what is outside
as if yoga, meditation, shitty self-help books
are what I require,
as if happy hours at the bar, Sunday-sair with a girl
would instantly restore me to normalcy –
ah happy-cunt of the great Indian middle class!
ah intellectual-cunt debating in news channels!
ah corporate-cunt discussing growth in ac boardrooms!
ah poet-cunt churning out verse for international journals!
ah bollywood-cunt selling flaccid dreams to the poor!
ah cunt on the election poster
ah cunt in the complicit rooms of police stations!
ah cunt selling merchandize and noise on FM channels!
ah cunt running newspaper by splattering naked bodies of women!
ah student-cunt fornicating and agitating in college campuses!
ah actor-cunt asking us to end poverty from your palaces!
ah brand-ambassador-cunt for fair skin, white teeth and slim hips!
ah soulless empire of cunts
looking down from hoardings, ad-widgets and social-networking sites!
I shall exorcise myself of you and your ghosts!
I shall speak now of the wrongs, speak now of the murders
I really have had enough of your chai!
I – the Cunt with a Conscience – shall master this human trembling
I shall rescue from the rot this precious inner feeling
I shall hug the fevered hearts and speak for all those
still
stammering.

The Indian Soul

for Shri Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

The Indian soul is pure
no amount of money, corruption and sophistry in the world of high art
can corrupt its soul
look at the Indian dog licking at the worn out tyres of a Maruti 800
look at its eyes and you know it is sacred
its hungry and cold in the misty Delhi winter
and you can weep out of pity for it
(my head grows soft like a peeled cucumber
as my face weeps inside the cheeks)
but the dog doesn’t need my pity
it feels my love and runs away barking
as if its dangerous to linger in my pity…
 
The Indian women are pure
I loathe them and call them rubbish
and they let me go
yes, they tried to shackle my heart, break my spirit
yes, they enticed me with the dream of babies
BUT when they saw my purpose they let me go
I slept over them like on the warm sunny beaches
and looked at the sun take the sea with it
and when I rose they fell off my body
like so much sand,
they never stuck to me –
(it was I who stuck to them
coming in the way of their life in comfortable cars
bearing sun-faced babies and listening to technicolour songs –
and when they saw that my spirit was getting muddy
in the warm pools of their cosy homes
it was they who kicked me out
complementing me, indirectly:
you are too much for us, too much!)

The Indian women are pure
they mind their business and know
each one has his own destiny to fulfill –
Just look at the beautiful women in the sarees
how graceful their movement and many-splendored their bangled hands!
its just that they are not for me
and they smile at me warmly and let me go
and I smile back at them happily, flapping my wings.
 
The Indian soul, no matter how deep in the muck it gets pushed
is pure and full of joy
look at the Indian cow lying on a bed of its own dung
look at the buffaloes wallowing in their own shit
but still giving – two times a day – pure white milk!
look into the buffalo’s eyes
can anyone be as calm and quietly contented as her?
The Indian soul is pure and joyous and sacred
and no amount of western shit splattered on the shop fronts
hoardings and newspapers can change it –
Half-naked women swing hips to tasteless tunes of bollywood?
Let them! Let the buffoons and jokers pass themselves off as heroes
and once done, let them do netagiri
folding hands, showing teeth and all –
none of it is going to change the Indian soul
it will always be deep and pure and joyous
away from all that is ephemeral!

The Indian soul – no kidding, guys, – is pure
(no, not as pure as the beauty soap just taken out of the box
like they show us in the ads
but pure in a way our drugged imagination cannot even conceive –)
 
Deep in the Delhi night
I breathe the glacier-pure air
it quivers in my nostrils, in my lungs, in my hair
I breathe in the great expanse
and breathe it back in space
 
The Indian soul is us, a will that has found its sap
the Indian soul is us, a light that cannot be stopped
and India is the earth, whose map cannot be drawn.

Rae Desmond Jones

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Rae Desmond Jones is a poet much published in the olden days.  His most recent book was Blow Out (Island Press, 2009). After many years spent in the wilderness of local government, including a period as the Mayor of Ashfield, a tiny Principality near Sydney, he has returned to poetry. He does not fear death half as much as being boring.

                                                             Photograph by John Tranter

The Kindly Ones

Mid Summer in the South

            When ice shelves slide softly

Off the edge of Antarctica

            & start to drift North

In the merciless tides,

Three cracked old women

Nudge each other

            Along the broken brick footpath

To the little table outside

            Michelle’s Patisserie.

There are only two chairs

            So the shortest stands in the sun

Beneath an umbrella hat embossed

            With the Australian flag,

In grimy Koala bear slippers.

