TOM CLARK: The Archer and other poems from The Sand Burg (1966) | Clarice Lispector: The Archer (A Part of the Future) / Mine of Mirrors

Nameless | Shanghai 2018: photo by Ma Chenlu, 20 May 2018

Clarice Lispector: The Archer (A Part of the Future)

The object shown in this beautiful Hubble image, dubbed Messier 54, could be just another globular cluster, but this dense and faint group of stars was in fact the first globular cluster found that is outside our galaxy. Discovered by the famous astronomer Charles Messier in 1778, Messier 54 belongs to a satellite of the Milky Way called the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy. Messier had no idea of the significance of his discovery at the time, and it wasn’t until over two centuries later, in 1994, that astronomers found Messier 54 to be part of the miniature galaxy and not our own. Current estimates indicate that the Sagittarius dwarf, and hence the cluster, is situated almost 90 000 light-years away -- more than three times as far from the centre of our galaxy than the Solar System. Ironically, even though this globular cluster is now understood to lie outside the Milky Way, it will actually become part of it in the future. The strong gravitational pull of our galaxy is slowly engulfing the Sagittarius dwarf, which will eventually merge with the Milky Way creating one much larger galaxy. This picture is a composite created by combining images taken with the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Light that passed through a yellow-orange (F606W) was coloured blue and light passing through a near-infrared filter (F814W) was coloured red. The total exposure times were 3460 s and 3560 s, respectively and the field of view is approximately 3.4 by 3.4 arcminutes: image by ESA/Hubble /NASA, 7 November 2011

Not having been born an animal is a secret nostalgia of mine. They sometimes clamor for many generations from afar and I can't respond except by growing restless. It's the call.

This free air, this wind that strikes me in the soul of the face leaving it troubled in an imitation of an an anguished ever-new ecstasy, anew and always, every time the plunge into a bottomless thing from which I fall always ceaselessly falling until I die and achieve at last silence. Oh sirocco wind, I do not forgive thee for death, thou who bringest me a damaged memory of things lived that, alas for me, always repeat themselves, even in other and different forms. The living thing scares me as the future scares me. That, like things that have passed, is intangible, mere supposition.

I am at this instant in a white void awaiting the next instant. Measuring time is just a working hypothesis. But whatever exists is perishable and this forces us to measure immutable and permanent time. It never began and will never end. Never.

I heard about a she who died in bed but screaming: my light's going out! Until there was the favor of a coma inside which she freed herself from her body and had no fear of death.

Before writing to you I perfume myself all over.

I know you all over because I have lived you all over. In me life is profound. The early hours find me pale from having lived the night of deep dreams. Though sometimes I float on a visible shoal that has beneath it dark blue almost black depths. That is why I write to you. On a waft of thick seaweed and in the tender wellspring of love.

I'm going to die: there's that tension like that of a bow about to loose an arrow. I remember the sign of Sagittarius: half man and half animal. The human part in classical rigidity holds the bow and arrow. The bow could shoot at any instant and hit the target. I know that I shall hit the target.

Now I'm going to write wherever my hand leads: I won't fiddle with whatever it writes. This is a way to have no lag between the instant and I: I act in the core of the instant. But there's still some lag. It stats like this: as love impedes death, and I don't know what I mean by that. I trust in my own incomprehension that gives me life free of understanding, I lost friends, I don't understand death.

The horrible duty is to go to the end. And counting on no one. To live your life yourself. And to suffer as much to dull myself a bit. Because i can no longer carry the sorrows of the world. What can I do when I feel totally what other people are and feel? I live them but no longer have the strength. I don't want to tell even myself certain things. It would be to betray the is-itself. I feel that I know some truths. But truths have no words.

