Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante? cus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!

‘Barin, a barin,’ said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.

‘Da?’

‘Dazhe skvoz’ kozhaniy fartuk ne stal-bi ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.’

Barin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózhaniy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bi ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Úzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity, Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastárzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds.

—Nabokov, Ada or Ardor, A Family Chronicle, 237

Like every great city, New York is a giant machine for generating memories. A future-nostalgia factory for all those who visit and can’t stay. Fragments of song, poetry, pop history, novels crowd every street corner and sidewalk. Buildings are wrapped in old newspaper headlines and half-remembered photographs. The real and the hyper-real are indistinguishable, and no-one cares—or has time to care. Eventually it all fades into the background hum, the ceaseless hustle of a city forever on the make, forever being made.

Yours is a room with a thousand clocks,

and several typewriters.

At the foot of the bed, a bronze compass

which points west-north-west in summer,

a sundial, a standing-stone, a hieroglyph.

A star-map, field-glasses, a satchel;

by the door a coiled length of rope and sturdy boots.

Every day you wake up exploring.

Things I would like to write, or write about:

“Pretentiousness: A Family History and a Fuck You.”

How steam curls off the edge of a coffee cup at 8am outside on a cold day.

A people’s history of the tomato, from an incorrectly-categorized fruit that folk thought was poisonous and named variously wolfpeach and loveapple, to the first food item to undergo wide-scale genetic modification, to a bland and overpriced-in-winter round red ball, all by way of my Grandfather’s greenhouse and a half-remembered movie about cannibalism in the Deep South.

A poem. Any poem. But preferably one of Frank O’Hara’s better ones.

You take a step: B flat. I let go the handrail and trip over a perfect fourth,

catch your hand before your left foot snags a tritone;

toetip to the devil’s harmony. the escalator glissandos tirelessly upward,

we stomp tone-clusters down the stairs

Six months before he was due to leave, we murdered him by the side of the road. Later, they would say that it was premeditated, that we’d invited him to that remote location just to kill him, left the body barely hidden because we were so confident that kunekune would dispose of it before anyone came to that cold, marshy campground, jammed up between the Whanagnui River and the dark-looming hills that flank the road to Jerusalem.

It really wasn’t like that though.

We’d planned to kill him much later.

And My Heart Goes Swimming

and my heart goes swimming

wet and lipid it hangs between waves of salt.
a warm heart in cold green waters
deep
to the bottom.

wave after wave washing the little skin
saline.

and my heart goes swimming

a fisherman scoops the sea,
finds a heart in his hand.

no cold fish warm red blood black hair
blonde.

a night of swimming,
open eyes laugh
see us
love
the man and my heart celebrate

and in the morning warm water from the tap.

but now the fisherman has fish to catch
see, he has a net, and sinkers.

back

to the sea
my heart goes swimming
wave after wave

no cold fish could swim like my heart goes swimming.

—Roma Potiki

in My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems. Eds. Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O’Brien. Godwit, Auckland, 1996.

Smoking with Carol

Filter tips, then menthol, lastly roll-your-own
with geriatric threads of tobacco hanging
and lick-spittle sealed. Come

you used to indicate, rolling two
in the laundry and carrying them
with the plastic lighter in your fist

out past the swimming pool, around
the Virginia creeper to the seat
where smoke could float over an entire valley

and quickly dissipate. You lit
yours first, I positioned mine
into your cupped palms or kissed

edge to smouldering slow flaring edge
breathed deep, as if we breathed together
for surely conspirators’ breaths are synchronised.

Often mine went out, or I left the end
not asking for another kiss of life.
Company or conspiracy were better

than any vice or discovery (later)
that the giveaway lighter had been left behind
and, for breath, there were peppermints

or a pre-dinner drink: white wine
and smoke dissolving together, Cloudy Bay
and our complicit smiles, smoke screwed-up eyes.

—Elizabeth Smither

via NZETC http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Ba28Spo-t1-body-d25-d2.html

“Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

“And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product [ … ] if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”