Pamphlet 2023 by John J. Parman

Pamphlet 2023

John J. Parman

1. Goodnight girls, I say, as they age beyond their photographs. Earlier, I picture a dinner with a former lover, her husband, how she, ex-lover, might find this house, expressive of us, this amalgam of contraries tied by what we find funny into a bourgeois paradise. I dismiss it as unworkable, yet she’s present, formerly known and known, a year of knowing, so long gone yet present still if only occasionally. And others too: knowing is knowing.

2. We speak in tongues, a mother’s and acquired others, a campfire comparison of clefts to snakes, brief flashes contradicted this, the word coming later, as did so many that I said aloud, not always accurately, as reading isn’t hearing, and I wrote first then heard the letters sounded. Speaking is like making love— we set it forth then improvise in light of what our words do or fail to do. This may be why I prefer women, who get this.

3. So it was we met and met, then never met again, and again then I seek to recreate our as it was, panoply of distant views, closely met, their contrast noted, a bed is a bed is a bed, their similarity apparent unless the conditions led to delayering, its own thing each time, science of unmaking.

4. Aware there's no address, yet we know the way. The road's barely a road though, maybe just a path or it's impassable, yet we continue, a certainty or even a hopefulness despite all the obstacles, more hobbled or anticipating that condition. It should discourage us but it doesn't or no longer does. We felt its heaviness, are now freer.

5. The order is inexact or in fact there's no real order excepting time which is no order at all really but we see the current or tell ourselves we do, they (for there are currents) only pull, carry, and undermine. We look back. They trail us in a way or we imagine this.

6. You pointed to St. Ivo, seen from the terrace, our terrace briefly, our week of a terrace, and we went here and there. Ivo's tower comes to mind. Sometimes I'm out of sorts in a seasonal way, weighed down, dragging my selves light or not, long twinned or conjoined, actor and actress on stages of which the beds are an instance or a bench at Capitoline Hill's entry, the photo filling me with loathing, yet that season. Light and found again, requested, one asking not ready to take my no and I proposed finally a yes to symmetry, yes, another you opposite and we both tentative and then we weren't yet cornered in some sense by physicality and a contradiction, that no within a yes eyed us, a crocodile at paradise's edge, alert to our falling.

7. Each year shortens. Still, you figure, dead, alive, or missing, as you are you, once so close, like others I counted as close who proved elusive, evasive. Who am I and who are you? The first question greets me. Good night it says or I say it, surprised again, but survival is no answer or is an answer. Who are you, those of you I knew, sometimes will meet or never will or not likely to which is a kind of never you predicted, never rolling off your tongue? But you meant it, I feel sure, and will prove just how never your never is amid all the nevers ever said to me, of which quite a few.

8. Winter's second middle month with those three days, portents they became in crossing life. Not everyone attaches to it, I learned. Where am I and where are you? I bravely wrote my treatises each time I set out with you, a several in quantity, loosely tied together. A treatise charts the many curves derived from the sacred geometry that gave St. Ivo form although I only saw its tower in the distance. I staked my treatises on the pact I made with the angels who keep such geometries on their shelves, flashing a briefest view of them. I know what I saw, I said to you, but what exactly did I see, so thin, receding into nothingness, yet released by your looping back, a game or some angel's book? Not a treatise but the play of lines and the point at which it gathers in some angel's hand, like wool or a rope or strip of a sheet, all the possibilities, pieces of paper or their substitutes, the words written embargoed or sealed, the angel recites them, yours and yours and yours, a heart of sweet bitterness, a birth or if I count them, a several.

9. Walking back once in Venice I noticed how the buildings curved resisting the urge to straighten curves too are illusive a more suggestive order yet an order. A doorway's indentation or a window's invites our speculation as does every boundary like this the water's edge a wood seen from an adjoining road. To be within it is a different feeling closer to unknowing. Elsewhere Venice straightens opens out to squares and rectangles bridges the border promenades narrow waterways while the grander ones are more riverine conceding to water its implacable priority to the point of flooding evidence of man's designs. We walked through a sequence while you spoke of long familiarity even your disdain for ancient errors. Stasis appears to be a theme of this place which anchored trade and dominions from its stitched together islands and accoutrements preyed on by epidemics curveballs we say now and we would know subject to odd strictures benefiting older sons the most marriageable daughters leaving the rest to fend a condition not limited to Venice but accentuated there.

