Jim Paddock: Poetry
Paul Valery, French critic and poet (1817 – 1945) once said that a poem is never finished. only abandoned. It was an understatement.
IN A CONVENIENCE STORE
And what have we here? Gum beer lottery tickets bottled water ginseng motor oil sandwiches shrink-wrapped condoms white black white black brown black yellow white black brown white brown black brown white a funnel full of humans in need of convenience life after life stopping by as I stand there watching writing and the man behind the counter asks why.
DRIVING TO SPARTANBURG
What is the half-life of a double-wide? Exponential decay the mean lifetime there, in a graveyard of busted things childless big wheels abandoned appliances chrome dinette sets oxidizing over grey, formless years a domicile without a basement but smelling like one. Plutonium is the longest-lived isotope Pu 244 a half-life of 76 million years a radiological poison, specifically absorbed by bone marrow. I saw Georgia as the sad cold mecca for trailers and trash yards filled with leftover life. But they explode in numbers across the line. How can that be? Does want want more or less? Does hopelessness hope less and less obeying a sliding scale from here to Appalachia? Or is it one constant choice they lack made or unmade by generations.
QUANTUM RELIGION
God begat Abraham. Who begat christianity, judaism and islam, while other folks were begatting hinduism, buddism and taosim. The jews begat the cult of the golden calf, the christians, and later, the pharisees, the sadducees, the essenes and the zealots. Then islam got busy begatting the sunni’s and the shiites, somebody or other begat the rosicrucians and eventually the christians begat the lutherans, who begat the anabaptists, the calvinists and the presbyterians. Over time, all this begatting soon begat hasidic jews, anglicans, puritans, mennonites, baptists, kabbalah, methodists, freemasons, shakers, mormons, wahhabis, sufis, seventh-day adventists, jehovah’s witnesses, ahmadiyya, christian scientists, orthodox jews, reform jews, conservative jews, and the pentecostal assemblies of the world. Not to be out-begatten, the world was soon blessed with black muslims, the unification church, the hare krishna, silva mind control, scientology, transcendental meditation, the assembly of yaweh, the church of satan, the divine light mission and the branch dividians. In art The image remains the same but is observed differently In god the observer changes everything.
A day (or two) in the life of Lisa Nowak, astronaut.
Meal Days 1* & 13** A Mexican Scrambled Eggs (R) Sausage Pattie (R) Granola (R) Strawberries (R) Orange Juice (B) B Rice Pilaf (R) Chicken Cashew Curry (R) Fruit Cocktail (T) Shortbread Cookies (NF) Orange-Mango Drink (B) x2 C Chicken Fajitas (T) Tortillas (FF) x2 Pasta Vegetable Parmesan (R) Butter Cookies (NF) Lemonade (B) x2 * Day 1 consists of Meals B & C only ** Day 13 consists of Meal A only B - Beverage FF - Fresh Food I - Irradiated IM - Intermediate Moisture NF - Natural Form R - Rehydratable T - Thermostabilized Post Mission To Do List: Wig Trenchcoat rubber tubing BB Gun Pocket knife Pepper Spray Diapers
EATING TRIESTE: 1990
Flying in a rented Eurocar skimming this pallisade rimming this Adriatic on a precipice as deep above the sea as the shellfish are below. A fingertip coasting on the lip of a glass, tasting the Gulf of Venice with our eyes we descend. Mongrel Italian more Habsburg than Medici the eastern seaboard of western Europe. A sea of food On the water’s edge. Cioppino Brodetto a fisherman’s stew of shapes we’ve never eaten life we’ve never seen. Shells in sharkskin suits rainbow mollusks fingerlong, filled with food, fingerlings, finger food. Shrimp, scallops, squid, mussels, mackerel, octopus, cuttlefish, vongole veraci. Reef dwellers fresh from the bottom come to life on a surface of mother-of-pearl. Dazzling remnants of maritime glory immersed in an aquarium of white wine vinegar For once the sea is rich but the port is overfished. The taste lingers And forebodes Second course: Laughing, we cross the line into Yugoslavia. As if it was a laughing matter. Another precipice? We just want to explore Porta Rosa, to drink Slivovitz and eat toast on the beach. Before Bosnia Before Kosovo and the Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims and the ethnic Albanians and the problems simmer on the nightly news. Before the region, like the shellfish, is consumed.
BRUSHSTROKES
The hand. The nipple. The orange. The peach. The belly. The bowl. The bottle. The nectarine. The subtle curve of the small of the back. The gravity laden breast. The shape, the form, the texture, the composition so false, so fictive, so transcendent so real.