            The other two slurp Coca Cola

With ice cream, dabbling their straws greedily

            In the brew while the short one

Plants her arms on her waist

            (wrists folded in) & complains –

The large women smile

            & one rolls a cigarette & lights up,

Allowing the smoke to collide softly & inevitably

Against the frozen glass door.

            Through the cloudless haze

The mad women hear the distant hiss

            Of roiling ice & they nod

As a Southerly wind spins & whirls                     

            Across the burning tarmac

Into the light

Silvio the God

Perhaps there is such a thing as a national psyche,

Even when the world is trussed like a turkey

In satellite bands of electronic steel

But have the Italians never shifted

Their long allegiance to Caesar (every woman’s man

& every man’s woman) or Mussolini,

Incarnated in a tanned old rooster

Crowing while caressing the polished boot of Italy,

Parading his erection as evidence of immortality?

Silvio the God will never die while the riches

Of television & the State pile up to choke the doors

Of the courts & the throats of Judges,

He will live forever with his cloud piercing penis.

If he was a woman he would become invisible

& tough like Angela Merkel –

Not that ordinary woman who grows old

Hiding her need for warmth, who instead will plod

To the Church to perform works & pray

To that beautiful male stretched out on the cross

That he should come down to whisper

Gentle words in Latin but instead she must

Bake sweet cakes for her Grandchildren –

Become the carer of the family history (Because

Nobody desires her unless she is useful, or wealthy)

Then she becomes tight fisted & hard,

Dry as a plaster crucifix.

O great Silvio, count your riches & beware.

You may yet find yourself hanging by the heels

In the breeze beside a row of your pretty girlfriends

Twilight

Three little vampires in blue school uniforms

Sit around a table on the edge of a park

Beneath the trembling leaves of a tree,

Light spattering their lovely hungry faces.

Beside them the concrete path is washed

Clean of all (except a thin crooked line).

It is going to rain soon & the darkness

Teases, as it dances through the weeds.

Eagerly they champ & dribble & clamp

Their jaws, waiting for the starving moon.

Adam Aitken

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Adam Aitken was born in 1960 and spent his early childhood in London,  Thailand and Malaysia. As well as numerous reviews, articles on poetry, and works of creative non-fiction, he is the author of four collections of poetry. Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles (2000) was shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book Award and the John Bray South Australian Writers Festival Award. He has been the recipient of an Asialink residency in Malaysia, an Australian Postgraduate Award and most recently an Australia Council Literature grant for new work on Cambodia. His most recent work includes a Doctorate in Creative Arts thesis on hybridity in Australian literature, and a new book of poems, Eighth Habitation (Giramondo Publishing). He lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. Adam is appointed Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i for Fall semester 2010.

Eighth Habitation

1

“Went up north for short holidays again last week.

And thankfully missed the floods in KL.

You have to pass Kelly’s (sic) Castle

before reaching

Clearwater Golf Sanctuary, right?”

Appeasing temple, or a Scots-Victorian Taj Mahal

built for the love of Agnes, English heiress by rumour.

Designed with “splendour in mind”

unfinished supplement to 1890s

tin-money, and rubber.

Filmset strangler figs “reclaiming civilisation”.

“While driving to Ipoh for ICT annual dinner (courtesy of zaman), we stopped

by kellie’s castle for a wee bit of look-see.”

“Not a haunted house, a haunted castle”.

Moorish. Built by Hindu stone masons.

Spanish flu killed Kellie,

decimated the master builders

& coolies too.

1926. Died

somewhere between Singapore

                                                & England

(some say Portugal).

Agnes went home to Scotland.

The surviving workers

built their avatar:

pith-helmet deity

in khaki and boots

standing between two fakirs

atop their temple

just behind the scullery.

I’m here for the “pictorial possibilities”, and like a good poem

there’s Juliet balconies

hidden tunnels and

the “doors and windows open and shut

                                                            by themselves”

light and dark.

My eighth habitation?

“Windows open and bang shut by themselves, we’ve been in there …

you can ask Joyce or Loo Hui. We spent only about 45 minutes

in there, and the clouds started to get darker and darker,

and we had to get out of there coz there’s no visibility in there

in case it got too dark. We walked quickly outside

into the open space, and I told the girls I HAD to take this shot

with the dark clouds directly on top of the castle, it’s really

a golden opportunity for a good shot that I think even the locals

find it hard to find! We got on our knees, frame a low angle,

and got these shots.”

2

Capitalist myth No. 357:

the workers deify The Boss

Capitalist myth No 358:

the workers poisoned his cigars.

Eccentricity that becomes the Boss,

for which the locals thank him –

            for Malaya’s first hydraulic lift,

            each room with a view,

the library of hardwood shelves,

much text that

rotted there unread.

Scott’s Waverley novels, Eliot, Dickins.

