Pamphlet 2024 by John J. Parman

John J. Parman

Free indirect (it rolls oﬀ the pen): she grasps or is grasped without saying a word or we’re left to imagine what she might say, grasping or taken or left speechless depending on factors to be woven in, hopefully, as context.

Slowed or kept within, we said, the weather as it was. Nothing gained by going out, you added, but I walked, true to that intent, arriving slightly damp, my coat left hanging on a hallway ladder long enough to dry, bit of ritual in winter, I observe. The attic, you noted, is 20 degrees cooler. We have worked miracles here in relation to drafts, perpetual, dogging cold we ﬁnally tamed.

Methane-spewing cows, a roundup, yet the cities get the stick, sprawling and the trains on strike, the tractors and the sheep clogging every road. I light a cigarette, metaphorically, arm drifting to her thigh, thoughts of cows distant, menthol habitual to others. Here the car’s redolent with the deep scent of unfiltered France held between fingers, lips, and the musk smell women make. We drive through towns, villages, the haze giving way to fog burning off by early afternoon. Later, we are away in an official sense, a city behind us, nights wet, then sleep.

Memory is more than names forgotten in the moment, jam of neurons or they hide, yes, annoying, but memory gives us time’s accrual, a sensory accounting, not just words heard but the rest when, if, there were such excursions.

Materiality, the countess thought, it counts for little as life peters out. A palace shared with generations of my sex after four boys now men should count for something, walls rising from the canal, the boatmen singing, but it means less or I feel it slipping away, being swallowed.

Not lost exactly but inverted so that things surface that may be ruled out by present reality.

On the wall, two old photos of Bergamo, the owner's town. I ordered the spaghetti neri. The salad, too much vinegar, she said, my experience before. I asked another what he'd had.

This was our present, but time was often past as we talked, the Café Lido, the quick, the dead.

7. I saw Death today from the train, wore a hood, hockey stick in one hand, slipped behind a barrier as we moved away, so not now, the glancing blow to the head, no.

It is this manufactured thing, the tiny differences we note, rising as desire or as disdain. We are all factories of taste even if wandering in fields photographing the flowers with old Nikons, the scents waftingly encylopedic, and I too wandered in my time with my old Leica knockoff, unable to name a scent yet remember them all fondly.

Ambition, après-coup but no, only the pages of a manuscript and others, the analysand's hand not presumably amid the typed lines. Each has a language (Lacan cites the riﬀ on Anglo-Gaelic: Joyce) and there it was, the coup.

10.

Household magic, that is, ordinary like a marriage or friendships adrift in an ether of self-/shared doubting, a plague or merely one more black dog set loose in an absence of light. "Here, boy" we think and even say. In back, some books of spells may ﬁnally repay their purchase, tramp doubts down and stretch the time past its breaking point. One waits.

11.

No rescue: this is time's constraint, slipping by as Heraclitus said, wet once with promise and then drier, but missing they are, even a poet.

Luck: so much dodged, fortune often what's missing or missed, good for one or perhaps not so much for a poet trauma-nursed.

Nine: how is it then only three or four (how did I lose count?), the taped door, table, the work ordered, an end like a late train?

12.

Milton's shadow fell, per Blake, the dead poet's descent, written out in two books, into Sussex, just two minutes from infinity. Others mention Martian visits but Milton and Blake converse as colleagues, friends, floating on life's buoyant, infinite tide, land's end for an edge, the sea and the sky refuting it jokingly, like so many other boundaries.

13.

My luck to be born between one empire and another, if that word applies: emperors are a dime a dozen, threats passed around like stones blanched on a beachfront, lines occasionally drawing the eye when not otherwise distracted as by a sweater. My luck to love in cracks of time, in beds borrowed and deserted, the sounds of distant cars, of waves.

14.

I am someone's fatwa in a drawer, the prompt ﬂashing on the screen as I plod between planes, transit a thin scrim of a thing, facsimile of autonomy. Somewhere a ﬁle with my aging features, history of apostasies against the gods' self-appointed, for whom lack of deference earns a tick, many so many, a cuneiform of ticks spelling out a sentence, a fate that accumulation warrants like a running joke, a schtick.

15. (Spring View)

So many emperors in our midst. It warms and then a fog rolls in. Will it lift when my artist friend draws her crowd at bay's edge?

Complacent in the face of heat, unwilling to inconvenience, so all is thrust upon others, ﬂoods and droughts, sun storms, hues not usually seen, while a fever or six moves steadily north to bask in it while coral reefs die, we read, distant and detached.

If I mention a beachfront, then you appear, a handknit white sweater and your tanned face, almost like a sliver moon does with clockwork regularity, but a slower rhythm unlike waves. Brick walls and a long whitish range bring another to mind.

I could express regret or savor the play that commenced then ended, a year or seven, give or take a month or two. To savor is truer to memory, my mind tilting toward pleasure, yet pain trails not far behind. Its doleful looks pass through me to strike life's mirrored ending, its endless self-reflection with a cast of others, appearing then leaving the stage again, whereas we figure somehow as a drifting presence, only briefly present even then, slipping easily as our malleable selves do, who

wink as they say who we are again. Who they are remains a mystery. Empires still vying obscure this view of spring.

