[...]always a big fan of linking to bloggers that I love but don’t get a lot of link love from[...]……

Unfortunately I missed your concert in Montreal, on July 2nd, and actually, last night was my first introduction to your music and personal charm.

I love that you sing Cole Porter! I am not an expert on jazz, but I know that when I am moved by a piece of music or voice, I automatically become a fan!
Barbara

One word: brutality

One sentence: The death of children is recurrently shocking, always half cocked, many times the puzzle that can’t be plainly, honestly, understandably resolved…

One paragraph: You have the smiles, razor sharp around the edges, soft as tongues melting in their fullness. Teeth & flesh, crescent moons scrabbled, love of life irrefutable – you have the love uprooted, cut down, stretched painfully. This is how it gets too hard to acknowledge, the young so vulnerable, pining, confident, perplexed. This is everything about us that doesn’t pan out, our children reaping the sins of their elders. Ah sweet Mary, Jane, Frank, John – sweet land of never never names – this is all the equations we are missing viable answers to, all our hope on a torture wheel unyielding, all our sense of justice questioned with impossible concussion directing…

Stream of Consciousness: Violence, violence against children – head-banging, heads shaking – violence & what do we do with what never will add up? I take you out by the river to see if we can clear out our heads, our hearts, our souls – emphatically, just at this bloody moment it’s a no go. & then we break down, & then we break out, & the thought of victimizing ignites anger. Only momentarily, though – it’s as if as far as we’re willing to look hard is a way out of blaming because all our empathy suddenly strengthens: thousands of us victims, children who escaped singing in the key of A minor, A minor a sloughing off of guilt, a mourning of wrong doing, life uplifting among the tragically lost, hope just to the left of everything sacred. Those kids, their lessons ended with a shot – here you go, too difficult to accept, too important by chance to forget just because. We will not forget, we will defy hatred, the next place we land a place to cradle love…

Say the names: “Seeing” – because the seeing at issue here is so important yet distressingly fragile – what’s ‘seen’ whether actually or metaphorically is destined to fade away in spite of intention, the deaths so many piling up & fading, the hope of remembrance slant hope, time & how mortality insures disappearance, love & maybe it’s love that endures, the recollection tempered by heartfelt propriety…

“…when you turned away
I, unable to invite and renew kisses,
heard the note of my failure.”
John Asfour

I

“Love is a mirror that hides no flaws.”
John Amen

Do you remember when I was the holy of your audience
squatting for hours on end in the motley crowd
babies crying, lovely women swooning
& me keeping an eye on
your stutter reveal –
do you remember it was me
had you whole, welcomed & diced?

I am the potted plant you decided was excess,
the girl in tight jeans & roomy sweater toppled,
a thought you barely had time for giving credence to,
small room lost in the panoramic scheme of things.
Do you remember asking me why & what for
on the eve of realizing I was everything I said I was –
even more so?

Dear John it’s 3 in the morning,
I see I’ve drawn the blind,
under my eyelids there’s all these lost souls
remembering love is serve & volley.
You’re not here, you’re never here –
keeps me honest, asymmetrical, hollering.
That’s it – that’s the light penetrating the pall of the room…

II

“What is it about beauty that lands me in the throat of grief?”
John Amen

Dear John I’ve fallen out of my own orbit
& the sky has skinned itself, clouds at war
with love preening like a picture in a locket,
humming posture & sedentary hope –
dear John able is as able does,
hope gives torrents of favour,
life allows.

Was that beauty I embraced
or only a story of fever pulsing?
Dear John all your footwork coming to a head
& me inscribing blessings after the fact.
We could tell each other it’s all right
knowing it isn’t – land
& fall short of recovery – touché.

It’s much less about turning away than facing up.
Dear John I’m on the brink of inevitability,
this is where all the finest themes
hone their raw skills. Now that you’re
a rose in my teeth wilting, calm
evacuation of my burning building –
now I’m all that too, & friable…

III

Do not leave me in this wilderness!
Or, if you do, pay me to stay behind.
John Ashbery

How high the house that John built stands –
can’t reach every poignant detail, posters
of Hiroshima on the walls, bowl
of origami cranes by the window,
faint light of the antique radio playing Roy Orbison –
can’t reach but not for lack of trying
as I count out the ways we do & don’t
belong here, the ghostly flicker of cheap tea candles
handsomely tattooing
a chair, an arm, a mood –

how deep in the cellar Reason hides
trying on chaotic jocular for size,
air trapped in its own throb,
psyche cadaver rolled up in a Persian rug,
our first words exchanged rattling the radiator,
make-shift sleeping space cold & snow-blind,
sure ground, shifting ground, tumblers –
how Folly, the fiddler, keeps sarcastic time
in the moment I’ve realized
no stable leaving exists.

