Sideways Station

Billy Collins Reading Three Poems Brought to Completion

2010-03-04T21:14:35+01:00

Billy Collins reading three poems and making people laugh.

January in Paris

‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned’ Paul Valery

That winter I had nothing to do
but tend the kettle in my shuttered room
on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,

but I would sometimes descend the stairs,
unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets

often turning from a wide boulevard
down a narrow side street
bearing the name of an obscure patriot.

I followed a few private rules,
never crossing a bridge without stopping
mid-point to lean my bike on the railing.
and observe the flow of the river
as I tried to better understand the French.

In my pale coat and my Basque cap
I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie
or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,
and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.

I would see beggars and street cleaners
in their bright uniforms, and sometimes
I would see the poems of Valery,
the ones he never finished but abandoned,
wandering the streets of the city half clothed.

Most of them needed only a final line
or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,
but whenever I approached,
they would retreat from their makeshift fires
into the shadows- thin specters of incompletion,

forsaken for so many long decades
how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

I came across the one I wanted to tell you about
sitting with a glass of rose’ at a cafe’ table-
beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,
cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache

by Monsieur Paul Valery himself,
big fish in the school of Symbolism
and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters
of the League of Nations if you please.

Never mind how I got her out of the cafe’,
past the concierge and up the flight of stairs-
remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

And never mind the holding and the pressing.
It is enough to know that I moved my pen
in such a way as to bring her to completion,

a simple, final stanza, which ended,
as this poem will, with the image
of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,
her large eyes closed,
a painting of cows in a valley over her head,
and off to the side, me in a window seat
blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Ballistics

When I came across the high—speed photograph
of a bullet that had just pierced a book —
the pages exploding with the velocity —
I forgot all about the marvels of photography
and began to wonder which book
the photographer had selected for the shot.
Many novels sprang to mind
including those of Raymond Chandler
where an extra bullet would hardly be noticed.
Nonfiction offered too many choices —
a history of Scottish lighthouses,
a biography of Joan of Arc and so forth.
Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,
the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain
and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.
But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,
I realized that the executed book
was a recent collection of poems written
by someone of whom I was not fond
and that the bullet must have passed through
his writing with little resistance
at twenty—eight hundred feet per second,
through the poems about his childhood
and the ones about the dreary state of the world,
and then through the author's photograph,
through the beard, the round glasses,
and that special poet's hat he loves to wear.

Undiscovered Amazon Tribes

2010-03-03T23:01:14+01:00

The other day an article appeared in the New York Times about ethnic jokes in Dagestan. I am not sure how accurate a portrayal this was of life in Dagestan but some of the jokes were very funny.

An Avar is driving through Makhachkala with a Lakh in the passenger seat. Spotting a red light, he pumps the accelerator and speeds through it. “You just ran a red light!” the Lakh says. “Avars don’t stop for red lights,” the Avar explains, and speeds through another. In a few minutes, they come to a green light, and the Avar stops. “Why did you stop?” the Lakh asks. “You can’t be too careful,” his friend says, “an Avar might be coming the other way.”

And this anecdote:

One anecdote has a guy approaching his neighbor Gitya, an Avar. He says, “Gitya, I heard a great joke the other day, but it’s about Avars. I don’t want to offend you, so I’ll tell it about Azeris.” He tells the joke, and Gitya laughs so hard that tears stream down his face. “Man,” Gitya gasps, catching his breath. “Those Azeris sure are idiots!”

I was also intrigued by the mention of a place called Tsovkra "the village of tight-rope walkers". (I wonder how people cross the street).

One of the authorities on Dagestani humour is quoted is a "Mr. Magomedkhanov, whose scholarly works include "Tattoed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Dagestan".

I have since learnt that there are complex connections between mountain women's tattoos and the decorations on spoonboxes, but at first sight it seemed like an interestingly disjointed title, which made me think of trying to write "Bears and Cafeterias of the Himalayas" or "Hair driers and Porfolio Management ", so I searched for it and I landed on its page on Amazon.co.uk. It was there that I came across a tribe of books I hadn't previously suspected the existence of: on Amazon pages there is a line entitled "Customers who bought this item also bought", and the books shown included:

Tea bag folding

People who don't know they're dead: how they attach themselves to unsuspecting bystanders and what to do about it

The big book of Lesbian horse stories

The anger of aubergines: stories of women and food

and the wonderful

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America

which has the following product information:

Despite the ubiquity of stray shopping carts, little effort has been made to comprehend the complex relationship between cart and landscape. This is, in no small part, due to the fact that we have until now lacked a formalised language to describe these wayward carts in systematic detail. That is, until now. In "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification", a layperson is able to identify and classify their own cart spottings based on the situation in which they were found. In five handy chapters, Montague leads the reader through his identification system, covering such bucolically littered locations as the Niagara River Gorge (where many a cart has been pushed to its untimely death) and mundane sites that look suspiciously like a suburb near you.

Taking another step into the jungle, people who bought "Stray Shopping Carts" also bought:

What to say when you talk to yourself

Fancy coffins to make yourself

Milk Eggs Vodka: grocery lists lost and found

Bombproof your Horse and

Versailles: the view from Sweden

Now that I have pointed the way, you can conduct your own explorations in this hitherto little-known Amazon territory. I have a big order to make.

Zeitoun - An Iron Fist Descending

2010-02-20T17:36:32+01:00

زيتون

Very recently I took a low-cost flight. On the evening before I left I read that the limit on hand luggage was 5 kg. and, since I didn't want to send any luggage, I decided to wear all the clothes I was going to need and stuff as many belongings as possible into the surprising number of pockets I now had available.I checked in without any problems despite the fact that my body appeared to be a perfect square and before passing through security I re-assumed my normal identity.

I have an illogical fear of running out of reading material. Even if I am on page 32 of a 300-page book, I am always haunted by the suspicion that when I turn over I will discover that the next 268 pages are all blank. I had packed only one book and just in case it depressurised and disappeared at 30,000 feet, I decided to look at the slim pickings in the airport book shop. One of the things I was thinking about writing was supposed to take place in a flooded city so, when I found a book which was set in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina, I picked it up thinking that at the very least I would learn something about what it is like to live in a waterlogged city.

I read the book on the flight. Then I read it that night before I went to bed. I read it on the way back, never looking up, despite being sat in the midst of class of schoolkids who were communicating every single thought passing through their brains to each other in real time at a volume which would have dismayed the inventor of the megaphone.

I hadn't expected much from the book when I bought it. Now I felt as if I had sat down next to a somewhat unimpressive stranger on the plane and discovered that they were one of the most interesting people I had ever met.

I went home and read till three in the morning, when I finished the book. And then I thought I must tell my friends about this. Luckily for them, I fell asleep.

But I have kept on thinking that I must tell people about the book. The title is Zeitoun and the author is Dave Eggers. Everybody I have mentioned it to has told me that "zeitoun" means "olive" in Arabic, so be ready for that.

The book tells a real story, mainly through the eyes of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant to the United States. After having spent a number of years as a sailor, Zeitoun settles down in New Orleans where he marries Kathy, an American girl who had converted to Islam before meeting him. They have three girls in addition to Kathy's son from her first marriage. Zeitoun works hard and manages to set up his own painting enterprise. He prides himself on his reliability. His customers are surprised by it. His business prospers and he employs many workers. He hires men from Peru, Mexico, Bulgaria, Poland, Brazil, Honduras, Algeria. He tries to treat them well. He quotes the Prophet Muhammad, "Pay the labourer his wages before his sweat dries".

When Hurricane Katrina sweeps in, Kathy and the children leave the city, but Zeitoun stays behind so that he can repair any damage to the house before it becomes irretrievable and also to take care of the houses they have purchased and rented out. When the city floods, Zeitoun begins paddling around in an aluminium canoe which he has in the yard. Zeitoun quickly starts meeting people. He paddles up to their windows and they strike up conversations. He gives a lift to a neighbour who wants to see if his truck is still all right. They find it has moved half a block and is under five feet of water. They hear someone crying for help and find an old lady who has been hanging onto a bookcase for over 24 hours.

Zeitoun continues to travel around for days. Rescue boats roar by sometimes and he realises that he can hear people they can't because, unlike their vessels, his canoe moves silently. He has plenty of food and water at home which he distributes. He takes care of several starving dogs he has found howling inside buildings. He goes back to feed them regularly. When his supplies at home start running low, he still finds bottles and containers floating around in the water. He continues to hand out water and food. One day a woman calls him over to her window and asks him if he can take her to an address she gives him. After a while, he realises she is a prostitute. "Where are you going?" he asks. "To work," she says.

In one of the properties he has rented out, he meets a tenant, who has migrated up from the ground floor. His telephone box is above the water level and is still working. Zeitoun's mobile phone had exhausted its battery days earlier but now he begins to go to the building every day at midday to call his wife.

Every now and then he sees looting. A few times he turns around to avoid people who look dangerous. But he continues to help hand out water and food and taking people to evacuation points when they say they have had enough. He thinks a couple of times that God has put him there for a purpose. Later, he will come to think that perhaps he has been made to pay for that hubristic feeling.

One day he goes to his tenant's house to phone and discovers to his surprise that the shower works. He takes a shower and then someone tells him that there are people outside who want to know whether they need water. He goes out and finds six men, some wearing police uniforms, some military uniforms. They ask for ID, which they don't look at and they order him into their boat, together with the other three men at the house. They are taken to the train and bus Passenger Terminal which looks like it has been turned into a kind of military base. There are soldiers, national guardsmen, police and prison guards. Zeitoun notices that there are no medical or relief workers, unlike the staging areas he had taken people to in his canoe.

They are told not to move and one by one they are questioned. "Are we going to get a phone call ?" one of them asks. "No." "Why are we here?" "You guys are al Qaeda," the soldier answers. The date is 6 September

They are taken to a compound which reminds Zeitoun of the pictures he had seen of Guantanamo bay. A vast grid of chain-link fencing with few walls so that the prisoners are visible to the guards and each other. They are placed in a cage. They can sleep on the dirt floor. Ready-to-eat meals are brought. They are mostly pork. Zeitoun says he doesn't eat pork. "Don't eat it then," he is told. The next day, other prisoners are brought in. Zeitoun realises that they are all from high-security prisons and that the guards seem to be trained to treat them as extremely dangerous people. Any infraction is dealt with by spraying people head to toe with pepper spray.

As the days go by, Kathy, Zeitoun's wife, begins to panic. His brother in Spain has started to ask her for news about him. His family in Lebanon starts calling. And the news reports keep on reporting higher and higher death tolls in New Orleans. His family in Lebanon call and tell her that she must find his body so that he can be buried properly.

It's not till 19 September that she receives any news. A missionary has seen him and was given her number to call. A few hours later she receives a call from someone from Homeland Security who tells her that they have no more interest in him and that charges will be dropped.

It takes another ten days for Zeitoun to be released. His hair has turned grey. Kathy's hair is now streaked white. One of her little girl's hair is coming out in clumps.

When he gets back to New Orleans, Zeitoun goes and checks on the dogs he had been feeding. They are all dead.

Zeitoun goes back to work. So much work to do after the waters recede. He tries to work even better than before.

I have read a review of this book which states that this is a fierce indictment of the Bush Administration's policy. It's true of course but I think it is much more than that. It shows how ideas, if not restrained by constant supervision and concern for individuals because they are people, can roll away like runaway trucks and crush anyone in their path. There is a quotation from Mark Twain at the beginning of the book, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

The great achievement of the book is that it makes you feel things from the perspective of Zeitoun and Kathy. Eggers keeps his own feelings out of the way, when it would have been so easy to comment and draw conclusions. While reading this book I saw the world through the eyes of a Syrian with the memories of his childhood and his family and his travels around the world. I was floating along with him around New Orleans. It was so poetic - paddling up to people's windows to talk to them, feeling a companionship with almost everyone, the dogs recognising you as you approached, helping everyone you meet. God has put you here for a purpose. And then an iron fist descends from the sky and smashes everything. And when I had finished the book, I found that several ideas which I had thought were firmly anchored in my mind, were now floating around and that I needed to have another look at them.

23 days elapsed from Zeitoun's almost totally unexplained arrest to his almost totally unexplained release. This was almost enough to shake his and his wife's lives apart. Yet, if I had read in a news report that someone had been set free after 23 days, I might have thought it was a sign of a system working properly. After all, there are people who have been in situations like that for years - there are almost certainly some near where you are living, wherever that is.

(This book is part of a project which Dave Eggers began in 2004. Called Voice of Witness, it intends to use oral history to illustrate human rights crises around the world.)

If vegetables be the food of music

2010-02-07T21:57:17+01:00

I had bought lots of vegetables to make minestrone tonight but then I came across this video:

So now I have got my tools out and am making my own orchestra. One can always cook the vegetables afterwards (and maybe the soup will taste better after you have played some Haydn or Mozart - that's just an idea, I am not sure who the tastiest musicians are yet).

You can check to see whether the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra is coming your way at their website. From the reviews I have read, it would seem that this orchestra also has a distinctive smell.

Vienna has an outstanding musical tradition, of course, but I honestly think it should be possible to have an even more exciting vegetable orchestra in Palermo or Istanbul, because the vegetables there are so much better.Then, when you have done the washing up, here is a bagpipe you can make with your rubber gloves:

And, if you only have one carrot in the fridge, here is a clarinet you can make:

More instruments you can make from pieces of your house at www.linseypollak.com

(By the way, ask 30 people how to make minestrone and you will get 40 different answers. I like it the way they do it in Genoa, with pesto stirred in at the end. Here are a couple of approximations Number one and Number two. Any minestrone is better the next day (but put the pesto in just before you eat it). When you think you have got the hang of it, go to Genoa and learn how to really make it.

Tough questions

2010-01-25T15:40:15+01:00

(This is a passage from Bill Bryson's "Notes from a Big Country" which makes me laugh every time I think about it. It is the start of a chapter entitled "Drowning in Red Tape".)

I'm not even going to begin to tell you about the frustration of trying to get a foreign-born spouse or other loved one registered as a legal resident in the United States because I haven't space and anyway it is much too boring. Also, I can't talk about it without weeping copiously. Also, you would think I was making most of it up.

You would scoff, I am quite sure, if I told you that an acquaintance of ours - an academic of high standing - sat open-mouthed while his daughter was asked such questions as 'Have you ever engaged in any unlawful commercial vice, including, but not limited to, illegal gambling?' and 'Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party?' and - my particular favourite - 'Do you plan to practise polygamy in the US?' His daughter, I should point out, was five years old.

The Frog (re-post)

2010-01-13T16:07:24+01:00

Anonymous


What a wonderful bird the frog are—
 When he sit, he stand almost;
 When he hop, he fly almost.
 He ain’t got no sense hardly;
 He ain’t got no tail hardly either.
 When he sit, he sit on what he ain’t
			   got—almost

								
(From the Rattle Bag, an anthology of poetry
edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)

Click on picture for frog calls

Ounce Dice Trice

2010-01-11T15:52:43+01:00

The New York Review of Books has taken to re-publishing books which have been out of print for a while. This page gives a list of some and even has a space for suggestions, if you have any old favourites which you think ought to be rescued.

This seems to me to be a wonderful idea. In fact, it might be good to have a one week moratorium on new books once a year, call it Reprint Week, and dedicate it solely to old books which have been needlessly forgotten.

A short while ago they brought out a book I had been waiting for. It is OUNCE DICE TRICE by Alastair Reid and Ben Shahn (first edition 1958). It is a book for children and word-lovers. It is only fifty-seven pages long but the words are meant to be read aloud, one at a time, and they are so unpredictable and interact so well with the drawings that if you belong to one of the two categories above, you will find you go back to it again and again. On the back cover Marianne Moore is quoted as having written when the book first appeared: “Reading Ounce Dice Trice aloud is the best way of separating the bores from their airs and the squares from their snores.”)

I have decided to carry a tiny notebook to remind me of words I would like to use but never seem to get the chance to. One of them is going to be "tantony" which is on page 50 of this book.

There are sections on collective nouns with things like a gundulum of garbage cans, a snigglement of string and a tumbletell of church bells.

And a large part of the book is about naming with names to give to twins, to various animals, for houses. Here is a useful page which will allow you deal with one of the many problems you will have if someone gives you an elephant for your birthday.

And when was the last time you talked to the fingers properly ?

A completely different set of names is suggested for the other hand.

There are lots of other fascinating words, such as gongoozler, thrumbled and pobbies. One particularly valuable one is PONSONBY, which Reid says is pronounced whenever you want to change the subject. I think that in the same way that basketball coaches are entitled to time-outs we all should be entitled to say PONSONBY at least once under certain circumstances, for example those long formal dinners where you end up seated to people none of whose interests seem to intersect yours.

You can see some more pages from this book here

Alastair Reid's love of words is very visible in his poems. Whenever I read one I have the feeling that all the words have been selected from a carefully tended garden.

One I like a lot is called Daedalus.

My son has birds in his head.

I know them now. I catch

the pitch of their calls,, their shrill

cacophonies, their chitterlings, their coos.

They hover behind his eyes and come to rest

on a branch, on a book, grow still,

claws curled, wings furled.

His is a bird world.

I learn the flutter of his moods,

his moments of swoop and soar.

From the ground I feel him try

the limits of the air-

sudden lift, sudden terror –

and movein time to cradle

his quivering, feathered fear.

At evening, in the tower,

I see him to sleep and see

the hooding-over of eyes,

the slow folding of wings.

I wake to his morning twitterings,

to the croomb of his becoming.

He chooses his selves – wren, hawk,

swallow or owl – to explore

the trees and rooftops of his heady wishing.

Tomtit, birdwit.

Am I to call him down, to give him

a grounding, teach him gravity?

Gently, gently.

Time tells us what we weight, and soon enough

his feet will reach the ground.

Age, like a cage, will enclose him.

So the wise men said.

My son has birds in his head.

You can also watch a video of him reading it here.

Finally the last page of Ounce Dice Trice also has a good thing to say, particularly if can learn to copy the attitude and the expression of the boy in the drawing.

The Umbrellas of Colombo

2009-12-23T21:00:53+01:00

Listen to the poem

These girls I see

all day

with their lithe ways

and plaited hair,

all with umbrellas,

black, ungainly ones,

cousins to rusty bicycles—

are they, just them, expecting rain?

But although most are closed

some are already held aloft

against the blazing sky.

There is no common purpose I can see,

except they seem

tools of importance.

Some toy with them

with nervous

eagerness, unsure of

what to do and how to be,

some,

very few,

swing theirs

in broad arcs of effrontery,

some hold them solemnly

like parts of a uniform,

some seem to want to keep

them out of view,

the way one might attempt

to hide a cello or a

team’s supply of

hockey sticks.

All day I watch,

all day I’m lost for thoughts.

I see them suddenly appear

at bus stops everywhere,

or else

in Pettah standing next to bristling

market stalls,

in Cinnamon Gardens stepping out

from underneath magnolia trees,

and at De Soyza Circus,

where the crows go bouncing

around, behind and

in between their steps.

On Duplication Road their numbers swell

and just as instantly they disappear.

It’s when I reach the coast,

upon the Green,

where people stand in lines to chatter

back at the grumbling ocean down below,

that things begin to come together in my mind.

I see three of these girls, with circumspection,

cross the lawn, sidestepping all the huddled families,

sit down and carefully arrange their skirts

and then bring their umbrellas down

level and open straight before their eyes.

A boyfriend slips behind each one.

And then with no change in the sky,

most gently—

it is not a storm, there’s no monsoon—

it sets to raining

kisses.

(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2588218)

Angelic Landings

2009-10-18T21:15:27+02:00

(This is a revised version of something I posted in August 2008 with the title "The Metaphysical Olympics. Click on the pictures to enlarge and make your own judgements.).

I often think about this peculiar painting of the Annunciation by Lorenzo Lotto. As you can see, God doesn't seem to have much confidence that the angel is going to carry out his instructions properly and Mary is just about to exit the canvas. (I'm sure there must be a never-discovered version where she has already hopped out). But most of all, I think about the cat which has jumped up in panic. What set it off? Just the sight of a big thing with wings ? Some angelic smell ? Or do angels move air when they come down and land ?

This one certainly seems to have come down fast. It looks to me a bit like a gymnast trying for a good score when exiting from a somersault. Perhaps overdoing it a bit and so appealing more to the crowd than to the judges. And thinking of that gave me the idea of organising the first Metaphysical Olympics. For the time being we only have one event - Gymnastics for Angels or Gymnangelastics.

One advantage in having angels compete is that they probably don't take steroids. However there are also some problems. It is to be hoped we will never have to subject any to sex tests. And then there is the small matter that they don't seem to turn up as often as they used to. Because of this, I have decided that we are going to judge the event by the way they perform in pictures of the Annunciation. Specifically, we will be focusing on how well they landed.

So here are some of the favourites as well as some of the outsiders in the Gymnangelastics event. Dutch and Flemish painters are unfortunately under-represented because most of them seem to prefer to depict the angel as it walks in through the front door or else have it comfortably seated as if it had been served a cup of tea before bringing up the delicate subject it was called upon to discuss.

(click to enlarge)

Beato Angelico
Beautiful wing position (and beautiful wings), hands in expressive but not overly flamboyant position. However the angel has not been able to completely check its forward motion.
Very good.

Alessio Baldovinetti
Quite a big wobble here. Wings OK but not outstanding. Hands-crossed position looks like a hasty attempt to regain balance.
Average

Botticelli
Big disappointment here from Botticelli, who surely must have been considered a contender.Very bad form in general, everything pointing in different directions and looking very unstable. Perhaps just about to tip forward onto the ground or grab Mary's garb.

Underperformer.

Caravaggio
Go back and practise some more.
Non-starter.

David
Knees somewhat too far apart, hand gestures not perfect, robe not completely under control and wings in in-between position, but all in all a very impressive performance. Might just be a surprise medallist.
Dark horse.

El Greco

Almost certain to get injured landing like that.
Are you insured?

Fra Bartolomeo
Just slightly tilted and askew, but another possible surprise.
The other Brother.

Gentile Bellini
Not perfect (I think you are supposed to land inside the house), but so dynamic and expressive it is very likely some of the judges will be swayed.
The menace from Venice

Grunewald

A completely different approach: flamboyant and deliberately rough-edged.

Walk on the wild side

Leonardo da Vinci
Most people's favourite. Turbo-spoiler wings, perfect poise, frozen motion and landing almost exactly half-way between the two cypress trees. Flawless.

Rubens
You can't deny the talent, but a rather hard landing.
Heavyweight.

Simone Martini
Much simpler than some of the others, but bordering on perfection.
Shades of gold

Terbruggen
A Dutch follower of Caravaggio and having the same kind of problems in making contact with the earth.Never Land

Tintoretto

Seems to have knocked a number of the house's walls down and to have involved the holy spirit in a stuka dive.
Spectators advised to stand back.

And then of course there is Lotto. Pretty good but something is not kosher. I have great confidence in the intuition of cats and until the issue is clarified Lotto will suffer a one-point deduction.

These are of course my personal opinions. I am no expert on gymnastics or angels, so you might want to contribute your own scores.

By the way, I took all these pictures from a fantastic resource - The Web Gallery of Art where you can organise your own exhibitions by searching by keywords. Searching for "Annunciation" gave me 540 different paintings. You could, for example, try and find all the pictures of St. Sebastian they have. (Perhaps useful for an archery event at our Olympics).

A Minor Key

2009-10-15T00:19:04+02:00

Listen to the poem

When looking back, I found my days

lay tangled in untidy heaps,

like unassorted clothes,

just washed but with the colours run.

As when there's one thing

which turns everything to pinks or blues

my wednesdays, thurs and fries

looked just the same as all my tues—

a slush in retrospect,

perhaps a glimmer here and there,

but all the rest unfeatured, unremarked,

an epidemic of unending undays.

So, on the first day of the year,

upon a shore,

I found a stone and threw it in the sea

and told myself that each day I would

take one picture in my head

and keep it polished

so that they'd all shine bright

as markers in the fog between my nights.

And now you ask what did I do

this first month of the year.

Well, I suppose I would have said

that mostly I recall

I slept and ached

and pined and worried,

tried to remember

and fretfully attempted to forget.

But then

I stumble on my picture treasure chest.

It starts one winter noon—

the Adriatic green, a thickly newly poured and

frozen paint. Above the line the sky

starts from

three clouds, identical

in shape,

like corncob pipes.

In size, one large,

one in between, one small.

Below, almost about to disappear,

a ship and, flying out to it,

swaying inside a

quaking carpet of unrolling wind,

a train of birds.

Next come some rusty pears

and apples inside a wooden bowl;

a Rothko painting, only red on black,

the paint which somehow moves

from place to place;

a calendar which read December 39th;

a dog obstructing flow,

stranded in halfway street

between two billowing smells;

the travelling sky at dawn

outside my window only

minutes from my bed and sleep;

a girl upon a bridge shaking her worries

from her head into a spray of auburn hair;

a photograph from 1938,

ten gazes, none the same,

intense enough combined

to keep the future hovering, still

an inch beyond the frame.

And then,

my newest friend

a demoiselle of ten, aglow with smile

as she ran up to say her first hello.

A downsideup bird in a tree.

A waterfall I stared at long enough

my mind just turned to drops.

A greeting which was honey for my soul.

A Dayak hornbill carving, like

a shriek of wood.

A seagull landing on a car just next to me

to wait together for the fishmonger to start his day.

The dance and song of rain

upon the roof tiles over which I

swung my feet.

And last of all a boy from Africa

spinning a pirouette so

sudden and so

bold it stunned a room

and made us catch our breath,

like when you accidentally realise

you've seen a month of minor miracles.

Phillip Hill 2007

(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2588218)