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977): from Água Viva (1973), English version by Benjamin Moser

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Sagittarius Star Cloud. Stars come in all different colors. The color of a star indicates its surface temperature, an important property used to assign each star a spectral type. Most stars in the above Sagittarius Star Cloud are orange or red and relatively faint, as our Sun would appear. The blue and greenish stars are hotter, many being relatively young and massive. The bright red stars are cool Red Giants, bloated stars once similar to our Sun that have entered a more advanced stage of evolution. Stars of this Sagittarius Cloud lie towards the center of our Galaxy -- tantalizing cosmic jewels viewed through a rift in the dark, pervasive, interstellar dust. This famous stellar grouping houses some of the oldest stars known: image by Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/ STScl/ NASA), 20 May 2001

Archer, folk festival, Gyantse, Tibet: photo by Ernst Schäfer, 21 June 1938 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Sagittarius constellation: image animation by Michelet, 17 August 2006

Globular cluster Messier 54 of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy: image from Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys by Ata Sarajedini, 25 May 2006

The principal stars of the constellation Sagittarius, as seen from the northern hemisphere, in a long exposure.: photo by Scott Roy Atwood, 21 September 2009

M104 ngc4594 (Sombrero Galaxy): image by Hubble Space Telescope, 2003 (NASA)

Untitled: photo by _ИГ, 20 June 2015

First World War, Belgium, air war. A French pilot attempts an emergency landing on his own terrain after a failed attack on German Zeppelin hangars near Brussels. The aircraft, a bi-plane, has hit the trees and become lodged; soldiers climb into the trees: photographer unknown, 1915 (Spaarnestad Photo / Nationaal Archief)

Woman in the Dunes, Hiroshi Teshigara dir., 1964: theatrical poster: photo by Doctor Sunshine, 3 March 2007

THOMAS (TOM) CLARK "THE SAND BURG" POEMS JOE BRAINARD 1966 POET'S FIRST BOOK

TC: The Sand Burg, Ferry Press (London), 1966: cover by Joe Brainard

The Archer

the sky is torn
   glug a locust
no these are another
                          season goes
the sky is blue today
it seemed impossible it could
turn into a pigeon that way

gloves and flutters of the mood
a sun that propagates like a father
a father that lugs home sacks of mud
                                                well light is feeding
                                       hey glug
                      this coffee's bloody
                      mug       the mugfinches
                      celebrate the light

                                   with
the pause crap to Tibet
your wrists and cold
gave exit to a kind
        of laurel I had not held

        a cold it numbed your Achilles and my
        and my
                    limbo actual
                   diversity or a jerk to say
           the hour
        would be caged
stepped forward and the smiles of eggs
just as we did not know that there are crests

           surprised on his face a laugh that his sons
          were in granite as the egg
a coquette fist driving this cast of face
                                   dint-first
thru the gesture a slowness that goes fast to let the scythe taste

he felt himself displayed to the tank
                  allured by the tend to dispel caste
                  a secretion beard pressed in corners
nib of the spider that is forward
                        personage not to goof the archer's friendship alone

TC: The Archer, from The Sand Burg (1966)

Twin Arrows, Arizona: photo by Philippe Reichert, 26 June 2010

Twin Arrows Trading Post, Arizona -- abandoned: photo by ap0013, 26 March 2013

Twin Arrows Trading Post, Twin Arrows, Arizona. In 2009, the Hopi Tribe and the Route 66 Association restored the arrows. There were plans to restore the trading post as well, but so far, that doesn't seem to be happening: photo by Dean Jeffrey, 30 March 2012

Twin Arrows. Twin arrows in the aptly named Twin Arrows, Arizona: photo by Randy Heinitz, 1 September 2013

And Now To the Stars

Nameless | Shanghai 2018: photo by Ma Chenlu, 18 May 2018

A kiss on the glove
At four blows
During lunch I dreamed of mud
But the neck of the waiter
A pink over the blue of the mud
Around your shoes
Was a something
A token I carried
To remember this love was like plastic.

TC: And Now To the Stars, from The Sand Burg (1966)

Nameless | Shanghai 2018: photo by Ma Chenlu, 14 May 2018

Afternoons

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/BandAid.jpg

Band-Aid manufactured by Johnson and Johnson Co.: photo by Svetlana Milijkovic, 20 June 2006

it’s fine to wake up and hug your knees
my knees
when I have run out of fire fluid
I rush back to bed

the feeling of paws on my knees
petals and wings
little hair
why have you gone

I sing that in my head
being alone is a song
a cigarette in bed
it’s better not to touch the ceiling
but if love attaches a band aid
from the ceiling to your head
there’s nothing to do but recognize it

TC: Afternoons, from The Sand Burg (1966)