Is stasis the rule or is the natural order to destroy it this dynamo of flatten and rebuild spread wealth so it can accumulate again? I wander off the subject whatever it is exactly curveballs and curving streets the way a wall of doors and windows unwraps reveals briefly by chance or by intent how love seeks out such streets' rooms within rooms and ideally a canal's distance. We take our chances with a narrow one smoothing out its slightest curve appreciating others how those forms excite us when we behold them hold them press our case our suit bodily with accompaniment of words lips fingers while she sings the chorus and the other parts as if Vivaldi composed for her another innocent giving voice in that curving way music goes. Are there innocents beyond the fall? Did they abscond or shift the hedges? We traded knowledge ignored the street distance imagined a vanishing point songs composed not transcribed looked for in memory that hall past ends disjunctions rifts. Songs they say are the last things to go.

10. In my neighbor's backyard once a gray fox—that color was told us— barked at night. "Unearthly," we agreed and she wondered if there was a burrow, but the fox moved on, taking its otherworldly bark with it. I thought of this earlier, reading two of Merwin's poems. Foxes are folkloric, not just Zen. In Tokyo, small statues of them appear in shrines. Kurosawa's film made out it's unlucky to be caught looking, but this isn't just about foxes or maybe it's others about whom we're caught out, lost in lures she brought along without intending and we too didn't exactly intend, caught as we are the way a careless fish is.

11. Like a cherub he walks from bath to fridge. Much talk some shouted a long history of it and regret a child not sired though desired we should wait six months he said the drugs not sure I can even have one she answered.

12, Things morph. Fantastic, she said, as I walked through the old galleries, a doubled staircase, a progression through time in neoclassical space. My late friend, intrigued by light, clambered as necessary to uncover how they did it—a treatise writer himself, as he reminded me later. I pointed to Lou Kahn, a light fanatic indebted to antiquity as he came upon it. "Serious" my late friend said. "Serious."

13. The Virgin rarely speaks let alone is seen but her Son is present where they gather wherever and how makes little difference. A crush is like the old days road strewn with leaves or the long after with shrines but she looks warily or is summoned in isolation one to one but searing so her real is visible even to the priests. She spoke from corners of the room "spoke like me" the hearer recollects like a sister or a cousin. Said the world must awake to peril but this is known spoken of by children so awake then she said again you are known just as I was known a calamity come to save a world soon pregnant with it bestial marriage a message as it was will be.

14. From our terrace that strained week when we were somehow us not us the view was a second layer of balconies and rooftops green the way green is amid terra cotta and chairs small tables the deep red not seen exactly specks or flakes of color like your Roman samples I still admire as I still admire you. From our bedroom the crowd below was like an ocean and at the bench on the bench by the great head hands a sack of a man I thought imagined you must think it too my life flailing in that odd way I never really flail but take stock in bits. Later Zurich suburb terrace to which I retreated haunted by your pregnant fears said so rapidly in bed unnervingly but then life's like this the deep red intuited by the eye because distance is too far or too close to know what just happened or failed to happen.

15. Spoke of starting stopping starting how one's leaving leads to another's. She bakes for her life's sake no longer able to abide only to be here baking the dough like shoulders legs napes but no it's only dough quiet under hands perhaps less heard than felt.

16. Landfall accidentally forty years or so household a precedent weddings turmoil. Wouldn't wish would wish not mine to wish only bestow raise what life provided landfalls accidents ground tentatively safe as safe as houses as sure as graves afterlives scarcely noted once gone yet grounded written out and written out then bestowed hand to hand and/or pen to pen.

17. Short Memoir Prize: How short a life despite efforts made distractions those raised alienated those who left in different ways yet I'm here.

18 Another winter lived through green leaves yellow limes lemons blue and red and bees cat sitting no-cloud sky bird sings spring.

19. But surely time is heterodox the way we are stunningly mixed mixing and obscure enough even to our selves? A mystery we solve solve resolve in waves of insights denials reprisals taking to task our several multiple elusive beings time being fragments fragments being roads of meaning crushed under life's collected weight what we think of too as wasted time time squandered set aside or allowed to be distraction read or seen merely for its self not some other thing more noble no not at all and yet they arose and took up space a heterodoxic lot ordained it seemed predicted noble in their ways won affection bought and paid our days doled out also fragments morsels warm liquids and houses houses small but stout.

