DAYLIGHT SAVING

                           DAYLIGHT SAVING

                                               - for Pam

                                   I do the dutiful thing and turn my clocks
                                   forward - or back - but then I conjure
                                   an extra twelve minutes, nudge them in
                                   to fatten the middle of the hour
                                   giving myself a little extra

                                   Time to play with.

                                   I am rebel. Thief.

                                   A friend and I agree that Time

                                   and second hands should be tied

                                   behind the backs of doors, banished

                                   bound with flat faces pressed

                                   to the corner. We flip Time around

                                   our wrists, make it lie down. 

                                   I tell her I once knew a clock 

                                   with eyes instead of hands. 

                                   It kept watch from a clean white mantlepiece 

                                   in a honey-coloured room.

                                   We listen for chimes outside

                                   the window and when the wind blows

                                   in the right direction, hear Time trip

                                   down the cathedral steps and take

                                   to the streets.

                                   I am tempted to wave as it passes.

                                   CB 2002

Tuesday Poem - from THE STARS, an artist's book by Vija Celmins & Eliot Weinberger

Today, a small excerpt from a rare book gifted to me some months ago by a dear friend. A letter accompanied the book; in it, the words 'Since artists take sustenance from other artists, feast here. . ." Feast I did. And feast I do. This book - The Stars - makes my fingers itch for graphite, spaciousness and simplicity at a time when such things seem like curiosities from another life; mystifyingly elusive.  

                ". . . they are, they simply are;

                                    the stars are an enormous garden, and if we do not live

                                    long enough to witness their germination, blooming,

                                    foliage, fecundity, fading, withering, and corruption, 

                                    there are so many specimens that every stage is 

                                    before our view;

       we and all the stars we see are just one atom in an infinite ensemble:

          a cosmic archipelago; 

                     the sky is like a millstone turning, with the stars like ants

                        walking on it in the opposite direction;

                                            the sky is like the canopy of a carriage, with the

                                               stars strung like beads across it;

                 the sky is a solid orb and stars the perpetual illumination

                     of the volcanoes upon it;

                                                 the sky is solid lapis lazuli, flecked with pyrite, 

                                                     which are the stars;

             each star has a name and a secret name;

                               the only word we hear from them is their light;

     men will never compass in their conceptions the whole of the stars; 

                                       under a starry sky on a clear night, the hidden power

                                         of knowing speaks a language with no name;

           goodness and love flow down from them.

              if we were not located in a galaxy we would see no stars at all; 

               . . . " 

       from The Stars by Vija Celmins & Eliot Weinberger. 

from the book's flyleaf - 

"The New York artist Vija Celmins has made many images of the night sky - paintings, drawings, and prints of gorgeous richness. In The Stars she and the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger devote an artist's book to the theme. Celmins has created three prints for the project, which she has also designed. One print, inspired by the worn binding of an early-twentieth-century Japanese book, becomes the volume's mottled deep-blue cover. The second is a negative image of the night sky - dark stars on a pale ground. The third etching suggests an open screen composed of sky and stars. For the text, Weinberger has assembled a catalogue of descriptions of the stars drawn from around the world, and from an array of historical, literary, and anthropological sources, This mythopoetic charting of the night sky evokes the vastness of the human imagination's response to a space itself  vast and unknowable. Appearing in English and also in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Maori, the text supplements Celmin's images visually as well as verbally.

. . . The translators of the text are the Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon (Arabic), the poet Bei Dao (Chinese), the translator and author Siddharth Chowdury (Hindi), the translator, author, and editor Hiroako Sato (Japanese), and the translator and Maori-language advocate Piripi Walker (Maori)."

 Vija Celmins on YouTube - Desert, Sea and Stars
C2108 - Life on Mars


- and for Simon Grant's Tate Online interview with Vija Clemins, click here

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill. 

This week's TP editor is Harvey Molloy with The Book of Equanimity Verses by Richard von Sturmer.

Dangerous spontaneity

Hmmm. Well, nothing may come of this morning's unanticipated madness, but I seized the moment and submitted abstracts to two conferences - the first goes under the heading Antarctic Visions: Cultural Perspectives on the Southern Continent and takes place in Tasmania at the end of June. The second (this is the one that's really taken me by surprise) is Oslo's International Polar Year (IPY) Science Conference (from what I can see, the design of the host building is based on the anatomy of icebergs and is quite beautiful).  

The submission date for Oslo was 20 January (yesterday's date) and - as seems so often to happen with me - I only found out about it at 10.00 this morning. 

The fact the globe is round is incredibly helpful at times like these. In this instance, it meant that 10.00AM on 21st in NZ was still hours before midnight the day before in Norway. It's all quite weird, really. Anyway, I rolled up my sleeves and pulled out the stops and when I finally pushed the Send key on my lapdog*, it was 12.20AM in Oslo (twenty minutes post-deadline). I was pleasantly surprised when the forgiving conference computer responded within seconds with a very polite Thank You for your submission followed by an email with the reassurance, Your abstract is in our system. Whew. I might just have made it...  

Being 'in the system' doesn't necessarily mean anything in terms of whether or not you actually end up going, of course. I'm not attached to any particular outcome but will admit that my fingers and toes are loosely crossed. Programme headings for both conferences are enticing and there are many reasons why I'd really love to participate.  

Invest wholeheartedly. Detach fully. This seems to be the only way to approach things these days. 

As a poet friend once suggested 'it's not difficult but it's not easy either.'   

*Thanks for the pet name, Pen