For current Gleanings, please contact the author Kim Dorman for an in-print copy of the latest Gleanings at his email address : Kim Dorman <[email protected]>
Gleanings & Fragments / September 2005
2 April, 1805 The first yellow green leaves. Of the figures scattered all over the Tree, & yet thinly,
& yet disclosing every branch & every grey twig resembled to a wonder a flight of large green Butterflies alighted on the leafless Tree / all shot through with Sunshine.
no_ only at the extremities of each twig.~
The beautiful Milk Thistle with the milk-blue white veins or fibres
up & athwart its dark green Leaves.~
All round the Fosses Civita Vecchia Garrison, the Gardens, where rocky trenches cut,
& made Fruit gardens, Figs & Pomegranates / else Cotton / & Culinary &c noble.
-from The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
*
[ Indian fragments ]
I recall an old woman
circumambulating
a pipul treecrows overhead
shouting.
In the newspaper
photographs of a solar eclipsea poet arrested in China
.
Grass by the well
cow bell"The circle has no circumference. . .
Golden oriole
on lowest branchEdges bleed, dissolve
(silence comes)
Delicate stem, gray bud
*
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
-Wendell Berry
*
A day spent at the garden. Not, certainly, in, as in suggests a kind of Bloomsburian ease, trimming and admiring, taking out a few stray weeds, adding a little mulch to the roses. No, at. Obsessive, violent actions, based on intuition, augmenting and shifting and bending and digging until the throat is dry, the back aches, the hands are a fund of dirt. And then a bath, but before the bath, looking out, a bluebird flits through the late sunlit air, quick, quick, the blue of it almost a mirage against the grass.
Prepositions count. The United States has declared war on terrorism. This phrase, in which "with" is replaced by "on," is reminiscent of other recent wars, the one on drugs, the one on poverty. These are conceptual wars, front-loaded with their own assent. They are wars without borders and without clear identifications or markings "You there, you look like a terrorist, we will detain you." They are wars that allow extreme authority to those who declare them. They are "good" wars, on the side of incontestable right. But this current war is more pernicious than the ones on poverty and drugs, which were social and domestic, using the ultimate language of combat against inequity and abuse, to incite and motivate political action. To declare war on terrorism is to subsume the violence of war into the violence of terrorism: the two terms merge across the innocuous "on." A terrorist can be anyone, anywhere, at any time. The war on "it" has no limit.
Terrorism is a way of surprising persons with death.
..
I heard someone talking about slow time, how nature works its changes slowly, but corporations work on
speed, the speed of profit, where time, as is said, is money. Reading poems, like writing them, also takes place in slow time. The slow time of reading and writing works against the fast time of profit, the catastrophic time of terrorism.The forms of freedom are not without restraint. If we do not know how to restrain, retrain, our desires, then we will not know how to align our power to the limited resources of the world. If we do not begin to reimagine our power, we will use it to constrain others. How to convey the urgency of making choices and decisions which lead to forms of life that do not impinge on others, bully them into agreement, mock context, trivialize faith, thwart rights, waste resources, collude need with want? Poets I want to say, are expert at the complex ratio of limit to possibility.
Poetry, I want to suggest, is one way to not be surprised by death.
-Ann Lauterbach
*
[ films ]
Taste of Cherry Abbas Kiarostami
Night Waltz : The Music of Paul Bowles Owsley Brown
Found this DVD at a used bookstore & was surprised to see it contained vintage films of New York City (1936, 1946, 1948, 1953) by Rudy Burckhardt, & footage of Paris & Oaxaca by Nathaniel Dorsky.
Bowles' music is a good surprise, too.Rediscovering the films of Sam Peckinpah has been a revelation & a joy. Yes, joy. Not a word usually
associated with Sam's work. But, overall, I think he might be one of the great American directors,
John Ford not withstanding. Films like The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,
Straw Dogs, & Junior Bonner, have all the richness & breadth of great literature. Even The Getaway
is amazing. If only we could have The Ballad of Cabel Hogue & Ride the High Country on DVD!
[ music ]
For Octavio Paz Six Organs of Admittance
The Milk-Eyed Mender Joanna Newsome
*
Man in the dark
peeing against a wall in the rain
holding an umbrella over him
pleased with everything wet.
