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Monday 3 November 2014

Units

.

Indigenous people visit their loved ones in a cemetery in the outskirts of Lima, Peru #DiaDeLosMuertos #DayOfTheDeath: image via Qariwarmi @qariwarmi, 2 November 2013


Dank leafmulch under rubber gluon muckshoe
First rain of the season earthsmell scumble

All saints and souls crawl back under
The wormy circumstance rug again no snug bug

At the witching hour time's vague vista opens up
Sun going down over mountain into ocean

A marbled grey wall split into violet underlit slats
Successive rooms we've been through now stacked

The floorplans of the endarkened cube units
Six deep memory storage for another world




 
Children living inside the Navotas graveyard in Manila climb on to stacked graves as millions across the Philippines prepare to pay their respects at public cemeteries for All Souls’ day: photo by Noel Celis / AFP via The Observer, 1 November 2014
 

Papier-mâché skulls in front of the Bellas Artes building, Mexico City
: photo by Antonio Olmo via The Guardian, 3 November 2014
 
#Navotas, Filippine, il cimitero che è diventato città: photo via Lettera43 @Lettera43, 29 October 2014

Prayers for you: A mother and her son visit the tomb of their departed loved one at a public cemetery in a slum community of Navotas north of Manila, Philippines, on Friday, ahead of Monday's All Saints' Day obervance. Filipinos as all other Christians all over the world, troop to cemeteries every November 1st to pay respects to the departed in the Christian tradition of All Saints' Day. AP/Bullit Marquez
 
 
A mother and her son visit the tomb of their departed loved one at a public cemetery in a slum community of Navotas north of Manila, Philippines, on Friday, ahead of Monday's All Saints' Day observance. Filipinos as all other Christians all over the world, troop to cemeteries every November 1st to pay respects to the departed in the Christian tradition of All Saints' Day: photo by Bullit Marquez / AP via Jakarta Post, 29 October 2010
 
Philippines All Saints Day
 
Informal settlers with homes built on top of multi-level tombs go about their daily business as relatives spruce up the tombs of their loved ones at a public cemetery in Navotas north of Manila, Philippines, in preparation for observance of All Saints’ Day: photo by Bullit Marquez / AP, 31 October 2012
 
XBM101
 
Relatives spruce up the tombs of their loved ones Thursday 30 October 2008 at a public cemetery in Navotas, north of Manila, Philippines, in preparation for All Saints' Day observance. Christians all over the world troop to memorial parks and cemeteries and offer prayers to honor the departed every November 1 in the annual observance known as All Saints' Day: photo by Bullit Marquez / AP via Waterloo Region Record, 28 October 2008
 
 
Navotas, Philippines. A woman reads a book outside her house, located on top of a cemetery: photo by Ezra Acayan / NurPhoto / REX via The Guardian, 28 October 2014
 
Embedded image permalink
 
Niño local coloca vela en tumba durante el #DiiaDeMuertos en #Navotas #Manila #Filipinas (Xinhua/ZP: image via XinhuaGráficaEspañol @Xinhua9, 1 November 2014
 

A boy climbs up apartment-style tombs to light a candle inside a public cemetery in #Navotas city, north of Manila: photo by Romeo Ranoco / Reuters via Hans Solo @thandojo, 7 November 2013

6 comments:

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore said...

What an array of steamy yet chilling photos. And your visceral-as-possible poem (going through those stacked up box-like rooms) a straight stare into the camera.

I was "typing up" this poem when I opened today's post...

WHEN DEATH TAKES OFF ITS MASK

When death takes off its mask
there’s only one face behind it

When death takes off its shoes
the stairs become evident

When death sits down to have a smoke
we’re eager to arrive

When the ship pulls away from earth
we’re on it

When earth pulls away from us
we’re not on it

How many have gone before
and we didn’t notice?

By a strange mathematics
it’s always someone else

The air is filled with light
and our time has come

Even if we live more years
steam puts its

mist on our windows

We’re still here and will
always be here

through it all

ever more beautiful

and still
_________
4/18/14

TC said...

Abdal-Hayy,

How many have gone before
and we didn’t notice?

-- Ah, but now we notice.

I guess it's in more than one sense pretty cold about those units, particularly when, after five years, the rent isn't paid, and the bones end up there on the ground, in the narrow causeway between the six-and-eight-deep crypt stacks.

There appears to be a housing crisis as well as a death crisis, in so many parts of this suffering, spinning ball of rented cement boxes upon which we so tenuously dwell, much as some alien species of our own creation. Thinking, here, I suppose of Mary Shelley and hers... creation I mean... monstrosity as a category having so mushroomed from the exceptional to the common any more...

And this is not even to mention the Lena Dunham news.

Abdal-Hayy, on a personal note, maybe you'll recall the particular loamy return of the earth senses when dark falls early and the temperature drops here -- that old recollection I have of a congenial evening with your magic opera collective in the big old northside house, that woody darkness feeling.

"Wormy circumstance", an epithet evoking all the clammy humus of a country churchyard on a chilly night, refers to John Keats's creepy-crawly adaptation of Boccaccio, Isabella: or the Pot of Basil, much appreciated for its "romantic" qualities by Keats's friend Charles Lamb -- who singled out for praise the grisly passages regarding the heroine's attachment to the severed head of her lover, which she discovers after his murder by her brothers, and plants in a pot of basil.

XLVI.

She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow,
Like to a native lily of the dell:
Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
To dig more fervently than misers can.

XLVII.

Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon
Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies,
She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosom, where it dries
And freezes utterly unto the bone
Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:
Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,
But to throw back at times her veiling hair.

XLVIII.

That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
Until her heart felt pity to the core
At sight of such a dismal labouring,
And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,
And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
Three hours they labour'd at this travail sore;
At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
And Isabella did not stamp and rave.

XLIX.

Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?
Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?
O for the gentleness of old Romance,
The simple plaining of a minstrel's song!
Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance,
For here, in truth, it doth not well belong
To speak:--O turn thee to the very tale,
And taste the music of that vision pale.


If it is late at night, you are alone and have a magnifying glass at hand, you can click on this image, and get the picture, somewhat.

Isabella (from the Deep Keats Scrolls)

TC said...

Talking of Mary Shelley's creation, does anybody remember these little Frankenstein-stepping geniuses?

Be the BQE said...

Tom,
Lovely poem and photos pairing. The proximity of life and death, and the squishiness in between. And how wonderful to read "memory storage" and not be reading about a device.
-David

TC said...

David,

Thanks and yes, the squishiness and the mingling... perhaps the everyday proximity to (what's left of) those who are gone, might help us to an increased sympathy, the understanding that the distance between here and not here is never more than a hair's breadth, and that there are more gone than present, and that before too much longer we'll be joining those multitudinous ranks.

Memory storage for another world would of course represent hyperbolic optimism keeping company with poetic licence. Even at this stage, as fragile the bones, so grows the memory.... Who knew (or would have wanted to know) the full squishiness of the details...

manik sharma said...

Tom,

Two words..

Unreal estate !!