16. (Belvedere)

1. Not then the view, precisely, nor the platform, yet nicely made, she observed, an eye. It's here, his hand sweeping. The decking and balustrade drew momentary attention. He paused to look beyond. Even when fucking he liked a view the window framed, its curtain like a July ﬂag or a jenny ﬁlling out, towers close enough to be a view if someone looked up, but viewed had its history, his cock hard beneath a coat, the crowd below waiting: these are love's exacting prices, set that high yet we paid them, hemmed in as we were, hemmed in, but now a platform or plateau with views in all directions, hawks gliding. The sun exacts.

2. Less panorama than a forest, its clearings brief then back at it, the burden is heavier that was naked once, ﬁnally naked, willing an end to all starts that struck us as false. Then desire's wet turns to ﬂood, recrimination, lives sodden, bedraggled. How like reality, to give it a name, this belvedere, decked out so splendidly for an afternoon's view across a city.

17. (The Moth)

Let me accept it was you as I immediately thought when you nestled, a hand with a small crevice even in March is a refuge from rituals the others dreamt up to bid farewell to your late form, So I found you there, and surprised. Life recurs, we saw, that part seems sure, yet transient as a moth in late winter, late winter's moth who wanted to bed down. I had to leave, so coaxed you to a bush, not snug nor family, but you'd soon rise oﬀ, recycled God knows where, a slow ﬂight or a crawl from a mark-making, heart-breaking place you left us, but now just green and slight.

18.

The man behind me sang but I didn't catch the words, "Herz" an exception. The rhythm took them. Even one violinist I saw on the left swayed as the singers did, but the boyish bass player, focused on her sheets, pushed up her glasses as they slipped again. "Only forty at mass," I was told as it ﬁlled up. "When he wrote it, the service ran ﬁve hours," a man in a reedy voice said at the start. "They all sang along." I hummed.

19.

And so it is that we loved in an order invisible then, slowly visible, reversible we see in retrospect: who loved whom gets clearer, yet we see too there's no comparing, in reality, as we fell into our motions as humans do in love, so caught up in their ardor.

20.

A theater of production or possibly reproduction, depending on whose ox is gored, to mix themes wantonly in accounting for one ordinary object or another, and sheets are pertinent to both, and torn or crumpled. 21.

Colder, and age is abundant in the canopy of late summer. You and you are abundant in life's ﬁnal ﬂowering, light becoming dark, light thick now and slower, slower, I cannot except nor exempt however much it's desired the way love was at points wished for, a human wish like all others, from birth through to the end, end of each and every wish I could enumerate if asked.

All from the same stock, archons and devils, oﬀspring of primeval ooze or aspects of one thing. Classic, my friend said, not timeless. Unrolled is how I think of them, with no stopping rule. 23.

I write them too I said and gave her my book. Earlier the library tour with the books. Indeed, I said, they will outlive me. They'll go unread the way so much else passes through, even as it's anchored here like those pyramids or a sphinx, her eyes staring as she posed questions for which I lacked answers (if I ever had answers). 24.

Haydn's pauses strike me as small notes in a bottle ﬂoating through time's oceans, the music itself like the corked vessels, struck, reverberating.

25.

It's true, I follow her, her face beneath her head of hair, joy in analyzing tarts and scents, her clothes, at once demure and ﬂamboyant as a princess in a world more beautiful as she notes it, and I trace this and am in some sense there in her world, so marvelous as to be infectious, seeping through the ether as I think of it, waves across the ocean, blue stripes on white cotton.

26.

They say that birth and death slip by in the northwest somewhere. This is my destination, but now I'm still as a mountain is.

27.

Magic is said to be an illusion, but it has its realities, I found: How love arose and fell away; how love arose and fell away; how it persisted through this like swords piercing the box yet the human, alive, alights.

28.

But what about us? Yes, you also ﬁgure, not as leitmotif but as experience, as play. There's no forgetting what we found and no recovering what we lost, as it's conventionally reckoned, gain being the other end of that pole, but found strikes me as truer to my memories.

29. (Aurea Dona)

Simple and how the light ﬁlters through the windows, a yellow tint, it may be this season's sun, fading up north, brighter there, but here is here, the Madeleine in its shoebox glory, the women singing and the brass and wood instruments accompanying them. I think about a poem just written that sets out how love's survival is purely, inexplicably the magic spoken of, invoked. If we carried hope it was as faith, the same as they bring to such a sacred place with its triple portrait (plus Mary and the Magdalene paired, a duo)

ﬂat on like an icon, a Byzantine touch amid plain Romanesque. Your foot in its shoe is beauty's brief expression, always how it's moments like this when I want to take your hand, to say again how magic brought us through the glittering sea, as they call it.

30.

I am one woman, the same sought, chased, and taken, a lure to journeys, a cause of wars, a hundred names.

31.

Fortune's lucky dog is told to me by an old friend, marveling at all the nippers, another wrote, abed. True, there are so many progeny to give the lie to all those rumors of decline if not the end of us all, our rabbit ways our distant past.

John J. Parman (left, at Christmas dinner with his sister-inlaw, Laurie Snowden, and her husband Chuck Smith) is a writer and editor who lives in Berkeley. This is his fourth pamphlet of poems he wrote in the previous year, illustrated with digital photo-collages he made during those 12 months.

Pamphlet2024is published by Snowden & Parman Editorial (spedit.net) and oﬀered exclusively by The Pallas Gallery, 1111 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, California 94111 (thepallasgallery.com), whose annex is to the left.

Pamphlet2024collects a year's worth of poems by Berkeley writer John J. Parman, along with a selection of his digital photo-collages. This is the fourth such pamphlet, all oﬀered by The Pallas Gallery (@_p_a_l_l_a_s_) in San Francisco.