Pamphlet 2021
John J. Parman
1. She brushes her long, dark hair. The room is warm and smells of her. The sun was setting, an afternoon over and done. How long? Time was when there were days, whole islands that were covered with fir. He dreads the calls that follow, the disembodied voice: Now, sir! He has no reply, no defense to these intrusions: You are wrong! She brushes her long, dark hair. The room is warm and smells of her. In that moment, he forgets everything. How it is with her is all that matters, but soon they'll be outside again, the throng. Time was when there were days, whole islands that were covered with fir. He longs to travel with her to some distant place, the cat's purr and the throb of ships, the clacking at three, a temple bell's clong. She brushes her long, dark hair. The room is warm and smells of her, the deep-down scent arousal makes, how in steam glass still mirrors fur, how the skin is like the brain, how love varies from tongue to prong. Time was when there were days, whole islands that were covered with fir. Love finds expression in the smallest things. Blowing curtains whir as the wind kicks up, billowing, almost pregnant when it's strong. She brushes her long, dark hair. The room is warm and smells of her. Time was when there were days, whole islands that were covered with fir.
2. Our hunger drove us to push at time. A room's cramped space, its bed, offered a view. Coming to ourselves gave it back to us. In memory, afternoons are divine. Sampling the diversity of the screw, our hunger drove us to push at time. In memory, these moments are the prime of our lives, heady before declines ensue. Coming to ourselves gave it back to us— equanimity resists age's crime. Across a table beauty's found in you. Our hunger drove us to push at time but life toughens us up for its long climb, tells us who deserted who, who's still true. Our hunger drove us to push at time, coming to ourselves gave it back to us.
3. Like the tattoo of some faculty in Bergen on seventeen May, assertively itself and a history: this is the rhythm of my days. Aboriginal, ambivalent, two or three or four ways of being or maybe more in one person made flesh, incarnate, arrived unknowing and yet knowing, drinking it in and yet walking more than running, at leisure as if born to it, workaholic. 4. Or, like Nancarrow, a backbeat at odds with the foregrounded motif, a front, although maintained, even brought out by an opposite when she came along. Straight and narrow in a bourgeois way, the ties and striped or solid city shirts, like the cuffs of khakis, slightly frayed from negligence, myopia, carelessness, the last diminutive of the first, though blame attaches. On the train, noticed but then forgotten, close observation thrown elsewhere, where the fish were.
5. Fifty-four. Again, the same tug she described as "lifestyle," a linen jacket, wrinkled on the plane, ironed to an imagined crispness. At a store, I bought a shunga print, predictive of our modest depravity, retaking displaced bits of our psyches, lost in the course of the everyday, then reclaimed, as Ms. Franklin sang. Twenty years ago, I now reflect, and a month, eve of a saint's day, as I put it later after we fell apart. Entropy takes us all apart. No immunity from this central fact. Where is that print? Put away, perhaps, or on a private wall, the kind of which I've many. 6. Backgammon and bull dice—Sam's Grill, circa 1995, according to a source. Not a gambler in this sense. Never particularly a fan of games. Lunch was lunch, but life raised the stakes. 7. Life takes place on five planes or occasionally on seven, nine, rarely twelve; even rarer adepts claim twenty; three is the norm. As for me, a plane is just a plane, the way a garden is an overlook and the smallest hummingbird amid the red flowers of salvia.
8. To be modern is to have a city or two in tow to recollect or set in time, not merely in space, to populate with love interests, trains, hates, the incidentals on which all texture depends. In tow is to say in mind or in a heart's pocket, ready to be taken out and examined at home as one o'clock rolls around or four is heard, the insomniac hour when it's all rehearsed. To be postmodern is to live in alienation, each one an atom of apparently repelling mutuality, no city large enough for both. To be modern is to ignore this stricture, to recollect or set in time how the space your legs took varied, how heat radiates in memory—its walls must be very thick to retain it and yet your soft, wet self's there too as music, perhaps, a fugue repeating the way a city does, always improvising on what it felt and heard.
9. We speak of give and take, possess. We think of one who gave and took, desiring and desired. We remember rising and falling, tempo and pitch, heat, the sliding way it goes, goes, and how we look at it and sense affect in its electric state, audible now and then against the rhythm of the rest. What is left, we ask? The quarrels, the estrangement, afterlives of unstated obligation. Yet once pictured her straddling a gear shift in anticipation. Take it in, whatever it is desire seeks, possess a facsimile or the man. We are bystanders in this play, troubadours hired by the hour to gather beneath her balcony then make our way upstairs, in quarters close possess her as in a film. What's left? Rushes we screen later at our leisure, technicolor, the soundtrack on a kind of loop, coming memorably again, again, as background to the talk that foregrounds memory, and how rooms, houses live on like sets, a stage we could recreate, enact how it was with fresh actors, stand-ins for us as memory provides, two humans of a certain age.
