Pore

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Dog, Dimitrova Street, left bank district, Voronezh: photo by Raise-the-Sail, 19 April 2009

Oh, old one
old Pore,
forgotten dog, small
animal that once existed
these sixty odd
years ago or more.
There was once a photo of you,
I remember it only dimly,
you had a name,
your name was not Pore,
I cannot recall
what your veritable name was
any more, it was so
long ago. Tugs
at my heart now I did not
care for you more,
little Pore, small
petshop mongrel
merely existing
so obscurely
and briefly, harming
none, ignored by all
and got rid of so soon
after you came, relegated
to what sad end
I cannot think of now
if I ever did know.
All I know is that you are gone.
Your photo is gone.
The vague memory I have of you
will soon be gone also,
those will have been the last traces
of you left
in the world, Pore.
I wish I had paid more attention
to you when the chance was there.
For you, if by some
weird chance
you are aware of them,
wherever you are,
these memories
I am seeking
must represent a sadness.
Or then again
maybe not,
for you were so undemanding always
in your brief time
under the weak occluded
1940s
sun. You asked so little
and received perhaps even less than that.
It will seem just as well to you,
it may be, to be forgotten,
even, perhaps,
a relief. Your image
dwindling now
even as I write,
so dimly limned,
so small,
so unremarkable,
so beset
if not by abuse
then by neglect,
that surely,
yes,
that's the part I do not forget,
the neglect, the remorse,
the thought.
I think
but am not sure
that in the lost photograph
you were looking up anxiously
at the camera
cradled in a dirty blanket
inside
a cardboard box.

Man playing with dog: photo by Roger Rössing, between 29 August 1948 and 15 September 1948 (Deutsche Fotothek)

Animal Memory

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Squirrel eating a peanut: photo by Mariappan Jawaharlal, 18 April 2011

Animals simply do NOT "look back", in the human sense, as remorse, regret, nostalgia, etc. They are far too sensible for that. Their demonstration of some semblances of short term memory, e.g. the serial position effect, which privileges recency over anciency, is a strictly practical function. There's a bit of hippocampus activity at work there... but only the tiniest bit. In the related area of spatial memory, the scatter-hoarder creatures are thought to have some ability to relocate their scatter hoards. But this function is limited at best, as anybody who has closely observed the behaviour of squirrels would know. We had a neighbour who for many years sat in his yard feeding peanuts to the squirrels. The squirrels accepted these gifts and immediately busied themselves with burying them. But over the years, the ground became an immense cache of buried peanuts, the location of which had obviously been forgot by the squirrels who had so busily buried them. It was almost funny to watch the little guys bustling about, scrabbling at the ground in one spot after another. It became obvious that their method was to scatter their hoard so generally that, by sheer force of arithmetical chance, sooner or later they could not help but accidentally discover an ancient mouldering peanut. Clearly they had no memory whatsoever of exactly where they had put anything. The same phenomenon occurs in elderly humans.

"power lines / stretching..."

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A powerline stretching over winter fields near the village of Erzhausen, Germany. Looking westward: photo by Ingolfson, December 2007

a field, in the mind

fog, winter colors

power lines

stretching into white-grey

frosted distance

empty

A powerline stretching over winter fields near the village of Erzhausen, Germany. Looking southward. The cemetery and associated buildings to the left: photo by Ingolfson, December 2007

Vassilis Zambaras: Athene's Tree (Two Poems)

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Olive tree, Sithonia, Greece: photo by Edal Anton Lefterov, 5 September 2009

I...Monsanto Man on Tractor, 9 AM


Out walking,

Smelling something faintly

Evil in the air

And not knowing exactly where

It’s coming from,

We finally come across a man

At a crossroads somewhere

Among the myriad olive trees

And ask him where he’s been

Spraying since daybreak to find out

Just where we can proceed safely,

Only to have him shoot back with a

No problem, folks. I’ve just finished.

You can walk anywhere.

Olive tree near Karystos, Eboiea, Greece: photo by Tim Bekaert, 20 March 2005

Olive trees (Olea europaea ssp. europaea), Corfu, Greece: photo by Cezanne, 16 July 2003

Monsanto phosphorus plant, Soda Springs, Caribou County, southeast Idaho. This phosphate ore-processing plant was originally constructed by the Morrison-Knudsen Company in 1950, and production started in 1952. As of 2011, P4 Production LLC (Monsanto’s wholly owned subsidiary) owns the phosphate mining and processing facilities. The phosphate ore processed at Soda Springs comes from nearby (10–20 miles away) phosphate deposits laid down in Permian-era oceans ca. 250 million years ago. In the plant’s furnaces elemental phosphorus is refined from phosphate ore. Phosphorus is used as an important ingredient of Roundup brand herbicides and for some other products: photo by akasped, 10 September 2010

II...Tree House

Greece's wealth on the bough: photo by Vassilis Zambaras, 2007

“Houses, you know, grow stubborn easily, when you strip them bare.”