Mountain
of Chinese noodles,
heaven for a poor man.
a
beautiful
vase
is
round
so
we
can
wander
around
it
forever
-John Tagliabue
Kim Dorman
Austin, Texas© Kim Dorman September 2005
Gleanings & Fragments August 2005
Hawk with ruffled Feathers resting on the Bow-sprit Now shot at & yet did not move
how fatigued a third time it made a gyre, a short circuit, & returned again / 5 times it was thus
shot at / left the Vessel / flew to another / & I heard firing, now here, now there / & nobody
shot it / but probably it perished from fatigue, & the attempt to rest upon the wave! Poor Hawk!
O Strange Lust of Murder in Man! It is not cruelty / it is mere un non-feeling from non-thinking.
-from The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
*
I see the bell but only by looking up.
Now everything is wet.If I change my ways will the way change?
He sailed with his wife, Mary.
-Anne Lauterbach, from "Oppen's Way"
*
When, as children, we were made a present of those great encyclopedic works World and Mankind
or The Earth or the latest volume of the New Universe wasn't it into the multicolored "Carboniferous Landscape" or "European Animal Kingdom of the Ice Age" that we plunged first of all, and weren't
we, as though at first sight, drawn by an indeterminate affinity between the ichthyosaurs and bisons,
the mammoths and the woodlands? Yet this same strange rapport and primordial relatedness is
revealed in the landscape of an arcade. Organic world and inorganic world, abject poverty and insolent luxury enter into the most contradictory communication; the commodity intermingles and interbreeds
as promiscuously as images in the most tangled of dreams. Primordial landscape of consumption.
-Walter Benjamin
*
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. This is why they insist upon their identity being recognized, insist upon their continuity their links with their dead and the unborn.
If the 'return' to religion is in part a protest against the heartlessness of the materialist systems, the resurgence of a nationalism is in part a protest against the anonymity of those systems, their reduction
of everything and everybody to statistics and ephemerality.Democracy is a political demand. But it is something more. It is a moral demand for the individual right
to decide by what criteria an action is called right or wrong. Democracy was born of the principle of conscience. Not, as the free market today would have us believe, from the principle of choice which if
it is a principle at all is a relatively trivial one.
-John Berger
*
SONG AFTER BATTLE
The old men say
The earth only
Endures.
You spoke truly,
You are right.
-Native American song translated by Frances Densmore
*
[ Indian fragments ]
Sun shafts thru smoke,
small fires
tended & calm..
Smoky light,
breath
after breath.
.Blanket laid on pavement
mirrors, combscoins dropped like stars
.Strung high,
leaf
& lamp smoke..
Light rushing upriver
*
Gauguin to Van Gogh: "You draw too quickly."
Van Gogh to Gauguin: "You look too quickly."
*
[ books ]
The Steel Cricket Stephen Berg
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Kaufman, Herzog, & Levi, editors
The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience Ann Lauterbach
.
Rescued from the used shop:
The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (Jargon Society, 1970)
Eyes & Objects Ronald Johnson (Jargon Society, 1976)
*
[ film ]
New from Criterion: Robert Bresson's great au hasard Balthazar
Sometimes it seems that, with the profusion of remakes, comic book characters, & computerized
special effects, we've entered a Dark Age of Cinema. A friend recently suggested the work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Maybe he'll restore my faith? I read that Werner Herzog considers him
the world's greatest living film-maker.
*
[ Seasonal haiku by Shiki ]
frog afloat in a rain barrel summer dawn
cooling on the porch a man who knows the names of stars
firefly's glow cold in the palm
in a corner motionless pregnant spider
summer insects dead between the pages of a book
hoe in a field upright in the heat no one there
my back to the Buddha how cool the moon!
*
[ Indian fragments ]
Riverbank 6 am father & son in the shallows
.
In the roadside dust I find a sack of human hair.
Valleys of ash, soundless
.
Damp towel
on the back of a chair.Clock,
two candles.Speckled mantis
at the base of a lamp.Moth wings.
i n m e m o r i a m Lorenzo Thomas Gustaf Sobin
Kim Dorman
Austin, Texas
Gleanings & Fragments July 2005
Thursday, One o'clockA distinct View with my glass of the Spanish Coast/Seaward
a great Scar of Pink Clay or Sand Stone; the Mountains above, drear & desolate, with bold
ascents & plunging Descents, the white Stone (granite or lime?) staring & streaking thro'
the black Heath & Brushwood~
40th p.2.The island & Town of Tariffa/The surface of the Sp. Mountains (limstone) in
fine sweeps, and horizontal Furrows & ridges.~
The Shadows of the Ropes & Rope Ladders on the Convexcave of the bellying Foresail
& Top Sails.