10. Dog, gone. And where, the Buddhists asked? Popes too grappled with this question. They had hopes for divine intervention, a whistle bringing a familiar form, bone, gristle no longer—restored as the Swedish sage remarked, humans and dogs back on the page. Without them, Heaven would be a bare place even if, as kings, queens of infinite space, we moved thought to thought along its hallways, its gold-tinted royal roads. How it pays to find again these dear and loyal friends waiting for us. We want to make amends for the lack of woods, the indignity of vets. They want us for eternity. 11. Clothed and in the streets again, I noted. Just now I thought how my house has become a museum. I've barely been out of it, garden as perimeter, a winter resistance to walking further. Overcome it, I tell myself. I like the way aunts are invoked and simple elegance. My mother chose the latter path, Chanel blue and minimal. God rest her soul, dead thirty years.
12. A funeral, if they still have them, is a name-taking. Who is there? Who is not? Those absent count themselves absent, grant liberty to their consciences, the freedom past wrongs or their indifferences give them, a license to ignore they renew unto eternity, death being just another provocation, not so? Floating above this scene, will I make the rounds of these quick? Or does this happen later, if later can be applied to eternity, as it's known colloquially, the interval between the acts, gossiping and cadging cigarettes, reuniting with the loves that died on us? Love dies its multiple deaths amid silence and bleak refusal, but then we joke and smoke and fluff the red-brown fur of our favorite dog, loose in Paradise to sire pups, run.
13. My friend Thomas gets six lines— five and a half, in reality. Reminds me of my father-in-law, the captain of his Orange Bowl-winning team, reduced to something like a cinder block, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. 14. I try to explain how the terrain of gender inside me is like marshland or a meadow through which streams meander, but when I loved you, the distance of hills foreshortened to edge the river we sometimes crossed. I was so taken by that riverbank, our brief commons, that I missed the high plateau behind it, immovable. I try to explain how I live distant from much else, a correspondent and observer, loyal and reviled in turn depending on who is asked. One friend, close—if it's what we're given, it could be worse. Within, I'm self-sufficient in a way, and yet I long sometimes for your embrace, to have it once again.
14. Fiction, the poet wrote, looking at his verses. Is it true, I asked? I aim for a kind of verity, science of feelings as felt by a barometer that's calibrated for a temperate climate, which is to say ranging from the heat of passion to icy stares on local streets, recorded in real time and replayed true to their temps and pressures. Friction may be a better word: how skin and clothing hinder movement while inciting us to bring and leave our senses. 15. Royalty is a childhood memory, along with tin soldiers and Dinky Land Rovers. The bourgeoisie kept them on the way architects tolerate the hidebound institutes that grant them honors, houses of representatives of those types drawn to congregate with fellows whose small worlds seem bigger after a few drinks. In childhood, they had fancy cars and retinues, brass bands and drum tattoos, big hats and feathered topknots, dangling golden ropes, medals. Party leaders in their Mao suits must regret the passing of pomp. (Only Mao wore it convincingly unlike all the others.) Royalty, rifling through ancient chests, finds only jewels and bear hats, tiaras, castanets, crush notes to fascists, disturbing photos.
16. Magic would be convenient, a subterfuge when things grow too hemmed in, relief from plodding cause and effect, the two ends of the stick with which we beat life habitually when we really want a wand, slender and black, white cigarette end to draw the eye, lend an air of authority. Convenient, like having a rubber handy when the drugstore is distant and love wants company. Magic it ever worked despite splits and leaks, except that is for wedded, unrelenting fertility. Left no room for error in a life prone to it. Magic though in a way, their arising, exceptions life let through, The house always wins—the truth brought home. 17. Photos reveal a split. Was unaware. How it must look from a distance as close in time as it's far in space. How good she looks, a voice says in a repeating loop. How she was is leitmotif, fugue, dirge, chorus, all the sighs packed in a thought, all the moans a river of moaning silent now as it meanders, beds empty that they left unmade, cleft and hair and hair and cleft, the air thick once with whispers is thin as late winter's ice, split and split past all recognition.
18. We are so far from modern now. Narratives lie dead on the page. We roll irony like the cigarettes we made with gummed paper and loose tobacco. Gauloises are now an honored memory, like how the Metro smelled. In between, we made love, sparking children and aches, ruptures life creates despite our passions. We navigated these upheavals. We longed for that wet heat sometimes, went back to it, irony alight in the aftermath, modern now and then, or contemporary as my friend put it in her list of 44 mistakes to avoid, life shifting even as we lay in bed. 19. Birthdays come and go. We are, it turns out, the authors of this disenchantment, enchanters so to say in the fictions we joke to call our lives, bouncing as we do between hunger and sating, among savages of which we are surely ones too. Your birthday came and went. We are, it turns out, the authors of this disenchantment, enchanters so to say in the frictions it led us to engage in, bouncing as we did between hunger and sating but amazingly not mating.
