Q - Wuming Notes

p. 101 - Pitchforks scene description

p.174 - 'It isn't spring, not anymore, April just makes me scratch my scars: the geographical map of lost battles.'

p.210 - She was different, but nonetheless extraordinary, one of those creatures who make you thank God for granting you the chance to walk the earth by their side.

I stare at the dusk that is entering our study and once again I see that sinuous body.

"We knew from the first moment. One day we would wake up somewhere else, far apart, for no necessary reason, following the twisted path of our lives. Ursula was a season, a fifth season of the soul, half autumn, half spring.'

p. 409 - On Banking

p.429 - 'Because the Lutherans are sometimes the best allies against the rebellion of the humblest classes.'

p.557 - On Christ as the statue (to the 5 year old) and why it was a truth told twice.

Taureans - Stiere (19 Jan 2011)

He prefers
to have his breakfast
with the kitchen light on.

She notices
the blue flakes
on his left foot
and the peeling sky.

... at least
that's what she assumes.

er bevorzugt
um sein Frühstück zu haben
mit Licht in der Küche auf.

sie bemerkt,
die blaue Flocken
auf seinem linken Fuß
und das Peeling Himmel.

... mindestens
das ist, was sie einnimmt.

Proximately

a crowded train
I was, once again, forced-fed minutes
to scrutinise the back of another stranger’s head
in front of me

unlicensed rear end phrenology

some hairy terrain
uneven tufts and sweat

straight, wave or curl
water spiral and plug hole
all the same

some glossed scalps
might be fate foretold
of hair
loss or greyed
the back skull he knows from reflections

the smell of her shampoo reminds me
of the smell of her and another shampoo.

For Anne Gregory - W.B. Yeats

'Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'

'But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'

'I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'

Hopscotch

"The same thing happens to everybody, the statue of Janus is a useless waste, the truth is that after forty years of age we have our real face on the back of our heads, looking desperately backwards. It is what in all truth is called a commonplace. You can’t do anything about it, that’s about the strength of it."

Hopscotch - Cortazar

“If my mate runs out I’ve had it,” Oliveira thought. “my only real conversation is with this green gourd.” He studied the strange behavior of the mate, how the herb would breathe fragrantly as it came up on top of the water and how it would dive as he sucked and would cling to itself, everything fine lost and all smell except for that little bit that would come up in the water like breath and stimulate his Argentinean iron lung, so sad and solitary. It had been sometime now that Oliveira had been paying attention to unimportant things, and the little green gourd had the advantage that as he meditated upon it, it never occurred to his perfidious intelligence to endow it with such ideas as one extracts from mountains, the moon, the horizon, an adolescent girl, a bird, or a horse. “This mate might show me where the center is,” Oliveira thought . . . The problem consisted in grasping that unity without becoming a hero, without becoming a saint, or a criminal, or a boxing champ, or a statesman, or a shepherd. To grasp unity in the midst of diversity, so that that unity might be the vortex of a whirlwind and not the sediment in a clean, cold mate gourd."

Chronicles (Sunday 9 Jan 2011)

the smouldering tip of a lit cigarette

between fingers

is it the wind, directing
or an invisible vacuum sucking
the fume

a praiseworthy moment,
when we wore our sixth finger
when the slender smoke spiral screen
the living room or another scene.

a praiseworthy woman,
when your figure was either
framed by the dusty and neglected window or creaking door
when the clock we smell to tell our time together is obsolete
now the burning incense could only whisper our minutes
that could not be converted into hours, days or weeks.

My ears are open
the tune playing in the other room that drifts in is well-muffled by the distance
the variety of your voices in my head are songs I failed to forget.

Without horoscopic bullshit from cousins of economists
without generalities or false details – that is
without ‘experts say’ or what ‘public thinks’
without reports of where world leaders are now congregating
without the vulgarities of seeing tragedies juxtaposed to the polished smiles and expressions of models sent to reinforce the jargons of the sales and marketing teams…
what’s your fucking ‘Asian perspectives’ with such an accent.

my laziness is the discipline
my bad posture when slouching on the sofa is another stance
to avoid reading the newspapers like chronic plague.

Shampoo in Supermarket (29 Dec 2010, 4.56pm)

Tearing as resistance
Her tears as

resistance against one departure.

Silent
it drops without echo,
unlike a pile of books in the library.

Silent
it drips, just one arm,
unlike those suicidal commodities
found along supermarket shelves

wanting to attract our attention
for only a brief moment
with buffered carton

or muffled cardboard bangs
it was heard
before we noticed them on the floor.

Yet we always prefer to deduced otherwise,
some other reasons

rather callousness
rather carelessness
rather that they were previously stacked precariously
close to the edge of the cold metal horizon

than logical suicide.

The shelves that reminded one
of cooler temperature
of colder blood.

I have told you before,

‘only when the shampoo irritates… only tears in one eye at most.’

'Poetry’ and News (4 Jan 2011 (10.40am)

We undermine not one but two
I shall not term it failure or success

like when a petit-bourgeoisie decides to read a little Burgess or Borges.
but they belong to those who used their lives to exemplify to us
what not to do

What not to write
What not to say
Not to summarize life as hope and rememberance
Not about your clichéd aspiration

or the broken silence of your emotional strands
fallen from your head

onto

the

half-eaten plate.

What not to show,
neither to friends nor acquaintances
Which is either sympathy or condescension
What not to suggest
Who not to collaborate with
Not to be always next to – ‘hanging around her like a bad smell’ (Bolaño)

Not to carry it with you when you are out,

inside a bag like a street peddler.

No.

Don’t say they are poems or writings
Don’t self-publish,

no limited print runs,

no independent bookstore.

Don’t do the design and layout yourself,

don’t trouble your close friend to help with the editing.
Don’t say they are accumulated over the years,

from the last few years
in between your chief preoccupation as
lawyer, doctor, engineer, banker, teacher, politician, bureaucrat…
Or postman, policeman, fireman, nurse, nun, clerk, monk, bookstore assistant, administrators, painter, hooligan, traveller, prostitute… whatever.

Let what is old get old
Like the newspapers piled up over the weeks
The density of the stack
the weightiest of trash.

So Abel and Cain,
So poetry and journalism are separate things, separated like ‘twins separated at birth’
The weightiest of trash

is the least material of things, the closest to dematerial:

words.