Glenn Gould’s Sonatas – Fantasies Variations over & over, day after
day. Sublime, tragic, joy-sorrow-
ful, heart-rending, heart-
filling.
Vibrating strings pull the soul’s sinew, tiptoe over your grave of dreams. Awake to lull
into neverending sleep.
So you dance, a marionette of his fingers, the sensitivity of his touch on your black
& white keys
cast
in sunlight and shadows over the ground outside.
Can your dangling feet dance faster? Slower?
Pitch
of splintering
glass.
A colossal public square,
churches and music halls,
crystal panes
raining.
Sharp shards in air.
Empty courtyard, mist lit by a rising sun,
the silverless mirrors, prismatic—
never hit-
ting
the catastrophe of ground.
Intense chromatic moments of notes waver in-process,
delicacy & trails & lively crescendos.
Time becomes space.
Trill floating
Escher glass-stairs of notes.
A cathedral of crystalline arrhythmic intervals.
Without tonal centres,
clusters echo clusters,
flutes, violin, saxophone,
this lullaby of gentle notes,
that tempest of cymbals drumming a glass-
bottomed boat torpedoing
a furious ocean.
Loneliness, an open-ended disjunctive divine embrace.
Fresh, clear
as the thrill of dawn.
Inspired by Tatar-Russian composer, Sophia Gubaidulina’s Modern Classical oeuvre.
Brenda Clews is a poet who dances. She’s had two books published, Tidal Fury (Guernica Editions, 2016) and Fugue in Green (Quattro Books, 2017). She’s also an artist, a video poet, an editor. and runs a quarterly poetry and singer/songwriter event called Minstrels & Bards in Toronto, Canada. Her website is brendaclews.com
Sorry,
I'm talking to myself
It's not polite to talk to myself
and not invite you
into the conversation.
When my mind wanders
think of me as a kite
high off the ground,
Distant on a string as
I trust you with the spool.
As clouds get a Bit furious above us
You know my attentions may
draw dangers that hopefully
won't more than tingle your fingertips,
should a strike find my tail.
And as I exhale
So does the wind
Loft my Apparency
of coherent desertion,
leaving the
horizon closer
than
the grounds Below.
I think the dead are singing
or so I gather from their mouths.
I do not like the boat I'm in-
it has no oars
and the big black water has no fish
or prawns so am I wrong?
The dead look like angels painted
touching and leaning and grouped
toward some understood truth
that Anonymous knew.
I don't like the car I'm in
it has no horn and the brakes don't work
so what's the use of youth?
The dead move like curtains
lifted by the wind. The windows are opened
and let the sun and the snow right in.
The dead seem to have no feet no need
for shoes they drift.
I shuffle along in my orthopedic shoes
poor circulation forcing me to lean on polls
in the street. I think I will join them soon
they are so neat.
-
Shining is asleep now
under the snow
and the plow in the barn
cuts the wind in two.
The tractor is graced
with a glaze of ice
and doesn't move
from its prominent place.
The sun is minted.
It does its work
in the subterranean hollows
of the hardened ground deftly.
Stirring deep is summoned growth
an off camera sex scene.
And underground in the nether hole
It’s pooling. She's moistening below.
It's a joy to know that out of sight
she's blooming like a nubile girl
bound to be seduced by a vital force
and show her charms
in sons and daughters of light and warmth.
It can’t happen soon enough.
In “The Shootist”, J.B. Books is not feeling up to snuff. He has cancer. What are the concerns of a man dying.
To die commensurate with the way he lived his life. Books dies in a gunfight. McIntosh dies in the desert, under a broken wagon, fighting Indians. Norman Thayer will die of heart failure by the side of his wife, Ethel.
Two police officers die investigating a stolen moped at a gas station in the Bronx. One buys it between the eyes, the other in the back. The killer out on early parole from a manslaughter rap. The DA blames the judge, the judge blames the parole board, and the board says the jails are overcrowded.
What should I be doing, old turtle. Devote myself to re-order the world or crawl off to a lonely spot and preserve myself. We are trying to educate everyone to their individual capacities and see that all are fed, clothed and sheltered adequately. Because the suffering of one citizen makes suffering for another, the slow death of one sometimes makes the sudden murder of another.
There is this black rock we live on and its lovely mantle of green. It is all that is perfect. And everything of it is perfect that respects its integrity. On the subway I was amused to find, hidden in the confused mass of anonymous, bleak graffiti, unseen by the studied, expressionless passengers, in pink, delicate script, vertically written, the word penis.
People are the element I live in. The world is pushy, we are bone, the numbers of us overwhelm. It is going to be hot again soon and the Bronx will actively resent it.
Books dies in Carson City, only two or three people will miss him at all. He died alone as he lived, with his enemies.