Now

the attractions are

ghosts, hidden passages,

a class excursion

or a promo

for “Ted Adnan’s Location Portraiture Lighting Technique Workshop”

(code for tropic porn

            among the Gothic moldings

            in the equatorial boudoir

                        for heat-struck Ophelias).

Heritage? Thirty, quite useless, rooms

including indoor tennis court,

            graffiti

                        of graduated offence (from “Abdul 2000” to

the spouting appendage

                                    drawn from hearsay

to “Malaysia 20/20 Vision”)

In guidebook-speak: “a defaced labour of love”?

            Thanks to the haunted Celts

            the rubber boom turns to palm oil and tourism

plus a hundred or so internet plagiarism essays

Kellie   

                        just absent on leave,

one deregulated voice

channelled thru the living

                        on MalaysiaBabe.net:

“it’ll b a cute cute castle

wif lotsa hello! kitty stuff in there..

it shall not b spooky…

it’ll b like every kid’s dream castle… haha…”

Cath Vidler

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Cath Vidler’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary magazines including HEAT, Sport, Quadrant, Turbine, Southerly and Cordite. Her first collection of poems is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann (www.puncherandwattmann.com) in 2010. Cath is the editor of Snorkel (www.snorkel.org.au), a literary magazine specialising in the publication of creative writing by Australians and New Zealanders.

Counting The Stars

Nothing left to do but count
the stars

(I could be here all night).

*

Like stopped confetti

their utterances
reside, bright-lipped

round the moon’s
pale head

(the abacus has gone to bed).

*

Oh chuckling stars
what can I do

but cut my losses
and count on you.

At the Botanic Gardens, Sydney

i.

Bats hang from branches

like pods of midnight,

asleep in the reek

of restless dreams.

ii.

Grass recollects

night-slitherings of eels,

their sibilant tracks

seeking closure

at the pond’s tepid lip.

iii.

Herbs cluster and build,

a storm-system

of piquancy.

iv.

Somewhere,

a drop of rainforest

falls, spreads

to full capacity.

Desmond Kon

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé divides his time between his art and teaching creative writing. A recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award, he has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in publishing, with a theology masters from Harvard University and creative writing masters from the University of Notre Dame, he has recent or forthcoming work in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Cricket Online Review, deadpaper, Dear Sir, Ganymede, Pank, and The Writing Disorder. Also working in clay, Desmond is presently sculpting ceramic pieces to commemorate the birth centennials of Nobel Laureates William Golding and Naguib Mahfouz in 2011. Works from his Potter Poetics Collection have been housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

hsuan tsang before the taklamakan desert

That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings.

          ~ T. S. Eliot

as lettered as song sparrows, finespun but ambivalent, purling rune, verse-love-elegaic

letters, ringing bells pealing-bowling-tolling, over-diatonic, dropping from belfries

a bunch of letters homophony-unwrapping-polyphonous; more becoming, becalming

as lettered as dash-of-love dreams, the scrunchy unscripted curves of them; they knell

slow, only lettered stubs of permissibility but not clarity, not token, soft-shod monody

as lettered, like someone else and his parcelled ideas about someone-else-especial

as a lettered dõgen inhales carbon-copy scruples, never sound changes, or cedar oil

there are nothing but sutras everywhere in time and space; sometimes sacred letters

are used, sometimes profane letters; sometimes divine letters, sometimes human

letters; sometimes the letters of beasts, sometimes the letters of ashuras; sometimes

the letters of a hundred grasses; sometimes the letters of ten thousand trees*

yet lettered to curatorial people doubled over in tracts, their inscribed, stolid podiums

as pasty; nothing letters what it seems, like rifling-trifling words split into infinitives

and supernal letters; they vacillate themselves, planate-unrest, periphrasis ill-at-ease

as lettered as their flamboyance letting us hide, letting go; we seek iliadic-baneful signs

kernels anew as lettered this vanilla midnote; I am such rest, the painful rest of it too

such serial-story calligraphy finely lettered, like love-in-waiting drawing likes as red

morning of herons as lettered as it is watery, disavowing, surging alkahest in hallways

as lettered, me beyond my own instruction, content as contusion art, euphony combing

still lettered, can’t he see? I don’t instruct my art nor its lost parts and whisper plains

these belles-lettres scarcely ciphers; tidy dais yet ochre-known, conduits so recondite

these belles-lettres unearthed that bless today of our sudden star-turning, terrene days

its letters as wrapt, happy-as-filigree trappings, us in puji si, whetstone and greying

* This verse has been lifted from a citation of Dõgen by J. P. Williams in his book on apophasis. Of Dõgen’s ideas on the use of sutras, Williams writes: “Thus we see that the ineffability of reality is not a question of there being no words we might use to describe it, but rather that there are no words which would describe it completely.”