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Showing posts from January, 2013

Zanzotto: Online

Old man, still asthmatic? talks at his kitchen table Immersion in air of Veneto eyes concentrated on thought 5 minutes 27 seconds of film kicks in at the click of the Pointer Poppies profusion of sanguinity he says, our own nature advances where?   Or the 1 hour 25 minutes 7 seconds behind bird-like microphones Multiplicity is a romance, he says, our words turn into dream moments Set between at table literary ladies hauteur rhymes with auteur But he reaches unassumingly for words to transfix wounded landscape One what is one what is one to do, he says, out here in the marches? His eyes don’t care for the lens don’t see us at cable-end years apart We want more signs but see instead his eyes thinking as he speaks of roads Of another war, the roads divide, he says, the present is made of remembers Or this video 18 minutes younger in black and white Reading in the open air of beauty and beauty’s checks and

Zanzotto: Graphemes

Desire asserts letters against the sky desperate for direction, to direct Epsilon and Company haunt space refigure buildings, make big claims Barricade babel from incomprehension outward facing they keep eyes appealing Never an alphabet in sequence but the rummage of desire and law Image of proud grammars small mark-particles of survival From western plains and southern waters the air enlivens Refreshes cleanses clears this city with a name and genome Even the miles of speckled adverts speculations, spectacular particulars Winds past the minitalks of say hoardings streetsigns shopping centres Wind of soft insistence, tender to prodding plants and water surfaces Processes the oxygen eating prolongs preserves private breath Renders lettering frail inconsequential amidst the progress of seasons Only it is human activity elevates million mi

Zanzotto: Bushfire

The will-it won’t-it by January sunrise too hot, catch too easily Ground litter rushes this way and that air lifts taking branches dust paper Language heightens the preliminaries tinder dry will be flying ember Ozone hole morphs into heat dome denial feeds what cannot be denied Watchers try to wait it out easy measure the day with their fire plan Sublunar we mark the boundaries clear the property of native refuse Property, the invisible lines around our landed wishes It is burnt gumleaves come first flat brown clouds above the hills Flying flowing the immaterial flames will turn dark every seed-grown material Seed cases decades buried old grenades ready to explode But will it come and where unturned topsoil takes the heat Fuel load waits, unmoving grasses could spark here, or somewhere Will touch off across the fences, from gullies will tr

Zanzotto: Embankments

Train gone the fennel stalks resume quiet a wind-light scent aniseed Stalk levels reach up steep inclines their hold and force repeating each summertime Edwardian stones impacted deep surface below sleepers, mute tangible scatter Or from acacia and peppercorn humus amidst paper mulch and refuse Little grasses spiky or downy splurge green evidence Where they cannot be picked where they field flowers go Ants from hideouts file through stems slow some, large with food specks Seed-headed fennel and ivy and a tangle of purple passion flowers In breeze silence, unattended but for an old Italian man with secateurs I sometimes think of what he might say to so much profusion On the vacant declines of Westgarth-Richmond i.e. what might I say? And here it comes the next one p assengers at windows blank with ipods S

Zanzotto: Occupations

To read him say he wipes the window into childhood and sees its workers Artisans at Veneto doorways hewers of wood and grinders of knives Is to wipe across the winter window and watch trades as they went: Milkman, leave those bottles on the footpath catch up with your clink-clink horse cart Garbage man, empty the stinking bins from the shoulder, set down with grace Butcher, amidst sawdust air, sever the offal slice the lines accurately for hours Ironmonger, lift the weight and feel the time it will take for a hard sale Blacksmith, fashion more glowing horseshoes in the shed behind the bowsers Knitters, by day and night make home comfort go full length He helps us see work without sentiment labour worth the years it takes Who are we, tied to the end of cables our income a set of numbers in a vault? And what are our chances of breakthrough to an arca

Zanzotto: Treviso

Once again in the zizzy dialect he set out to park reality in our minds The stone houses of Treviso ancient pavings in summer heat Here the words track earth change all the way to the Geiger levels Barely able to believe it is coming to an end already Down where the rootworks feed grasses picking their moment to gush The radio waves muzzy and chattering their once in lifetime insistences We return to it his intuitions that in his way mutated into instructions Invitations   invasions intimations that nature (word overused) gets us in turn Once again here in the surety language offers he gets us For whom Treviso is a day trip farmlands fallen castles canals More so where we are now this instant listening not only to solitary cicadas Or jazz from an outmoded sound machine in antipodean backyards at dusk Questions about ends and starts all