-- George Seferis, from Thrush

Not your usual idea

Of a child’s elevated playhouse
Full of youthful abandon,

But this

Abandoned, low-lying roofless

Shell of decaying stone walls

Inhabited by stubborn runaway

Brambles and wild olive trees

Rooted firmly to the earth.

The "face" of an ancient olive tree: photo by Vassilis Zambaras, 2007

“If you haven’t built a house, dug a well, and married off a son or daughter, you haven’t lived.” -- Greek proverb

As part of her dowry, Eleni was given about a hundred olive trees in a grove in the middle of nowhere about 9 kilometers due west of Meligalas; the only way you could get there in 1981 was to park your car a kilometer away and go on foot uphill for about 20 minutes. Every winter, my mother-in-law and her late husband would walk down from Revmatia to this olive grove during olive harvesting time (a two-and-a-half- hour walk) with a donkey ladened with provisions, all six children, the goats and anywhere from 15 to 20 sheep. Once there, they would stay in a tiny 3x3 sq.m stone hut for as long as it took them to harvest the olives-- usually a week, but longer if it was a good year. In 1981, Eleni and I decided to tear down the hut, together with the nearby sheep enclosure and use the stones to have a new house built in the grove, but first we had to find enough cornerstones for its construction; using our Fiat 127, we immediately set out rummaging through the countless heaps of dumped stones and piles of rubble scattered all over Messenias to find the pieces we needed.

For this small 4 x 6 sq.m house, we only required about 50 cornerstones and fortunately for us but not for traditional Greek village architecture, at this time people were still demolishing traditional stone houses in fits of modernist frenzy and building new monstrosities out of reinforced concrete and brick and calling it “progress,” so it was fairly easy finding cornerstones. And that’s just what Eleni and I did in the ten years between the building of the little house in the grove and the construction in 1991 of the much, much larger two-storey stone residence our family now lives in. By then we had amassed approximately 1,200 cornerstones—more than enough for the house and the stone wall in front—and were known throughout Upper Messenias as that “somewhat batty couple in a battered Fiat 127 who were gathering, of all things, cornerstones.” [NB: It might interest readers to know that cornerstones from old demolished houses are now selling at 30 € a piece and up.]

But back to the grove. During Fall, Winter and Spring and when the two children were still too young for school, we would leave Meligalas every other Friday night after I had finished with my English lessons, drive the car (filled with enough food and other provisions to last us until Monday morning) to where the dirt road morphed into a rut, and then haul the kids and provisions up to the house—no electricity, no phone, no running water, no other people, owls hooting, jackals crying at night, millions of stars—for a weekend in Paradise. As strange as it might seem, when we came back down to idyllic Meligalas on Monday, it felt as if we were returning to Hell aka Civilization.


Vassilis Zambaras: from One Down (Twice), Two to Go, from Vazambam, Saturday 11 July 2011

Ancient olive tree in Pelion, Greece: photo by Dennis Koutou, 30 January 2011

Bird Hunters sign, outside Monsanto phosphorus plant, Soda Springs, Caribou County, southeast Idaho. This phosphate ore-processing plant was originally constructed by the Morrison-Knudsen Company in 1950, and production started in 1952. As of 2011, P4 Production LLC (Monsanto’s wholly owned subsidiary) owns the phosphate mining and processing facilities. The phosphate ore processed at Soda Springs comes from nearby (10–20 miles away) phosphate deposits laid down in Permian-era oceans ca. 250 million years ago. In the plant’s furnaces elemental phosphorus is refined from phosphate ore. Phosphorus is used as an important ingredient of Roundup brand herbicides and for some other products: photo by akasped, 10 September 2010

Olive trees on Thassos, Greece: photo by Peter Pakandl, 7 September 2006

Allen Upward: Athene's Tree

That old Talk about the Gods, which is called mythology, is confused in many ways, partly because all language is confused, partly because it is a layer of many languages. When the talkers no longer used the beast as an idol, they used it as a symbol, in short a word; when they no longer slew the real christ at Easter, they named the sun at Easter, Christ. Their language is tangled and twisted beyond our power wholly to unravel, because it was beyond their power; because it began as a tangle, when man's mind was still a blur, and he saw men as trees walking, and trees as men standing still.