The Terminator
One leaf falls holographic illusion across time the Terminator travels to shape Sarah Connors’ destiny. Heart attack a common enough destiny as common as young men discussing girls’ tits. The Constitution is the document we refer to, the lodestone to correct course and not go crazily astray. Lose all purpose beyond murder, child sex and food hording. Illuminated manuscripts in a dark age, tape decks remind us of our voice our communal voice Supremes and Fred Astaire the silken wail.
I lie alone in the night its sensuality makes the best sense it does or does not clarify the day of classes or clients or chain saws whatever fever may have infected me at the moment a fever to achieve access to foreign films while living in the mountain community of Schroon Lake the fever to instruct the American people how to apply ideals and practicalities of Constitution to international relationships the fever not to die today, to maintain consciousness just one more season (and one more after that).
Anyway, what is being discussed– the finiteness of one life– or perhaps existence continues in another dimension, on another frequency no owl hoots but other purpler and indigo occurrences with other purposes as incomprehensible and wonderful as these purposes to choke on a cherry pit or nuclear bomb to wail our wail together each individual identifiable hoot and wail, loud laugh and suppressed scream one orbicular chant, humanity, from India to Indiana complete, one sing.
I feel this way searching for my place among you childless, but a child among children obeying or not obeying the speed limit as my hormones permit everywhere among brothers, the sisters among sisters the races together exterminating the last rhinoceros and preserving its genes at the zoological society my species attacking entire rain forests, temperate forests and boreal forests like the engraver beetle in the red pine’s inner bark. Thus, I occasionally cheer the Terminator cheer the machine and neutron bomb even in the face of individual heroics, the male and female face their physical love, tender and violent I don’t know what I want.
It could be simple as this headache. Not to despair just to care enough to think clearly and accept 10,000 years of history. Not to hate those in authority humor is the only remedy yellow ape teeth chimping in the glass death face and ritual is remedy a death song and one for planting and one for the beginning of loving.
The Burning of the Jews
It was a woodcut in our high school history text, Unit 4 Beginnings of the Modern World, that so disturbed, from the Nuremburg Chronicles depicting “the burning of the Jews,” flat perspective, faces of the victims among flames, in no particular agony, not especially Jewish, during the Black Death 1/3 of Europe died 1347-1351 alone. Although you die together you die alone. Earlier that week I had attended our 6th grade’s performance of Fiddler on the Roof, at first thinking Coltrane should have recorded Matchmaker as a bookend to My Favorite Things but as the play darkened with the town’s absorption into the diaspora, democracy yet unthought of and rule of law a fig leaf for authority Jasper, who played Zero Mostel, delivered his line well to the effect you=re just doing your jobs while wrecking our lives.
Anyway, nothing like that is happening here, is it? The gardener planting tomatoes, the gravedigger finding skulls, there is so much life a little death won’t matter. I’m reading Bloom in the Times, how anyone who doesn=t believe Israel should exist is by definition anti-Semitic. Come to find out, I may fall into that category–not that Israel shouldn’t exist, but as a so-called Jewish state anymore than a Muslim or Christian land. To some Jewishness is not a religion, it’s an ethnicity. You have no problem with the Swedish state, do you? Should the Swedes be expected to open their borders to the Finns?
Jasper was a beautiful ham, big as Zero. A friend posed this question: must all states be melting pots like the United States? I said yes not because they should but since it’s inevitable. Let labor flow like capital! I hate when people disagree with me. I get angry. When a plate breaks, it asserts another possibility. America was the last word of the play and brought a tear of pride to my eye.
Immigration, exasperating argument re the Other. How many’s more than enough? 9 billion, a rational, real number that exceeds or we’re convinced is within the carrying capacity of the planet. Climate change is the new Black Death. I like the Amerindian body type and face mixed in with the European, African. The irrepressible economy rolls out reams of logs, ores of elements, bags of ice, fields of rice. Embargo. The moon stares, bare, full of interstellar space. Better a cold shoulder than a visit from our military. The crazy Nazis must have felt themselves extraordinarily compassionate toward the mother, earth, the goddess, history, or some such abstraction and, thus, acted on a fraction of all they did not know. Selfless soldiers just doing their jobs expanding the border or, on the other hand, collecting fagots for “the burning of the Jews.”
A Gun in Every Home
Two fine films: The Lost City and Blood Diamond. I joined Blood Diamond during a village massacre and said to my wife A gun in every home. Those devils would think twice before razing the village and seizing the boys.
A well-regulated militia. The local militia the most interesting moment in a strong film with motive (economic, emotional), action (chases, fights) and a sexy, sexless love story. Use of violence by the local militia for a limited purpose: protect the community, the young from the janjaweed. The crop from the weed. Limited scope and defensive posture but armed and coordinated, cooperative, the men (and the women) side by side. Warriors at the gate, you will not run, you will not bargain. Just violence = limited scope, defensive posture.
Great music. Cuba, Africa. The Lost City, when the communists tell the club owner under threat of violence No saxophones in the band. The saxophone! Invented by a Belgian–Look what the Belgians are doing in the Congo! When the state’s violence is turned against the citizenry for non-violent acts.
