Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
Greenwood
by Kai Chan
"Closed Up - Looking at Myself at the End of 2020 #4" 2020, ink on paper, 28 x 22 cm
From the Notebooks (2010-2021)
by Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2021.
Number 69: Little House Gradually Being
Overwhelmed by Night (February 26, 2011)
CHEEZ
by Fiona Smyth
The Photograph
coordinated by Kamelia Pezeshki
Two or three elements by John Bladen Bentley
View Current Issue
https://oceanpounds.com/blogs/doubledouble/0122-2021
A transformation (2018), The documentation of a gallery space transformed into a working and living quarter. Photographs by Lee Ka-sing
Poem a Week
by Gary Michael Dault
GIRAFFE
with its laneway neck
sprayed like lilac
in the spring
the fragrant giraffe
with the bedroom eyes
sweeps down to graze
like a needle falling
in a gauge
the giraffe's pastoral
mouth moving
in the fatty dust
the emplacement
of its gnarled legs
stable like a baby's highchair
the creature lifts its small
goat head
to the tallest trees
where the sweet leaves wink
at the animal's appetite
delicate after food
its heavy-lidded eyes
close on spindly dreams
where a satiny evening
opens with a pillow
for its tender horns
OCEAN POUNDS online exhibition
SECLUSION DELUSIONS
Drawings by Shelley Savor
https://oceanpounds.com
Gibberish Diary
written by Holly Lee
Yap, I’m praying to the burning bush, to the crocodile in the pond, that snake, that fish bone, a short-haired woman walking in her sleep. Yap, I’m that man behind the trunky curtain, a cigarette in my mouth, inhale exhale I command the blooming and the falling of flowers, I plant that storm in the city, my wolfman hovers above buildings under that messed up sky. Manwolf drives into the city, only the four-legs, eight-legs and fourteen-legs strolling by. The two-legs are on boats refuging, at home cooking, zooming, streaming, lounging or doing nothing. I am doodling.
SECLUSION DELUSIONS showcases a small number of mixed-media drawings by Shelley Savor, all done in the isolation year of 2020. One may say these paintings are not just delightful, but therapeutic, they present equally well as whimsical sanctuaries for our currently interrupted, baffled form of living.
...........................................
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Caffeine Reveries
by Shelley Savor
Radicchio
ProTesT
by Cem Turgay
Aotearoa
by Madeleine Slavick 思樂維
Fire Station and Tree (2020)
Travelling Palm Snapshots
by Tamara Chatterjee
Uzbekistan (November 2019) – Deeply affected with the surroundings; we started each day walking the same path from our retreat to main street. One had to remember the intricate web of turns; one had to avoid the unnamed yet alluring tangle of passageways, unless of course one wanted to seek a real adventure. It's a cautionary tale, we found ourselves turned around in several cardinal directions and several kms away from our intended retreat on at least a couple occasions.
Some Trees
by Malgorzata Wolak Dault
Number 58
"Sap check'd with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere...."
Shakespeare, Sonnets, V
The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES
(A column on the culture of eating and cooking)
Canned Sardines
by Kai Chan
In our household we stock up on tins of sardines in oil; the Portuguese brands are the best. It is handy to have them for the winter time and on a rainy day when no one wants to go shopping. We also like to have them as snacks. We love this recipe by Elizabeth David: Take out the sardines from the tin without the oil and mash them with two or three tablespoons of softened unsalted butter, chopped parsley, salt and pepper to taste. Put the mixture in the fridge for about three or four hours. This sardine butter is now ready to be spread on crackers or bread. It is very delicious.
Another of our favourite sardine snacks is this recipe adapted from the “bar snack” chapter of Gabrielle Hamilton’s cookbook, “Prune”.
1 can sardines in oil 1 dollop Dijon mustard
small handful cornichons small handful Triscuit crackers
1 parsley branch
Then she gave details in how to prepare and consume it:
Stack the sardines on the plate the same way they looked in the can - more or less
Don’t crisscross or zigzag or otherwise make “restauranty”.
