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This piece is about 3 printed pages long. It is copyright © Angela Gardner and Jacket magazine 2008.
The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/35/gardner-a-3.shtml
Now that I am in Madrid and can think
Fade
when I leave the clouds
Now that I am in Madrid and can think
words
interrupted from images inhabit a language in skin
different from the burden of blood or blessings here
but as capable, lifting a hungry wind to stars that hide above the city
nothing sleeps, instead a dangerous elevation drives
over seemingly intractable borders to where everything pulses
songbirds hang by their throats in the sky and shutters close on afternoon
with inevitable bleed of images that spill or drip or puddle
from our luggage
in Madrid we all carry moments when we think we are happy
yet our photographs reveal loss and amalgamation
a thin man’s precise and hungry modelling, a child one hardly knows
in Madrid an orange will sit next to a bowl waiting for metaphor
not for signs of desolation as in other cities with their plastic bag tumbleweeds
or dripping taps. This is another language
a light intense with the reality of what we love
(a postcard after Frank O’Hara)
Fade
Slowly the images
the verisimilitude and lies
that opened a space a running gap
in the rickety structure of dreams
filled with moth holed stars
and glass faced tricksters
super eight and wall projected
a flicker frequency stream of consciousness
glancing from the head
sparking like an oxy-acetelyne torch
against the uneven line
between light and morning
And as they fade
we are left with stillness
we must stop clapping
and allow the Universe to be swept clean
All that movement amounted to nothing
and now it is over
when I leave the clouds
through a window sky
opens gets lost closes
unravels fitful gusts of cinema
or nothingness
infinity always escapes this radar
this attempt to order the celestial
and when I leave the clouds
the stars look very cold about the sky[1]
[1] Quoted from a letter by Keats
Angela Gardner
Angela Gardner won the 2006 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and 2004 Bauhinia/Idiom 23 Prize. Her first book Parts of Speech was published by University of Queensland Press in 2007. She is founding editor of the poetry journal www.foame.org and a practicing visual artist with work in public collections. In 2008 she will travel to the USA and UK on a Churchill Fellowship to investigate small press poetry/printmaking collaborations.