How hard the old cloistered scholarship, to which the Nobels of a bygone age gave their endowments, has toiled to understand the word glaukopis, given to the goddess Athene. Did it mean blue-eyed, or gray-eyed, or by the aid of Sanskrit merely glare-eyed? And all the time they had not only the word glaux staring them in the face, as the Athenian name for owl, but they had the owl itself cut at the foot of every statue of Athene, and stamped on every coin of Athens, to tell them that she was the owl-eyed goddess, the lightning that blinks like an owl. For what is characteristic of the owl's eyes is not that they glare, but that they suddenly leave off glaring, like lighthouses whose light is shut off. We may see the shutter of the lightning in that mask that overhangs Athene's brow, and hear its click in the word glaukos. And the leafage of the olive, whose writhen trunk bears, as it were, the lightning's brand, does not glare, but glitters, the pale under face of the leaves alternating with the dark upper face, and so the olive is Athene's tree, and is called glaukos. Why need we carry owls to Oxford?

-- Allen Upward: from The New Word (London, 1908)


Vassilis Zambaras: Monsanto Man on Tractor, 9 AM (from Vazambam, 19 October 2011); Tree House (from Vazambam, Wednesday 2 February 2011)

Blade

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Mixed forest of Araucaria araucana (aka Monkey Puzzle Tree) and coigüe in Nahelbueta National Park, Chile: photo by Scott Zona, 27 November 2010

Had great trees great memories
Would that lifeform which has looked impassively down upon centuries of use
Recollect the gold and silver pilfered from the Andes
By vast slave armies to finance the high tables of the New World?

The cutting edge of history is once again the blade that slices
The tall cold man in the dark coat out of the cameraphone picture

Snapped beneath the exclusive restaurant portico
Under the iconic exotic imported monkey-puzzle tree

Whose large female cones, if left untrimmed, would like big coconuts sway
So dangerously from the limber concentrically radiating branches.

Araucaria araucana, beneath the Sierra Nevada, Parque Nacional Conguillío, Chile: photo by lautaroj, 31 December 2010


Araucaria araucana, along Lago Pulmari, Neuquén Province, Argentina: photo by Pruxo, 15 March 2007


Araucaria araucana (Monkey-Puzzle Tree, Pehuén) on the slopes of Volcan Llaima, Parque Nacional Conguillío, Chile: photo by William S. Kessler, 15 October 2005

Araucaria araucana, Curacautin, Chile: photo by Pato Novoa, 17 June 2009


Araucaria araucana, female cones developing: photo by MPF, 27 July 2005


Araucaria araucana, new green female cones: photo by Derrick Coetzee, 26 July 2009

Phantasmagoric City

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Charlie Chaplin stands on Douglas Fairbanks' shoulders during a Wall Street rally, 1918: photographer unknown, for The New York Times; image by Mr Gustafson, 21 October 2007

The dozens and scores of pinnacles that have pierced the skies over Manhattan in the last dozen years, towers for doing business in and towers for living in, are the permanent notation of a great surge of prosperity. The tide itself once so often recedes. The towers are there to testify to the vast energy that threw them upwards and that is certain to reassert itself after the necessary retirement... For a while the receding tide leaves these ambitious monuments high and dry. Then the waves begin to lap forward again...

-- The New York Times, 25 March 1931

Wall Street, from roof of Irving Trust Co. Building, Manhattan: photo by Berenice Abbott for Works Progress Administration, 4 May 1938 (New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

Trading floor of New York Stock Exchange just after the crash of 1929: photographer unknown, October 1929 (Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum)

starlit

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Christmas decorations, Richmond Annex: photo by efo, 24 December 2011

frosted tears are they, on the face of the neon
liquor store clown -- starlit Albany
inversion layered reddish blue two
forty eight a.m. Christmas on the Richmond/
Oaktown drag
thirty two degree separation
from earth above wide arcs of white light
from cruising police choppers
search the sky

Chain drugstore exterior, Albany: photo by efo, 23 December 2009

James Schuyler: December

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Hanging Christmas decorations in Providence, Rhode island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940

........................................................................Il va neiger dans quelques jours

........................................................................FRANCIS JAMMES

The giant Norway spruce from Podunk, its lower branches bound,
this morning was reared into place at Rockefeller Center.
I thought I saw a cold blue dusty light sough in its boughs
the way other years the wind thrashing at the giant ornaments
recalled other years and Christmas trees more homey.
Each December! I always think I hate “the over-commercialized event”
and then bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the entrance
to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants to look at all
the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue in swank shops
and how can I help falling in love? A calm secret exultation
of the spirit that tastes like Sealtest eggnog, made from milk solids,
Vanillin, artificial rum flavoring; a milky impulse to kiss and be friends
It’s like what George and I were talking about, the East West
Coast divide: Californians need to do a thing to enjoy it.
A smile in the street may be loads! you don’t have to undress everybody.
..................................“You didn’t visit the Alps?”
..................................“No, but I saw from the train they were black
..................................and streaked with snow.”
Having and giving but also catching glimpses
hints that are revelations: to have been so happy is a promise
and if it isn’t kept that doesn’t matter. It may snow
falling softly on lashes of eyes you love and a cold cheek
grow warm next to your own in hushed dark familial December.