Commit to the full stem of parsley, not just the leaf. Chewing the stems freshens the breath.
Well, you really have to carefully follow her instructions to appreciate this simple pleasure.
The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES is a new column on the culture of eating and cooking, with contributions by various authors. The column name is borrowed from the title of a book by Claude Levi-Strauss. It is spontaneous, a little amusing but serious at the same time.
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Leaving Taichung Station
by Bob Black
Sabbath Elevator
"That he could form no memory of what he observed and could not record it in any language lent it a fullness..."-Ben Lerner
I
My, how things clatter:
to slip the wax from the wing in the day's brightness dropping
over evaporated water as fleshy-cloud and navigation and ground-speed snapping celestial,
small, accumulated reductions protected by modern engineering not granted Icarus:
you are in flight and of flight and stave the landing of thought and reconciliation
by the names of flight numbers, gate termini, the book that you open temporally like a lie and the storage-frozen food on a tray:
the amelioration of worry and shrinkage that you shall confront with your pressed ties,
trousers, obsequies and the dispossession of glasses poured full of memory and cheap booze peaty in its hope,
landing gear pulled tight, the hum in your ears, the ubiquity of voices tableting stories,
like thoughts stuck in the scrawl of a running-out-of-ink notebook,
syllables in your throat circadian in their jockeying: can you name them
or the heat of the grieving you shall embrace after the tarmac and the jovial current time
and the local temperature?
Do the dead recall such astigmatic arcana?
Does the local temperature matter,
for in a matter of hours the winging over latitudes and stories shall converge.
Though for now, you are elliptical and concentrating on the re-broadcasts
and the lacrimal memories that seem perfect for such a lofty altitude:
flight masks the sedentary and skepticism by the seeming,
by the optimism and negation of constraint by flight.
Tears not yet run
but the fear speaks up as your belly pushes against the buckle, the turbulence and drop.
A yellow-jacket skids across the glass' lip into the balm of the sugary oblivion of wine
and falls, its knitting pinchers sated from effort.
Gone summer and other sureties.
II
Once, you sat beneath a maple that seemed lenient to winter's selfishness
but was not enough to broker a way from the ember-fleeing words that lit up
between us once the acorn hit with a blod,
the ground between us thunderous and treacherous in its attempt at seeding
and I watched you scamper away in fear.
Who has not spent the rest of an afternoon chasing reassurance and reconciliation?
What to take from all that:
the dirt still stuck to our legs like tusks of ticks and burr,
the executed green fronds in the park patched like fallen lightening on our socks
having plummeted earthward from the exhaustion enacted by the sky's requirements
and yet and yet and yet:
The world will be made whole
from the stitching of our fingers
and all the absence and distance contained in the space and circumferences
which our thoughts marry and our bodies bridge:
the parsing of the sun, the masoning of the mortar between histories
and now the latitudinal escape of an ocean and the bureaucracy of time.
Still, I have seen in your youthful face the guarded protection of old age
and the fullness of that love that the young avert.
The turning away from the casket, the creaming over of the blemishes,
the switch backing of allotment and allegory.
How old the questions, how young they forever remain.
At the departure gate one intuits home, though the distance sung remains vast.
III
My, how the plane clatters upon its return:
all that weight which original in its grounding quicksilvers away in its slacking and its apostasy,
as you, your body and the tonnage of the fuselage, baskets fullness and fear,
gravity and thought and circumspect calculation radiates counter-clockwise,
the paranoia of the ground leaving,
as thoughts bank over the Great Lakes toward ceremony and reconstruction:
idea, re-imagination, recalibration, the blurring of the dead
all the while you soar above the awkward with felicity and facility,
the making sense of the seemingly senseless:
steel and aluminum craft and cranial slippage and the speed conjuring
a cutting away of the surly coupling that is both gravitation and emotional.