Between 4 & 5, Thurs afternoon, April 19arrived at Gibraltar.~
Cracker, Blazer, and Hasty,
Spitfire, Sulphur, & Strombolo.~
Water by Halo Moonlight/grey yet very bright, Fish Scales tossing about on it.
-from The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
*
THE WORLD
It burns in the void.
Nothing upholds it.
Still it travels.Traveling the void
Upheld by burning
Nothing is still.
Burning it travels.
The void upholds it.
Still it is nothing.Nothing it travels
A burning void
Upheld by stillness.
-Kathleen Raine
*
Driving north
on Lamar, we arrive
at a Chinese temple
Tin Hau,
Queen of Heaven.
Curved roof,
rock shrines
an unexpected sight
in Austin.
We peer inside
idols dressed
in yellow silk.
Incense sticks
in pots of sand,
offerings of fruit
in lacquered bowls,
a feminine feel
thru out.An elderly couple
smiles at us.
Feeling welcome,
we go inside.
Not a speck of dust,
everything arranged
with care.
Cups with gold trim,
fresh flowers,
embroidered cloth.
Chinese letters,
hand-brushed
on strips of paper.
Brass bells.
At the entrance,
a plate of orange peels
dried in the Texas sun..
She points to
the wall & says
"Buddha in back."Her husband
slips past us,
carrying a bouquet
of roses.Suddenly,
female voices
rising in chant
she bends
to turn on
a cassette player.
*
[ books ]
Jubilant Thicket Jonathan Williams
Long awaited & worth the wait.
The Green Piano Janine Pommy Vega
*
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have
new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future. But we go round,
or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
-D.H. Lawrence
*
In this war between mankind
and the beauty of the world
I am a traitor, my loyalty
does not lie with mankind
-Paul Goodman
*
I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges,
pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has
never been forgotten.I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumor and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities
cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honor.
-John Berger
*
IN OUR TIME
In our period, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.
-Muriel Rukeyser
~ Kim Dorman
Austin, Texas
Moon 33, 23m above the Horizon/the Star, 25, 59.8 7 degrees from the Moon,
the whole Cope of Heaven 190 degrees.~
Blue pierced white.
~
Long years of seriousness, of deep Passion, awful incident, seas traversed, & the
famous Things of the world seen...
-from The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
*
A rich
man, though wet through
by the rain.
-LeRoi Jones
*
[ Indian Snapshots ]
Boy waving
through spraynarrow fishing boat
eyes painted on the prow~
Thought it was a dog at first
goat at the edge of a field
grazing on tall summer grass~
Under a pandal roof
smoking, singingworkers
wait out the rainfor Jack Kerouac
*
[ music ]
Jumping the Creek Charles Lloyd
Skirting the River Road Robin Williamson
*
Was it the wind
or a word, a certain way
she tossed back her hair,
the late hour with our friends,
the wine, the black table mats,
washing the dishes or brushing
my teeth in the dark while
our son slept, the turn
of her profile in shadow
in the hall in pajamas
and outside new fall
leaves scratched concrete,
the traffic dull moving by and
loud trucks grinding me wide
awake to think alone while
they were sleeping?
-Dale Smith
*
Assume man to be man and his relation to the world to be a human one:
then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.
-Karl Marx
*
[ films ]
Salt of the Earth Herbert Biberman
The Human Condition III : A Soldier's Prayer Masaki Kobayashi
Black Rain Shohei Imamura
(& for my wife, Susie:)
Le Rayon Vert Eric Rohmer
This is one of my favorite films. Improvisational, humane, romantic.
The only way I know to find it is on a DVD (or video) titled Summer.
*
THEY
I see you down there, white haired
among the green leaves,
picking ripe raspberries,
and I think "Forty-two years!"
We are the you and I who were
they whom we remember.
-Wendell Berry
*
be the priceless
lotus
in which I
sleep awake
in your skin
the touch
of everything
shy.
-Jack Hirschman
*
Joy is what I like,
That, and love.-Ted Berrigan
~ Kim Dorman
Austin, Texas
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