This quiet neighborhood, July, undergirded by violence, force. That’s a given– any farmer, custodian, EMT will tell you that. Without just violence Gandhi’s scope, and King’s, might be vanishingly limited, negligible (but not non-existent)? Regarding King the matter is simple–he was non-violent but dependent upon federal force to counter the South’s violence. No doubt without the larger force, the non-violent would be overwhelmed by southern violence. Here, non-violence was a tactic, not an ethic. Gandhi, however, had no violent partner to protect him from the British. Or did he? 1) There was the potential violence of the population, which Gandhi restrained but could release which the British feared, and 2) It was the restrained (limited scope) violence of the British that allowed Gandhi to exist rather than be extinguished–this restraint was a (British) cultural imperative (limited scope) as well as emanating from Britain’s view of India as a protectorate and valued citizen of the united kingdom (defensive posture).
What about violence or threat of violence to compel compliance with community as in mortgage foreclosure, driving without license, drug possession. Perhaps it is necessary violence to maintain orderly commerce, the common space, and preempt bad behaviors associated with otherwise neutral, private acts. The defensive posture is the common good; the limited scope is forgoing deadly force. But the citizen, too, must maintain a disciplined, armed non-violence, in case the state (the janjaweed) engages in an unjust, autoimmune violence. Hence, a gun in every home.
Robert Ronnow’s most recent poetry collections are New & Selected Poems: 1975-2005 (Barnwood Press, 2007) and Communicating the Bird (Broken Publications, 2012). Visit his web site at www.ronnowpoetry.com.
People are dying around me, but I can’t save them.
There are spikes pierced in my back,
spasms, but I can’t touch them.
Heartbeats, hell pulsating, my back muscles,
I covet in my prayers.
I turn right to the left, in my bed, then hang still.
Nails impaled, I bleed hourly,
Jesus on that cross.
Now 73 years of age, my half-sister 92,
told me, “getting old isn’t for sissies.”
I didn’t believe her—
until the first mimic words
out of “Kipper” my new parakeet’s mouth,
sitting in his cage alone were
“Daddy, it’s not easy being green.”
Leaves in December
Leaves, a few stragglers in
December, just before Christmas,
some nailed down crabby
to ground frost,
some crackled by the bite
of nasty wind tones.
Some saved from the matchstick
that failed to light.
Some saved from the rake
by a forgetful gardener.
For these few freedom dancers
left to struggle with the bitterness:
wind dancers
wind dancers
move you are frigid
bodies shaking like icicles
hovering but a jiffy in the sky,
kind of sympathetic to the seasons,
reluctant to permanently go, rustic,
not much time more to play.
Group Therapy
Wind chimes.
Wind chimes.
It’s going to rain tonight, thunder.
I’m going to lead the group tonight talking
about Rational Emotive Therapy,
belief challenges thought change,
Dr. Albert Ellis.
I’m a hero in my self-worship,
self-infused patient of my pain,
thoughtful, probabilistic atheism
with a slant toward Jesus in private.
Rules roll gently creeping
through my body with arthritis
a hint of mental pain.
Sitting in my 2001 Chevy S-10 truck,
writing this poem, late as usual.
It’s going to rain, thunder
heavy tonight.
Fiction Girl
(Transition)
Drawings, then poems flip over to fiction;
the flash girl rides this ghost of the invention.
Insecure in youth, switch girl from drawing
to poetry, extension flight, outer fiction space,
yours is a manner of words at work.
Mercury is a god of movement.
A new skill set, brain twister, releases 100 free plays.
Life is a version of old times, fresh starts, torn yellow pages.
I focused on you last night; I watched your head spin
in sleep, a new playhouse of tree dreams, high shifting.
Changes are leaves; I lift your spirits to the gods of fire,
offer you thunderbolts practice your shooting in heaven
or hell, or toss back to earth.
Change is a choice where your energy flows.
No computer gods will help this poetic journey.
May you cry out loud on route to fairytale creations.
You are the chemist, the mixer girl shifting gears.
Creativity is how the gallery of galaxies cement.
Flash fiction lines cross stars.
Cold Gray (V2)
Below the clouds
forming in my eyes,
your soft eyes,
delicate as warm silk words,
used to support the love I held for you.
Cold, now gray, the sea tide
inside turns to poignant foam
upside down separates-
only ghosts now live between us.
Yet, dreamlike, fortune-teller,
bearing no relation to reality-
my heart is beyond the sea now.
A relaxing breeze sweeps
across the flat surface of me.
I write this poem to you,
neglectfully sacrificing our love.
I leave big impressions
with a terrible hush inside.
Gray bones now bleach with memories,
I’m a solitary figure standing
here, alone, along the shoreline.
Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era and is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, and small business owner in Itasca, DuPage County, Illinois. Mr. Johnson is published in more than 2,013 new publications, and his poems have appeared in 40 countries. He edits and publishes 10 poetry sites.