In the blue run beneath cognition and weightlessness and algebra
life toward a hurling, toward the speeching of amends by a graveside.
Many speak of funerals, few of the flight over fields and chasm plowed and seeded below.
So, you pull back from the cabin window, too small to mirror desire and dismay,
this marriage of modernity, plane and passenger each at lurch,
amateurish as the holding of a newborn.
Impossibly aloft, the bell ringing over the pasture diming the cow home to a pole,
all of that in the banging of the landing and the full-breath stop and pivot,
the heart replenished, the head cleansed of speeches for the bereft.
You figure after the procession, you will gambol to a cafe to bind what you left behind
pull it from the future with your siblings over dated wine and frazzled recounting.
Make the story the same.
IV
But it did not quite end like that.
Instead, you walked out into the cottony sky not silken but scraping,
the weather bailed up like stiff bowls of root bark and boll weevil
the basket of trees flamelessstuck between your teeth, the chewed bark and the frayed electrical wire: color peeking from the shearing, the stain in the old man's collar,
the cracked sunglasses that failed to obfuscate the tears.
Love made you fearless, faith picked at you like pennies itching their burn in your pockets:
the red crescent still pleasant against your skin.
Fuddled from the forgotten speeches, you left with the burn of being upon your hands.
V
The return is even more stiff,
again, above the ground and the surly bonds straightening and disappearing
pace and tug of the firmament's spin: the words exchanged by the graveside
and later in the watery cool of night.
Fuselage, toes tucked under sheet and skin
and the sudden recalling of the wine on the cafe's patio and the swarm of bees
which lickety-split appear in reckless formation, that small leap of temperature and time
that deepens the blue in the sky and widens the irritants as the insects panic in search of sugar
as the days distinguish themselves in their failing light and loss of heft.
The number of yellow jackets an indication that something has been rent,
an escape valve that enabled the innumerable swarm:
"the bees realize their days are numbered as the temperature declines and the rush maddens,"
the waiter suggests while consoling in his pouring of the potable and the tea.
VI
My, how old the questions,
My, how long the flight across pivot and story to arrive at you, resistant in your counter-spin.
The ongoingness of things, the lift and the leverage of love born not grimly but leonine
in its laziness.
One day we will be old and we shall go undone and shall brisk our hearts toward
any small dollop of sweetness as the bees, for our flight and fever shall need it.
And though the soil will cover us and the sky pull us, so too the sea shall carry us
and the elevator of our meaning shall go floor to floor clanking without our assistance.
Make light of that and save your index finger for the space between a hipbone and home.
It is all in the returning
as we wait for the earth to greet us
and as we adjust to ground speed and the pace of our lives together:
the de-acceleration of our acclimation to gravity and longing
if even during the crossing of loss.
The blanketing of mercurial flight, the distance that it took for us to cattle home
and for a moment the earth stopped and your arms opened
and all I had to burry comes forth in a field of colour.
Awake and ecumenical:
The light in your eyes that casts the shadows and the navigation in relief.
In relief.
VII
Make your way through room and roam,
red thread and the turning away
in that place where the world intersects the cavity of the heart,
and the calculus of lift,
the buzzing, fecund space of an eye closed, a buttered syllable
and a mouth wide open, mute to speech
articulate for listening.
There you are beneath the chasing stars and the night scattering composed.
Beyond diction or syntax or gardenial instruction,
the moon recasts as a life more luminescent than contingent.
You taught me that, regardless of the tense.
Listen, even in your going away, vital and visceral,
I shall always be with you for I am of you, even when distance denies that.
And when the curtains cloak out the evening's drift,
even when Summer is gone and with it
all its sureties,
I shall come wondering and ringing, no longer adrift.
MONDAY ARTPOST
ISSN 1918-6991
Published on Mondays, with columns by Artists and Writers
Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
mail@oceanpounds.com
mondayartpost.com
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