Dear John something of a scandal
has swept up unrepentant residual flak,
released it in the form of cool ash onto the front lawn,
sown seeds of nostalgia, thought better of that, screamed
bloody murder yet remained unheard –
dear John the tirades of our ephemeral hopes
gone on a bender don’t
bleed the way they used to, something
I appreciate remembering how you had
neither coinage nor humility enough
to take the ineffable
to gutsy heart…

IV

Feeder

“The body’s discomfiture, bodies of moonlit beggars,
sex in all its strangeness: Everything conspires
to hide the mess of inner living, raze
the skyscraper of inching desire.”
John Ashbery

Tinderbox of virtues buried beneath the leafless willow – explosion
to follow, the invisible voluminous with dry core, small
ally of a salted heart, a windy compulsion, dreams
stilled by onslaught of tired saying, wide love
on the lam again.

This morning I reveal what I am
to what I’m not, make the necessary introductions,
offer to translate the fine print of misapprehension,
discover yet again the obvious – there is no translation for
wired hope, dead star, frippery: touché.

At the new birdfeeder first bird arrives, at least
the first I`ve seen, a tiny blithe of a creature hovering
for seeds, a mini pause of intention
I drink in along with coffee & lost concentration
on dog-eared book in hand.

I think of waking you, of watching you sleep,
of making love all day long as though
we’re twenty again, wet behind the ears,
sinuous as vivacious mood swings, our bodies speaking
in the tongues of neither god nor devil arriving –

think how the day will be all arms & legs
& the little pulse in departed bird`s breast
off to sing his mating song, & the glimmer
in your fine open gaze
rivering our shared slippage, live albatross, joined hands
on the cusp of springtime feral…

V

“The brain is a messenger with blood on his hands.”
John Amen

Dear John flicking stones over river left to right,
a hand glider sampling palpable direction
& how it’s come to this, looking
to others for balance – dear John
in plasticity pushing for commitment:
well maybe tethering baloonish breath
to mysteries & dead ringers is
long on sticking, short on arrival –
maybe dear John is bereft of a synonym
that could lead to keeping
comfortable beat?

I make of how I speak of you
a cozy igloo, only on the upside
of signals like corrections
go baffled forward.
I tell a mess of homage
to gods I don’t witness for
hoping generic wrath
keeps to unloaded highways –
dear John this & everything
more – mannerisms, homilies, health –
handcuffed anomalies?

I’m tracking a deer to the edge
of the campground, holding
my morning cup of dark coffee
close to the chest whispering.
You once again allot like dust
like harmlessness like treason –
dear John am I sideways or stung?
The next cull de sac is where I see you
running on empty, stepping flat-footed
between the gap & the gape
that’s been us slipping haywire –
been the black thumb in the pudding, puddle
of marked…

First Word – seminal

First sentence – In many lives fathers loom large in the ominously subtlest of ways, suggest without wholly revealing, touch but it may be self-indulgent, expect & are puzzled by their children, even as their children are puzzled by them…

First paragraph – This was somehow familiar & puzzling all at once, specifically regarding the ending. Family, isn’t it that Russian author Tolstoy who said that happy families have no stories…The family here appear to act towards each other at slightly crossed purposes, at least where the patriarch is concerned. The way the patriarch/grandfather is delineated one gets a sense that he is interested in practical details, less so in pleasures or emotions. This comes through via the selected detail, pleasure in the signature of a boy’s Game Boy & a daughter’s new cat, practicality (& indirectly criticism) in the grandfather’s questions as well as conversational subjects. One gets the sense that the speaker is revealing nothing beyond bald statements as far as the father goes – that is, to get to the heart of the matter you’d need either to decide for yourself based on details afforded what kind of man the grandfather is, or else query the narrator himself. The details do speak significantly, just not in a direct way.

Stream of Consciousness – Families always reading each other between the lines – fathers & their ostensible powers, grown kids with kids of their own recognizing so much of themselves in the mothers & fathers & yet not so – veiled criticisms that bite at the extremities – can we love someone who speaks a different emotional language? Well naturally, but then again, then again – the house with its cracks & all you can do is feel the scrutiny as judgement – mothers, where are they in this book? I’ve yet to read enough to know if there are mother poems – this is the first except we’ve been given that includes a female, a girl child with her new cat – I had a cat young – Bijoux was her saccharine name – loved Bijoux, protected her from the rough play of boys – families & rough play – love is a first & second & third helping of shimmering guilt often enough in the pit of the familial – also first & second & third helpings of tenderness – the practical can drain yet ironically is necessity if you’re going to get through – a fine ingenuous piece of wisdom simple as a child’s nursery rhyme coming up to bite you in the back of the heals – prayers, how do they fit in as you sort through treasures & debris both – treasures & debris on a muggy day in a life, hanging out the family’s unseemly laundry, cottons & silk & denim & wool – the grandfather in that poem missing the apple trees – what does that say – you could see the guy in an entirely different way without much difficulty – I had one of those gentle fathers, lucky me, in yet not such a gentle mother – where are the women in these poems – am I going to find them once I get the book? Or is even thinking about them wrongheaded due to the needs of this memoir…

