Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
The Photograph
coordinated by Kamelia Pezeshki
Futur antérieur by Horst Herget
Model: Nii, wet plate/ tintype, original plate 6.5”x 8.5"
CHEEZ
by Fiona Smyth
ProTesT
by Cem Turgay
Greenwood
by Kai Chan
Spring Drawing 1 , 2021
Poem a Week
by Gary Michael Dault
Serpents in Dreams
serpents in dreams
coil round like letters
alphabetic reptiles
mad to spell
I see one
hanging down
into a G
another twists
into the letters M
and then D
surely they're not
doing all this
just for me?
DOUBLE DOUBLE issue 0507-2021
View Current Issue
https://oceanpounds.com/blogs/doubledouble/0507-2021
CONTENTS: Lee Ka-sing - Spiegel im Spiegel in the afternoon, violin and piano. Ten recent photographs. / Poem by Holly Lee - For Rosetta (an octopus that played with dancing fish)
Caffeine Reveries
by Shelley Savor
The City Beckoned
Aotearoa
by Madeleine Slavick 思樂維
Two shelters
I would like to wait for a bus here.
From the Notebooks (2010-2021)
by Gary Michael Dault
From the Notebooks, 2010-2021.
Number 84: Two Notebook pages. On the right, "Love for Two Oranges" (December 24, 2020) and on the right, "St. Francis" from Christmas Day, 2020.
Travelling Palm Snapshots
by Tamara Chatterjee
France (April, 2010) – I arrived without warning; sporting silver flip-flops to a rather chilly 8°C. My runners and jacket lost to an arduous adventure 11-hours (flight) south on the world map. Shoes shopping in Paris is a rather serious and dangerous affair; but after a month in Africa discovering outrageous fauna, flora, a pirate or two and the jungle mafia - it was the nostalgic welcome home I really needed.
Some Trees
by Malgorzata Wolak Dault
Number 73
The Botticellian Trees
The alphabet of
the trees
is fading in the
song of the leaves
the crossing
bars of the thin
letters that spelled
winter
and the cold
have been illumined
with
pointed green
by the rain and sun
the strict simple
principles of
straight branches
are being modified
by pinched out
ifs of color, devout
conditions
----William Carlos Williams
Leaving Taichung Station
by Bob Black
Three Times: 最好的時光
“Does the world have nothing inside but sorrow?”–Andrei Platonov
“Rain and tears, are the same
But in the sun
You've got to play the game
When you cry
In winter time
You can pretend
It's nothing but the rain
How many times I've seen
Tears coming from your blue eyes
Rain and tears, are the same
But in the sun
You've got to play the game”-Aphrodite’s Child
1986: Hooker's Green (a time for youth)
Chaiyi - Taichung
And the years slip like breath along the edges of our skin, an abundance and a reckoning, the firmament spreads wide, like a gap-toothed space, dark and unending. Pitch and Pale above, all that which twined and coursed through you, comes forth like small accumulations. And then
I was here, fallen into a world that had not yet prepared for my waking—green was my Island home, green was the sound of my mother’s tears as I was born, green was the scent of the papaya my father fed her to assuage her fear, green was the sound of the neighbours' screaming in downtown Taichung, green was my vibrant heart, the rice fields and the stone rivers and the thumb stuck between the gapped teeth in my mouth and the vegetables being hawked every morning, green the vegetable sellers voice with the sails of the morning, green of my mother’s grumpy breath and most importantly the green of my grandmother’s eyes loving me in the husk-goldent morning: emerald as the mountain cats and soaring hawks, she a keeper of the land and the maker of my heart.
Blindness, from the beginning, snaked its way into my eyes and wording, and I could not tell the difference between day and night, between body and absence, between the sky and the ground, between winter and spring, between melon and dragon fruit, that swimming. There was only way to distinguish things when you are blind:
The movement and difference of temperature.
I name it green and I grew.
2014-2020: Phthalo Blue (a time for love)
Toronto – Taichung – Taipei – Toronto
Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.