20. Night is lights in distance, bright lattices and singular points in motion according to someone's vantage despite stillness from a kitchen window. Night pulses owing to its cricket heart. Sirens, trains wail and wobble, traveling at unknown speeds as points of sound, ebb and flow as my garden's heart's chorus does not. 21. In a photo, Frederick Rolfe writes with a pen. It's 1907, but he looks like my contemporary. Some have this knack for timelessness, dead undoubtedly, but alive in view, like Prater's altarpiece in the Old Belvedere, a girl's face like a Polaroid looking out at me. Schiele and Klimt in the New Belvedere hung above warped wooden floors. Some of it was stolen, but I saw it with my mother before those actions of repossession. One is now in the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. Rolfe is dressed in a white jacket. Slacks and jacket are both rolled up, tailoring by self-adjustment—I do this. And loafers— "easy to put on; don't call them sandals" --he wore such a shoe. I wear them too.
22. To reflect is to bring her back, whether from afterlife or just another place, imagined walls and shuttered windows, gates never open, and yet evening's narrow trails find her passing through and even horizontal. 23. Words painted in lines, a memory of women sometimes desired, sometimes transgressing. Matisse in his suit. Montaigne with his pen. I am them. Each word weighs what it does. Each word echoes down the corridor from my room to death's—that chamber of uncertain volume, if ashes or a corpse. Each word escapes into time's fluidity, spilled from my desk to a quantum floor. I am Stein, walking in occupied France or looking out over it from a terrace, thinking of a woman's endless layers, her progress toward death unwinding. So many deaths. A terrace a prelude like a table's chair with curving arms, irritation as a step, anchored to legs the servant fixed, exposed, whipped. I am the bed, horizontal as a grave. I am the end of time, that ceasing she wanted, to step away from life. I am time's fluidity, time's shouts when carried away, its agonies, no escape, its hopelessness, cold and hot together both too much. I am Rilke, self-loving to a fault.
24. She sketches himself in dresses ever more flamboyant, and he gives her a desired apparatus in its primordial form, rooted from deep within or floating more likely in consciousness, unconsciously, like his fingers, a hand admired across a table. He writes herself into plays, a bride stripped bare, a man watching as she comes. She complies reliably most times if the sequence is followed, a half-moon a boat, her sign waxing, slow plunge. Come, it says; she hears him say it. Apparatus is her gift, twice granted, he thinks, it's her dispensation, key to release. Bound, she thinks, it's his way of being close, a hand and fingers consciously straightening out a kink. Found, he thinks, so thin the light comes through it. A dress, sunlight behind it. Her eyes masked, mouth ajar and tongue strolling. He sketches her portrait, still life but she's moving.
25. Vapid novels of bourgeois life. A man happy in the present, unambitious, dressed demurely in his plaid skirt playing a script girl's appointed part. Back street in Crete, a house he set out to three patronesses, half a stake each so oversold and yet so charming they forgave, and slept with women as an extension of friendship though preferring sailors. Prisoners are best, being hungry, but that was the other. What then is the key to immortality? Bourgeois life is like a garden gate one slips into when life is pressing, when someone wants you in theirs. I sleep alone. I dress in work shirts and eschew those striped city ones I wore for years. I walk. I could be demure, a script girl of a sort, trade among those potentates demanding a kind of sexless deference. Demure and self-effacing, but I gave it away. What then is the key to immortality?
Too much sun is bad for painting. Too much personality's character's destruction, it is said, it is said, but what then is the key to immortality? I miss the heat, the way the sun set across the north end, the bay's slot and the island old prison like a ship. I never went for boys, but the girls are unreliable as lovers, only friends. Immortality is so many dice games with the afterlife, oh so many names worn away with time or never cast or carved in the first place. Beauty only, its form and features, endures. A mother is laid to rest and her man remembers her tenderness, wrapped between her legs and thighs, sighs becoming children in time, babes and then men women following her casket, the garlands of flowers still there in the stonework, a head in profile, her torso with her breasts and flanks. This is her monument, this resting place, very like a bath.
26. To move is finally to break with distance with the dead. We run from it, in our minds— treadmill gesture, we're aware. To move is to follow, embrace others loved, we tell ourselves, among our stories said aloud between us as in exile we live as natives, ones transplanted. Snow arrives, the sea larger here than there, the houses grander, a formal symmetry. Their graves were stones; upright markers too formal for the men beneath, ashes and spirits. I was two, then older as one by one, dead. To move is finally to go some distance, more than a stone's throw, and hear a different sea, its light less prone to memories, its rhythm living for me like an open boat's song at summer's height, sun obscuring nightfall, dusk hardly noticed, the moss forgotten hiding names, their faces always young.