Say the names – “On the subject of hegemony” – I got the sense that hegemony in this family was anything but clear, that the narrator was talking of being-with-others (in this case the father) more than being-in-the-world because in this case that was the overpowering situation. It is a kind of ironic title to me, anchored in the subtle suggestion of the details re the grandfather given…

First word: homage

First sentence: It feels like a sanctioning of wondrous difficulty, this “poem almost done”, the kind of difficulty that reworks, re-strengthens, rewards – or almost – & that it has to do with the sense of flesh becoming what one holds to while insisting on sensory deprivation brings to mind learning to morph the physical to the spiritual, without losing the essence of the physical – morph the possibility to the promise.

First Paragraph – Lovers take many side roads & main roads, sink into the ground via travelling footsteps, hold some sense of the given fiercely, learn intrusion is a chance for thickening, trail behind them cartloads of desire. That the beloved can either stay or depart yet both ways remain intruder says something profound about the nature of love, physical as well as emotional love. So many seeds, how many spilled in a pile of what has failed, how much the mutative governing the steadfast, how simple an open palm held up open. Secrets are dangerous, secrets are blessed, & thinking on tallying we do well to keep the heart fresh, the soul honest, the imagination timely & alive…

Stream of consciousness: Because desire is light well shadowed, because I lost you abandoning shadow, my body still speaks of what it can’t put to rest, shadows looming everywhere. A healthier problematic would see me making peace with the impossible, if only at later luminous stages of the night. I like to walk the shoreline thinking of the nothing I can entertain only there, knowing that it has to do with what I might dream of not ready, really, to fall under any spell – under any tidal under pull as strange blankness settles in, my thought of you, a precious thought, ungovernable on dim nights, anxious mornings after. There are footprints everywhere I go belonging to neither you nor me, yet somehow tracing out our trajectories over decades – I’m making this up, it’s one way I can get to the mysterious heart of the matter, finding me & you where we’ve never actually been until I claim we have – I’m drawing this out, how your singularity is at issue in where I go ready to once again recognize nothing, abandon everything, for the sheer fractious joy of doing so. All I am alluding to now was a long time ago, before I’d learned that this too would pass. If this all sounds particularly sad, well it is. Nevertheless it is lovely & substantive & fragile enough to disappear leaving no home address. I want to sing what I know of this in the forest where the tree falls & no one hears it – that seems a fine way to pay homage, alone, listening…

Say the names: “The sentient coming to poem” – such a title seems to me to hinge the disparate reflections here, how there is acute awareness shaping understanding of what I take to be the missing beloved discussed & talked to & recognized in flesh as well as spirit, or perhaps more accurately, spirit/flesh…

“My uncle cooked
his own meals,
ironed his days
and polished his own shoes.
We found him
sprawled on the bathroom floor
his bitterness
three days ripened by eternity.”
Dr. John Asfour

See what we’re left with
a storm before a calm
rant without rage & yet raging
how we turn to incite after enticing –
see the little man belittled
by his own lack of confidence,
everything even-handed over-measured.
Seeking the plausible is not necessarily
the best way to get to the heart of things.
See the thin man in shadow disconnecting.
Now comes a moment to stumble through his demeanour,
relish the way we empathize despite the way we darkly suggest,
move into recognizing just barely our own selves,
give alms to the moment, moments to the history –
see how we don’t lack breath for ironic pronouncements.
Uncle is dead – long live uncle –
somewhere in this observing
is a kind of broken lens –
the push-you-pull-me radically deaf,
godhead looking down staying
numbly mum, love
& all the rest of it
another way
to try…

Dr. John Asfour .

Saturday, 28May 12h00-14h00

Monday, 30May 18h00-20h00

Saturday, 04June 12h00-14h00

Monday, 06June 18h00-20h00 [with Dr. John Asfour ]

Location: galerie Samuel Lallouz, 1434 Sherbrooke west

Contact: tel.[514]256-2483 normancornett@gmail.com

Cost: $100[all taxes included] $50[students and seniors with valid ID].