This is how he snagged and snared, his blue eyes like Centaurea cyanus, cornflower wild in the field of his gaze and his words ran through me like my mother’s milk, for it was he who opened my taste to uncanny and wobbly things, surrendering my predilection for mistrust to care and leaps and undoing. Tangled trees our limbs became until I grew new roots that begun in the slow, waving of the east Beaches and scampered across oceans and feted itself over bowls of eels in Taichung and later singing to the distant mountains of the train station, lanterns guiding us along the spines and secret whispers of 九份, cats pursuing like jealous lovers, our hearts together, mine for the first time, in fire fettle and ferocious and he spoken as the sky curtained the sea: “the friscalating dusklight”, a strange love song I only learned later but that it how it began, all blue words and blue eyes and blue skies stretched over blue water and blue tea. Little did I know, then, our hearts would grow blue as well, blue as the rust on oiled, long gone steel, our hearts blue as the ghosts that carry their teeth in silk bags and render them mute, blue as the ache in his bones and his soon-to-stop raging heart, blue the color of his chest and railroading scar after his blue heart was scalped open and the black-blue valve, dead from the blue oxygen of which it was deprived and removed to be replaced by a mechanical blue-steel one and blue when I left our love and our city in the time of Covid.
Phthalo blue, where was the halo of our love and our life, blue-deaf everywhere: the lost blue faces on the streets, the leaving blue faces on the airplane, the made blue ocean on the southern sea, the raucous blue words of my mothers and aunt and the soft blue lullaby my dead grandmother sang to him one night, of which I would find out later. All blue.
The blue of the bitter melon, the blue of the magic and sea, the blue of the rain in Kenting, all gone now, or so it seemed. The blue leather flintcraw of our life, our words and teeth and bones, all laying in beds far apart.
Endings before the beginning had even blossomed, blue as the coal night, blue as the touch of your tongue on my body, blue as the Noctiluca scintillans familying at night along Taiwan’s islands, sparkling love and loss
藍色的眼淚
And then the ocean took us, as did life, all of it, gone. And I could see death’s disguise hanging on me.
But the colors had yet a surprise for us, blazing through the skystar in the shape and sweet sweep of wine.
In the swallowing of a new time and a new color and there it was lapping up everything in front of us,
waiting.
2021: Magenta (a time for freedom)
Toronto and onward
How does one see through the clouded time of unseeing, especially when they themselves tell stories with pictures while all along they have struggled with the nature of how to see. So, it is with me. I am blind. Have I been blinded by his blindness and his love and breaking and yet, I returned, call it the gamble to gambol past all that had died previously, what else is there to do in time of shadow and sorrow: our love had already cantilevered over death’s dominion and stood straight, so why not, why not I asked myself as I wept into my red pillow on the flight back, where my spine weakened and my breath grew troubled and how was I to know that all things change, that color had transformed, that we had substituted blue for magenta, life for death, the land for the sky and it stood there, as the canary lights across Mississauga fleet and reflected back the constellations above and I understood, this simple gesture
That there the light was lanterning home....
And I fled all I had fled originally only to encircle those incurable circles and I awoke days letter as my mouth was filled with light and the thinning and so,
this morning darkness spreads thin the bone-winter light and the pliable silence limbers with memory as it enters my body and my sight and I gulp and open and I hear him say,
Shale shell the burning of the night sky and of your pulpy and ever-bursting heart.
You: the color
Me: the scent
We: the chrysalis and cover.
All that gaining and going. All that and all that we became and so this morning, again, spreads the darkness carving anew the winter light…..
spreading and becoming and what began as green became a wilding color and we flowered magenta for we had plucked death and we shuffled off the flora that once grew wild in 林口區, the red restaurants skeletoning the alleyways of 淡水區, the red warm water of 礁溪 and the red rivers and beaches and our skin reddened in the red sun of 萬里桐, all of that, our red life which has now beckoned us color, scent and chrysalis: our cover
alive
Wing it and set that free.
For: Wan-lin Yang
STAY WITH ART. INDEXG B&B
(Breakfast area and small shop)
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416.535.6957
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MONDAY ARTPOST
ISSN 1918-6991
Published on Mondays, with columns by Artists and Writers
Published since 2002, an Ocean and Pounds publication
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