20. “Woman as a work of art” Burckhardt wrote on a slip of paper and then left it out of his story perhaps seeing that they had lives of their own and declined to be untrue t0 lives that were self-created as they hoped wanting freedom taking selfmaking as something given not worked up knocked up smocked up as for better or worse the kitchen nursery feast days church days birthdays were art as well not art that slipped easily onto paper so better to leave it as a passing thought.

21. Zuni Café lunch two friends one says the modern museum in Amsterdam has a Texas bar or room in which the smoke is palpable .Tranny bars in Texas are mentioned then tran proposed as the latest but anyway a change of underwear guarded against arrest when raided now likely they're raiding again as the earth whose day or whose week this was or is grows hot. Priorities.

22. We don't have one hundred words for buffalo or birds abundant on savannahs. We call a lake what rises from runoff and is left there to drown the crops ruin farmers. One hundred words for pain this is too many pain being pain like life is life words failing us as it rains floods dries out reappears.

23. In a reading room twinned columns bronze tipped an old poet pauses to find his glasses then resumes weighed down with tributes like Horace to his patron emperor.

24. Fire and its quenching and rekindling is this repetition or dialectic you leave trepidation trailing? No I write interest will distract you both somehow while I sort out the several hearths left as ashes as traces.

25. Ides of May slip by twenty years a year hence and I forgot then remembered your white blouse sun west pitched as later it plunged sea red afterward we kissed and one of us saw that flash a sign but what I wondered it meant no clear idea but it marked arrival yes nothing more but this an awaited this.

26. Dark houses (although cars pass) clouds I guess and no sign of stars: reminded of the street-of-nakedladies painting (adolescence) also the city of the old lady beloved of Babar but no streetlight nor balcony nor even a green suit.

27. It ends in small bursts a refusal to say it's over. How like men this is faced with any ending.

28. Birds are an audience the one I made mine uncritical or ignoring yet tuneful unfailingly sing as God intended my audience at dawn or dusk or even night a lone hooting night between wind rain branches footfall all sorts species of dark listening to my voice as God commanded.

29. Out of context rain in August thought it was a stove left on backdoor open no mistake it was rain as she affirmed light audible water the plants we will take it I said unseasonal and no clouds but there are (glances up in darkness) yes.

30. Outside, a quarter moon. "She comes along with it," he thought. "Always does, at least she's mindful of it. South to west, out there waxing and then waning, marking decades passing like a quantum clockwork, cosmic yet off kilter, tempo faltering, the tone and pitch disordered. I couldn't take it. An imagined edge is in view, jumping off point, the game restarting; some other moon picks up our erratic rhythm.

31. In some world somewhere we are again whatever we were then before events for lack of another word came between us so we were again you and me as we are today I believe despite a lack of sighting.

32. My friend condemns. I understand. Life is never simple, but simple can be the best way to take it, straight as the moral of the tale read to us whose moral stays in memory, a rebuke to those without morals (and they are legion, it is said).

33. A stunner he thinks quoting but she is the novelist agrees not displeased to share pages with her when a copy arrives although she's dead doesn't see it doesn't know or care now how her younger self's reception runs on without her as Benjamin said it did.

34. Oh, darkness and rain: such are winter's clichés which doesn't mean I'm less dogged by them. So immersed as they arrive as I walk or glance out and feel a grip or a pang and miss spring's kisses, fecundity and promises.

35. A kind of theater: there we are, love’s bodies pressed, yet words come too as metatext. A stage then with a bed, a window, a sea or bay, brick wall and sounds made, old as love itself.

36. Of love’s effects what to say? (Points to children, a cliché.) All melds together as sense’s circus maximus, free ranging as is recommended, as feral.

This is the third pamphlet harvesting a year’s poems by the writer-editor John J. Parman, many of them written in the upstairs room opposite. Born and raised around New York City, he also lived in Singapore and, by the time he was six, had circumnavigated the planet. He studied architecture in St. Louis and then at Berkeley, where he has lived since 1971.

This pamphlet is sold by The Pallas Gallery, 1111 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco 94105 (@_p_a_l_l_a_s_), and published by Snowden & Parman Editorial (spedit.net). Text and digital photo-collages © 2024 by John J. Parman.

Pamphlet 2023 selects from a year of John J. Parman’s poems. It joins The Bergman Prize Manuscript and Dance Card, and several pamphlets, all offered by The Pallas Gallery.