Nameless | Shanghai 2018: photo by Ma Chenlu, 27 March 2018

Clavier

Nameless | Shanghai 2018: photo by Ma Chenlu, 22 April 2018

The past that I chose
this thing with a lip in its midst
this unpleasantness resembles a rose
offered by a leper
but there is a warmth in sores

Night goes on
    in this cup of pebbles
a leopard shuts his book
a lamp illuminates the filth
a dwelling in refuse
in the terminal
signal of a lip
                   the dragonish
look of satiety on the face of love
in the corner of the cage
where you seem to have gone with me

A prison boat to infinity

The sugarish mist of distance
a ship going    twilight's
smudge on the horizon touched by
the crap on your paws

TC: Clavier, from The Sand Burg (1966)

Nameless | Shanghai 2018: photo by Ma Chenlu, 16 May 2018

Clarice Lispector: Mine of Mirrors (from Água Viva)

DSC08967=stavrosstam: photo by Stavros Stamatiou, 16 April 2018

Close-up of foam on the surface of a tide pool, Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, California. When plankton crushes ashore, it dies and disintegrates creating foam-like bubbles, which are left on the floor of tide pools floor after the ocean retreats. The bubbles display all the same properties as soap bubbles, displaying typical interference colors, except they last much longer than soap bubbles. The organic material of the plankton, which lowers the surface tension of the water (as soap does), and preserves the film, is responsible for these colors: photo by Brocken Inaglory, 1 March 2008

But now I'm interested in the mystery of the mirror. I'm looking for a way to paint it or to speak of it with the word. But what is a mirror? The word mirror does not exist, only mirrors exist, for a single one is an infinity of mirrors. Mirror is not something created but something born. You don't need many to have the sparkling and the sleepwalking mine: two are enough, and one reflects the reflection of what the other reflected, in a trembling that is transmitted in an intense and mute telegraphic message, insistent, liquidity in which you can plunge a fascinated hand and pull it out dripping with the reflections of that hard water that is the mirror. Like the seer's crystal ball, it drags me toward the void that for the seer is his field of meditation, and in me the field of silences and silences. And I can barely speak, with so much silence unfurling into others.

Mirror? That crystallized world that has in itself enough space to go ever ceaselessly forward: for mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it is a magic thing: whoever has a broken piece can go with it to meditate in the desert. Seeing oneself is extraordinary. Like a cat whose fur bristles, I bristle when faced with myself. From the desert I would also return empty, illuminated and translucent, and with the same vibrating silence of a mirror. Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.

Remove its frame or the lines of its edges, and it grows like spilling water.

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977): from Água Viva (1973), English version by Stefan Tobler

Close-up on foam on the surface of a tide pool, Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, California: photo by Brocken Inaglory, 1 March 2008

Nameless | Shanghai 2018: photo by Ma Chenlu, 11 April 2018

2 comments:

Mose2326 May 2018 at 01:06
but there is a warmth in sores

In this age of virtual intimacies that line has a curious nostalgia.

It's great to read these early poems of yours, Tom. Where were you in '66?
TC4 June 2018 at 13:47
I was living in Brightlingsea, a cottage perched on the edge of the world as it was then composed. A fairly austere existence it was, living on fish and chips (the catch being local). Weekends in London. Travels (auto-stop), off the island, curiosity-driven (!), from June to Sept. The Sand Burg was published by the late Andrew Crozier, a friend from Dulwich with whom I'd been mates in the Wivenhoe period, when we were both @Essex. An amazing sum - I seem to recall the astronomical figure 50 quid - was raised in incremental donations. Looking at it again, a bit mouldy from all these years in a series of steamer trunks, I see that it's quite well made in all material respects, with the special bonus of the wonderful Brainard cover. The title and what I suppose would have been said to be the theme, though I was probably not quite aware of this at the time, came from the Japanese film Woman of the Dunes, which I'd seen at the Arts Cinema in Cbge, directly downstairs from my then digs (c 1965). Estrangement perhaps would have been a more accurate title.

Monday, 21 May 2018

The Archer and other poems from The Sand Burg (1966) | Clarice Lispector: The Archer (A Part of the Future) / Mine of Mirrors

2 comments: