Four Variations is now online

Four Variations

for (the late) Sir James George Frazer
by Carol Novack

Hear this read by the author, with music by Benjamin Rush Miller


I
Sisyphus

He gripped a corner of the sky and peeled it off the walls of the world to go where no man has gone before. Behind the sky was the same sky, same dry/wet, blue/gray variations, the mesmerizing metamorphics of clouds. Being and nothingness as always being and nothingness. Isn't there more? He asked, peeling the sky off the walls again and again, always the same sky.

LINK

3 Little Love Poems/Flashes (Draft)

Any comments, critiques? This will be up for a day or two then gone. I hope you enjoy!

3 Little Love Poems


Relations

Auntie was prone to say: “Cheese is best when sliced thin just like life.” She always bit off a lot of less than she could chew, and avoided more than a mot of mirth, even with dessert and a spot of port. “Take little and relish it, and you will be sufficient. But that’s just my opinion.”

When I was little, I ate too fast and choked at birthday parties. Then I grew up a little and married the first man who’d overcome me, big with an eloquent tongue. I nearly lost my breath till death might do us part.

At Auntie’s funeral, a weeping man hugged me so brutally he caught my breath. He was the man called Happy Henry Auntie had left at the altar. As the attendees gasped, Auntie reversed herself with deliberation and panache, floating down the aisle towards the door. “So sorry, I made a little mistake,” she spoke politely, waving her white-gloved hands.
_______________

His Heart

Carla wore his heart under her sleeve. The heart he’d carved said “Carla and Carl forever,” as if her arm were a tree he’d planted on his property. An arrow with angel wings pierced the dead center of the heart, “a darling, thoughtful touch,” she exclaimed, turning as red as the heart’s aorta. When Carl left for Majorca with Mabel, the wings turned black and blue.

______________

Nostalgia

Short, plump Lili longed for the man on the other side of the square, the one who sat on a bench reading Sonnets to Orpheus. Everything about him was grand and aquiline. Atop the man’s mane of white hair perched a black beret. A black tie always relaxed on his lavender silk shirts; he seemed to have a menagerie of them. Was he always going to a Ball?

The man she called “the one” reminded Lili of what she wished to remember of her childhood: a blueberry sundae with dark chocolate chips. She wondered what color his eyes were. She was an expressionist who loved Kandinsky.

Lili took to wearing a black hat to cover her dull gray hair and a long black silk scarf to adorn her parade of lavender blouses. She started to make a habit of walking by him, winking her hips. Then she added an accessory, a book of poems by Rilke that poked ostentatiously from her mini-tote bag. Lili did this for weeks, months, years, oh what is time? But he never even glanced her way. He was too busy mouthing poems, looked as though he were eating them. Yet he was ever gazing up at the sky, into the sun, with his eyes closed. Lili tried wearing spiked heels to create noises to awaken him from his Rilkean reveries. Nada. Niet. Rien du tout. She tried tripping and ripped her purple stockings on several occasions. Nada. Niet. Rien du tout.

One day, Lili set up an easel in front of the patisserie opposite “the one’s” bench. She brought her most luxurious colors and began to paint him. A crowd soon gathered to exclaim her praises in most colorful words. When the crowd dispersed, “the one” walked cautiously up to the painting and asked Lili if he could suggest a “minor touchup.” “Although I cannot see, I can smell the color you used for my eyes,” he said. "They are in fact absent of color, but perhaps I should say they were, as you’ve made them blush. I can feel you are a warm woman of wit and refinement, the one I’ve awaited to take to the Ball.”

And so they went and that was only the beginning.

Gated Communities: the saga continues

Poem

I sat at the end of the road -- not my road, just one I had taken because it was the first that I found. There were no other roads in sight, only a rectangular piece of yellow paper pinned to a tree whose name I did not know. The piece of paper stated:

This is a poem:
neither the end of the road nor the beginning of all roads.

Curb your expectations!
This is only a piece of yellow paper
on which sits a poem about roads
of no consequence.

Ho hum, another poem about a road,
you think: tired poem, exhausted road,
eroded metaphor of stones
on which I bruise my feet.

Ho hum, the poem thinks:
Worn feet, stanzas on which I stumble. No rhyme. No reason.

Some insist
there is a sequence
to roads
if you can see it.

Others insist
there is a score,
but say you must be a scholar
of harmony, theory, and history
to understand
the movements
of notes.

Remember:
what you observe (is ripped
what you hear (is burned.

Find the player
to find the player.

The piece of paper was crisp and clean, as though it had been recently pinned to the tree. The letters were formed erotically with flourishes and curves. Was the poetic calligraphist saying that the poem was of no consequence or the road? If indeed this road was inconsequential, I simply had to imagine another and press on. And so I did. I turned left and saw the man in white nearing the top of a hill. He beckoned to me as he disappeared to distances beyond my sight.

Violet's Dream: A Triptych

Here's an excerpt from part I of my new piece.

"A pig in my bed is not a surprise, though he always tends to happen suddenly, as if on an impulse: mine or his. We fly to Reno … eventually.

He has always had tasty lips that feel like butter, and a strong nose for fear. He can smell menstrual blood and menopause from impressive distances. Comely pink pig, so smart, so misunderstood . . . so maligned . . . so malignant. I suck on his briny knuckles with my pretty pink mouth, porky pink tongue.

In turn, the beast feasts, plucks organs from their venal roots, popping them into his mouth, barely chewing. He leaves my mammary glands for last, salivates as he kneads them, wanting milk.

Now I am all bone, ready for a stroll on the runway in my rose silk gown.

I think of the three pigs: the pig in my 20’s, the pig in my 30’s and the pig in my 40’s. Pigs come in threes like fairy tales. Then who is this pig in my bed?"

Email me if you want to read the entirety.

fieralingue Poet's Corner - Fieralingue

What a day!

So happy to be in Anny Ballardini's Poet's Corner in the Italian journal Fieralingue. Thanks, Anny!



fieralingue Poet's Corner - Fieralingue

The Guild of Outsider Writers Featured Poet - Yours Verily

The Guild of Outsider Writers - Home

Thank you, David Blaine!

Reading next Wednesday in the East Village

NEW Reading Series!!

Friends of Tuesday Shorts now showing monthly at the Boxcar Lounge (http://boxcarlounge.com): Our FIRST phenomenal reading is November 28, 2007, 168 Avenue B, East Village NYC. 8 - 10 pm.

Please join us and forward to anyone you know. We wanna see your shorts there too!

Hosted by Shelly Rae Rich, writer (see http://blog.shellyraerich.com) and co-editor of Tuesday Shorts (http://myspace.com/tuesdayshorts), the series kicks off with an eclectic group of talent.


And here they are…..(in ABC order)

Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in journals like Pindeldyboz, Post Road, and Red Rock Review. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a recently reinvented literary journal, which has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. Sunnyoutside Press published a collection of his flash fiction, Breaking it Down in November 2007.

Linda DiGusta is a freelance writer and artist. Active in the NYC theatre for more than a decade as a director, designer and performer, the inventiveness of acting and collaboration on a screenplay re-kindled her early interest in fiction, and she has had several short stories published in print and online. In the fine art world, she currently has 2 still-life drawings in the exhibition "Lineal Investigations" at the Housatonic Museum of Art, and her assemblages and drawings have been seen in group exhibitions in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including at Art Gotham in Chelsea this month. Integrating art and writing, Linda also writes for and serves as Executive Editor of Resolve40.com, an online publication created by artists in 2005 to present the art world from a fresh point of view. She lives in midtown Manhattan with artist Mark Wiener and their multi-species family. More at: http://www.lindadi.com and http://www.resolve40.com.

Anne Elliott has performed her poetry, with and without ukulele, at the Whitney Museum (with the Beats show), PS122, Lincoln Center, The Poetry Project at St. Mark's, Woodstock '94, and other venues in and out of NYC. Her poems have appeared in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, Verses that Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the Poemfone Poets, and other anthologies. Her fiction has appeared in Hobart, Pindeldyboz, FRiGG, Ars Medica, and others, and she blogs on the writing life and feral cat management at http://assbackwords.blogspot.com.

Carol Novack, a former criminal defense lawyer and Australian government grant recipient, is the author of a chapbook of poetry, play, collaborative CD and two collaborative films. Writings may or will be found in many publications, including American Letters & Commentary, Action Yes, Del Sol Review, Diagram, 5_trope, Gargoyle, Journal of Experimental Fiction, La Petite Zine, LIT, Notre Dame Review, and the Star*Vigate anthology of best online writings. Carol publishes the multi-media e-journal Mad Hatters' Review (http://madhattersreview.com), curates a reading series at the KGB Bar, and runs lyrical fiction writing workshops. She'll be a resident at The Vermont Studio Center next year. For additional details, see her blog (http://carolnovack.blogspot.com).

What I'm writing

I've been working on a prose poemy series called "Gated Communities," and collaborating with the wondrous poet Sheila Murphy on a piece called "Room."


Here are bits of "Gated Communities." I've submitted Part I to a journal of prose poetics.

GATED COMMUNITIES
(a series in progress)


Part I: Outside Looking In side



Mapquest

Where leaves of the sequoias fall and winds lift them beyond the edges of roads.

No, not edges not roads. A circle of time.



Mapquest

Where there are no sequoias, no winds to move the minutes.

Where horses lose their gait and disintegrate.

Where no one remembers the ways, means, or mothers.

He says: a rhombus. She says: a trapazoid.



Opera

I bought a vintage velvet dream and hemmed it to rub against my ankles like cats. Dead mother's emerald earrings clung to my ears like leaves.

On a road with no moon I shivered under shadows of trees I could not see. He said he'd be waiting by the gate. There would be no other opening.

There was no gate.



Mapquest

If you proceed from A to B on your horse, you may not notice a slight deviation, a size of time as imperceptible as the beginning of an embryo.

You must have circular vision like the sequoia know where beginnings never end and endings begin.

You must recognize the invisible point of conception -- open your self to conceive it. Then let it go – (that's the point. (beside the point.



Ball

One must have a mask to enter, said the keeper of the gate. His head was swathed in black sackcloth with holes for his eyes, too dark to see under a half-hearted winter moon.

Are you a hangman or a gatekeeper? I asked, I in my red cloak, with my head in the winds and rain, my feet in red rubber slippers.

He said nothing as the road became a river and he a ferryman steering a boat of cloaked shadows cascading over the gate into a promised land of violins, ice wine, and chandeliers.




Part II: Inside Looking Out side or



Vacancy

There I was, finally or so assumed by me, presumed I. Evidence: A: There was no keeper. B. The gate looked different, cast in a light I didn’t recognize. There was graffiti on the gate: an outline of a heart intersected by an arrow at the precise midpoint of nine circles, apparently. The graffiti was a scrawl in Latin, translated: DANTE LOVES BEATRICE.

Someone poked me, but not yet the man with the umbrella. Someone questioned my assumptions. Was this my dead mother? Is that what she’d said, in the manner of the crow, opening and shutting its beak, did she ever squawk at me, utter: caw caw? Are you sure that’s what you saw . . . dear . . . you with your extravagant imagination, your solitary perspective? Have you located yourself in correct time and season? Are you walking tall and straight forward? Beware of walls!

One must be vigilant. I had learned that much, perhaps not that much. The gate keeper gone, I could only keep watch for and on my self. Was there truly graffiti on the gate? Was there love or at least a story of love? I could not respond, to anyone’s satisfaction, as I imagined, without any fore or hindsight. Where had I left my sight? How could I find it? Where were the chandeliers?

I raised the volume of my voice to an atonal # A, a vulgar arrow to pierce the bland white noise of the context, nothing but fog and a sense of walls. Then, abruptly, the man with the umbrella but without it, all in white: jacket, shirt, pants, and hat. He looked fatigued, red eyed and back bowed, as though in wait for the arrival of an arrow, consulted a watch with a large face he wasn’t wearing on his wrist. It’s time, the man said repeatedly, nostrils quivering.

The man cleared his throat to achieve a tone of certainty: there is not . . . is not any, any longer . . . no longer is time but not vacant. There it is, VOICI and VOILA: the vacancy! For you, if you wish. Then he scurried past, disappearing at the end of the roads, it seemed, though I could see no roads.

The planet on this side of the gate felt flat and far like an outdoor concert hall without speakers. The man must have fallen off its ledge, either the planet or fog, I couldn’t tell. I only knew that he was not to be beloved; the distances were much too obvious. There was nothing to do but seek the plot allotted to me, my space to design. I started to walk short and crooked in a random direction.


Mapquest

If you walk swiftly to meet deadlines, you may miss the turn.

If you walk slowly to arrive at specific places, you may miss the turn.

Walk without point past the playgrounds and cemeteries, the wedding rotundas and taverns. Walk only toward possibility without thought and reflection without light.