27. Edgware Road, affair of hookah shops, my friend's old place around the corner, another world. I stayed at my dad's hotel with his namesake bar, a room quite small and devoid of view, but the Wallace close. When was this? Eight or nine years ago. It feels an eternity. Outside, a lot of rain. I read how the lines should be broken so the readers know how a line should read. Oh reader, read as you desire! A hookah came with a smoker, a man out of synch with a great in its own mind metropolis but at one with the sidewalk's diaspora. Oh London, take it all in stride! Terror passes quickly with its knife. Stay, stay away from bridges, the underground at its deepest points, those old lines with ancient tunnels, cars to match. Pray we may be safe, even as safety is this random unfolding of hours and their subdivisions, slowing as we catch a glimpse, see light minutely ahead of impact, feel lightheaded just at the thought.
28. Lives that were porous, wet with promise as we walked— this was our territory: you, me, two singularities in generic rooms, platforms for chemistries we made, a few borrowed, shaped humanly, all backdrops when we coupled, realm on and in realm, the two briefly, illusively fleshed. 29. My reading includes a southern mansion imported from Athens via New York City, analyzed by a friend with six children, one of whom I remember scampering across the mezzanine of the father's Roman house after misbehaving at a concert there, amid my friend's classical motifs on jet black, one can ending on a neighbor's carpet, as a cat revealed, black footsteps on its white field. My mind was briefly on the Beaux Arts. I think my friend derided it as sclerotic, like modernism in the run-up to postmodernism, but I may be mistaken. The postmodernists were young, bored, fed up, ready to have fun at the expense of the grandees of the postwar consensus—abstract expressionism rendered vertically or brutally, occasionally horizontal, a word that conveys the louche and predatory nature of that era, bragging rights, afternoons out of the office as others toiled, white shirts and narrow ties, drones with pencils, moral upholders of their leaders' abstract aesthetic. The postmodernists also fucked, but with less rigor and more color, paving the way to an eighties that proved fatal to so many.
30. In this constricted world, small things are magnified. The growth of beans draws my attention and how tomatoes seem to know there's a wire frame close to hold them. Bamboo stakes do this for the beans, their tendrils wrapping around them after they felt their way. It takes twenty minutes to water them, twenty minutes times the days my wife has been away, but I've lost count now. The garden across the street I measure in watering cans: two and a half, more or less—a bigger can than the one here, which takes two fills to water much less. 31. The idea of reading letters in an archive—letters in beige folders, for instance, written by writers to each other: they suggest that all is exposed if fame in any way attaches or if the family has an archival bent (like mine) prepared to dive in and read, but reading doesn't catch the flames that illuminate these sheets or crackle airwaves through which they flew once, finding a mark or landing pointlessly in fields life had torched even as the writers kept writing, stuck in time. Sometimes they float up randomly, written in their distinctive scripts. (The way they write by hand is part of what makes them sublime.)
32. What is seen versus what is told; the words bounce between us as they did between you and her, how the senses take another, words arriving in their parabolic way, soaring over what we saw to land where our doubts lie, near to our loving and divided hearts. Oh cease this tearing that your words enable! Let me rather gaze openly, hear her who's before me, here with a kind of simplicity despite panic, calm when running's done. 33. Requited, unrequited—in between, there's an expanse of disintegration. Looking back it's flat and nondescript, with gas stations here and there, the diners of small towns that advertise the same fare, barely filling. Later it can be bleaker, depending on who is looking around. I knew the territory; now she had her own version of it. On the road you see wreckage no one's removed, guess as you drive by that it will be, as accidents are the peril of motion. Like an Iranian bombmaker, we think we can just drive along. Looking back, it's flat, harmless, a blue truck off to the side with a tarp. It's nondescript, so we remember blue as we move toward it, or the sea, wind, the sun sinking, the windows ablaze briefly with reflected light. An expanse.
34. I work on my manuscript, a year of poems, two themes, roughly, their weight on outside scales unknown. Perhaps it was the Angel of History and her basket, the past a harvest handed around, loaves and fishes, water that might be drunk banqueting. Gather this! My manuscript a basket filled out in 10-point type like the one-two rhythm of plain weave, poems slid between the warp.
John J. Parman is a writer/editor who lives in Berkeley. This is a selection of his poems and photo-collages from 2021. It was produced in December 2021 by Snowden & Parman (spedit.net) and is offered by the Pallas bookstore– gallery, 1111 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco (IG: @_p_a_l_l_a_s_). Text and images, except the Rolfe photo, © 2022 by John J. Parman.