James Schuyler: December, from May 24th or So, 1966

Ice skating in Rockefeller Center, New York, New York: photo by John Collier, December 1941

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

The Birth of the Prophet

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"I have been certified as mildly insane!": photo by Gillian Wearing, 1992-3 (Tate Gallery)

So then he wandered out into the street and began to testify
Something about life being a long journey of the soul
An endless voyaging turning into a voyaging with an end
One knows how but one does not know when
No one yet knows when as the traffic bore down on him

As the traffic bore down on him my mind drifted in the wilderness
Or was it that my mind having been adrift all along
I’ve just grown to regard the wilderness as my resting or laughing place
He cried but those were not yet his last words
As the traffic parted around him as around one charmed

Windows ("That time of year you may in me behold")

.

Boy beside store window display of Christmas ornaments: photographer unknown, December 1941

Delmore Schwartz: The Winter Twilight, Glowing Black and Gold



That time of year you may in me behold
When Christmas trees are blazing on the walk,
Raging amid stale snow against the cold
And low sky's bundled wash, senseless as chalk.
Hissing and ravenous the brilliant plant,
Rising like eagerness, a rushing pyre
(As when the tutti bursts forth, and the chant
Soars up -- hurrahing! -- from the Easter choir).

But this is only true at four o'clock,
At noon the fifth year is once more abused,
I bring a distant girl apples and cake,
Pictures, secrets, lastly my swollen heart,
Now boxed and tied by what I know of art
-- But as before accepted and refused.



Delmore Schwartz: The Winter Twilight, Glowing Black and Gold, from Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, 1950

Boys looking at store window display of toys: photographer unknown, December 1941

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 73: That time of yeeare thou maiſt in me behold

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 73 (1609 quarto, facsimile)

That time of yeeare thou maiſt in me behold,
When yellow leaues, or none, or fewe doe hange
Vpon thoſe boughes which ſhake againſt the could,
Bare rn'wd quiers,where late the ſweet birds ſang.
In me thou ſeeſt the twi-light of ſuch day,
As after Sun-ſet fadeth in the Weſt,
Which by and by blacke night doth take away,
Deaths ſecond ſelfe that ſeals vp all in reſt.
In me thou ſeeſt the glowing of ſuch fire,
That on the aſhes of his youth doth lye,
As the death bed, whereon it muſt expire,
Conſum'd with that which it was nurriſht by.
This thou perceu'ſt, which makes thy loue more ſtrong,
To loue that well, which thou muſt leaue ere long.

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 73: That time of yeeare thou maiſt in me behold, from 1609 Quarto

Christmas trees and wreaths in store window display, photographer unknown, December 1941

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Presence: Providence

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Snow in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940

Snow in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Snow in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Snow in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Snow and slush in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Snow and slush in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Waiting for a bus on a rainy day in Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Window shoppers watching toy display in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Window shoppers watching toy display in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Window shoppers watching toy display in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Window shoppers watching toy display in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Boys watching toy display in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Window shoppers watching toy display in downtown Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940



Christmas window display in a 5 and 10, Providence, Rhode Island: photo by Jack Delano, December 1940

And then we had presence

--Ted Berrigan, from Presence in The Paris Review #37, 1966

The Paris Review #37, 1966: cover by Derek Boshier

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Seasonal

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Unemployed workers in front of shack with Christmas tree, East 12th Street, New York, New York: photo by Russell Lee, January 1938 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Shoppers rush past frozen images unseen,
In bright synthetics Sierra skiers ski
Through snowdead woods on blurred storewindow TV.
In the forest it is cold. How can it be
Colder in the cities? Street people crouched
Under Amoeba’s protective arcade mouth
Such big round starving O’s: oxygen balloons
Lifting off to perfect freedom, no strings --
A pity they can’t float off in them.
Peace, brother. I can spare the buck or pass it.
Just breathing commits one to everything --
To life -- which can’t be purchased on this street
Where ravenous as sheer presence Christmas lights
Up human appetites for guilty pleasures.

Mendicant begging outside supermarket entrance: photo by Anna Kaiser, 6 September 2011

Amoeba Music storefront, Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley: photo by efo, 13 December 2008

One-legged war invalid begging, Berlin: photographer unknown, 1923 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)



Food line at the Yonge Street Mission, 381 Yonge Street, Toronto: photographer unknown, 1930s (Yonge Street Mission)



Toronto street sleeper: photo by Andy Burgess, 20 December 2009



Children sleeping in Mulberry Street, New York City: photo by Jacob Riis (1849-1914), 1890; image by Dark Attsios, 18 December 2011

University Avenue, Berkeley, at night: photo by Whyzee, February 2008

Very little town of Bethlehem (El Cerrito, California): photo by efo, 18 December 2011