Category: Poetry and Translation

Monte Reale/Mason’s Eucherist: by Bonnie McClellan

MON REALE / MASON’S EUCHERIST

Tourists take photos while the faithful take communion.

The priest extends God

again and again.

within the cardboard flavoured

benediction of holy bread

He Is

reconstituted by faiths’ sanguine tongue.

The exchange of force:

the weighted wheel that rights itself

the pendelum

the cam shaft

the finger on the shutter button:

charged reflex of the aperture flash-writes the icons’ golden tesserae

to memory

again and again.

Monday, in the winding weekday of a suburban street:

The bread man drives a panel truck

newgreen once, now filmed with summer dust cast up from the road

innocent as the first stones that years ago

smacked off enamel chips and so

engendered oxides’ ruddy rose.

Chanting through the nasal static of a loud speaker

unintelligible words.

His rough square hands convey

in paper, through which butter has begun to soak,

delicate pastry filled with almond paste and dark chocolate

lightly dusted with powdered sugar, and then:

two swallows of thick, black coffee,

in a plastic dixie cup.

The 10 a.m. taste of salvation

again delivered to working men.

Continue reading Monte Reale/Mason’s Eucherist: by Bonnie McClellan

Elysium: by Tom McClellan

 In a continuing celebration of the life and creativity of my father, Tom McClellan, who passed away this last Saturday, August 3rd, I will be publishing some excerpts of his work. The following is an excerpt from his blog posted on May 14, 2011.

Elysium

We came at last to the middle of nowhere.

Homey, suburban, not alien at all.

A side yard between two houses,

Where children often play,

Untouched by growing pains or war.

…

“The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, were the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous.” (Wikipedia)

+++

Biography of a Bipolar: by Tom McClellan

Reposted from IPM 2MXI in loving memory of Tom McClellan
(23 September 1941 – 3 August 2013)

Biography of a Bipolar

At first friends share the ecstasy that comes before the burn:

“That night he was going crazy everyone

was too drunk to care.”

But after years all learn:

“His conversation grew brilliant and alarming.

Students were frightened by his lecture on Hitler.”

“He wrote the most pitiful letter;

though I was not angry, he spoke of us fighting.”

“His religious notions, never stable, flowered

into oddity; his judgment went haywire.”

“He was barricaded in his room in his skivvies when the police came;

he was surprisingly polite.”

The poet obligingly provides snapshots from hell:

“I meditated Detachment and Urbanity but the old menacing

hilarity was growing in me.”

“What use is my sense of humor when the brain blinks

like a radio station rapidly distanced?”

“I lay there secured but for my skipping mind.”

After the delusions pass, he lacerates his soul with reason:

“Seven years ago Bloomington stood for Joyce’s hero and Indiana for

the evil, unexorcised aborigines, while I suspected myself

The Holy Ghost.  The glory and banality of it are corrupting.”

The poet’s wife learns to suffer a fool who falls in love

with students, madhouse nurses,

any woman but her:

“I don’t think he realizes the damage.”

New drugs offer old hopes of Panacea:

“To think of all that suffering for lack of a little salt in the brain!”

Theories suffer the usual changes:

“Recent research shows mania’s a summertime dis­ease,

perhaps an excess of light.”

…

(Robert Lowell)

This poem is excerpted from Mr. McClellan’s book: Reflections From Mirror City

 

 

cloud table:inter prestation

.

.

.

.

light-bearing months; burnt out, used up, exhausted, passed by

heavy grey clouds twisting, cajoling, traveling along the route of back-lit, illuminated, golden-edged time

passed, exhausted, used up, burnt out;  visual border between heaven and earth compensated, forfeit.

.

.

.

.

inter: put into the earth

prestation: the obligation to perform or not perform a duty

Mothers and Daughters: Red Square (a map of our mother’s closet circa 1972)

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We will know her by her symbolic attributes;
In her image neither lily nor byzantine purple signify.
We will note that in the hard-drawn felt-tip icon of the Mother God
She is ever shown wearing Red high heels.

Some colored squares in our territory’s mapped legend fade,
Re-worn and illegible as old confetti on a wet asphalt street
tracked back by our insistent, diminishing feet.
Others cling, vibrant in the hanging dark:
stripes of light cotton voile:
one turquoise,
one lime
green.

In more contemporary images we will note:
The hard-drawn, felt-tip Icon of the Mother God
Wears Red high heels. Her dress, now codified,
is the color of the first oak leaf in spring; however

it lacks the turquoise
of Texas’ summer skies.
This color cooled has flown
from our mother’s dress,
to hold light purchase only
in our daughters’ eyes.

by Bonnie McClellan

Mothers and Daughters: Intermittent Signal (Non c’è campo)

field

My sister’s voice
shattered across
an inconsistent, oscillating
field
stammering in and out
of being
then gone
but imprinted
on the field
not of you are here
but of you are this.

lack

My grandmother’s pearl
earrings oscillating
one black pearl one
the color of cream
thick with fat.
– she moves her head, lifting
her hands to speak
two palms holding up
a weightless field –
her lips move and issue
the sound of glass
sublimed

expansion

I am made up of stars that are not, or
the container of their memory:
fireworks cracking the saint’s day
of the insomniac night
I became not always
the one who leaves
but the one who is (for her)
the fertile field/the constant star.

dispersion

How long until she knows
what it is to be the glass
flowing into flatness,
ceding the vertical,
breaking the light,
into water?

by Bonnie McClellan

"non c'è campo" photograph by Bonnie Broussard

a note on the title: Italians often refer to a place in which there is no reception for mobile devices as “un posto dove non c’è campo” – although the word campo translates as field (with the same degree of semantic density as field in English) it also implies range or depth of field.

Mothers and Daughters: Terra Cotta

Peering into the narrow compact
Rectangle reflecting back:
The rumpled face of a woman
……….whose father is dying;
……….whose mother will die.

Under chin skin slags, begins
To give up the ghost of a woman
……….whose skin was once full
……….and firm as an egg.

Now, like a plastic bag full of slip,
When squeezed in the right places takes on
Then, temporary grace of a woman
……………who will also die;

Falling away into potsherds, unfired.
Falling away into sand, into clay.

by Bonnie McClellan

Tic - photo: Bonnie Broussard, sculpture: Matthew Broussard

Mothers and Daughters: Communicating Vessels

One year when the awakened plane trees
find themselves struck yellow in the night,
there will be nothing left of me but
a memory in your hands as they pull
wet laundry from the spun drum or
open the window’s case –
inviting October’s last, warm breath
to communicate the dust
between one room
and another.

by Bonnie McClellan

Reflections VI, D – Mother’s Day: by Tom McClellan

A guest post for Easter from writer, IPM poet and essayist Tom McClellan

Dear Son,

You’ve done yourself proud at Officer Training School.  Acing your course work and being the first to be selected Group Leader—Congratulations!  You said you want to adopt me as your second father—You make me proud to think of you as a son – “My Son the Marine, Warrant Officer Burton.” That has a nice ring to it.

Official spring began two months ago, about the time real spring had peaked in an explosion of azalea blooms along Turtle Creek.  Now spring continues cool and wet through the Ram and into the Fish.

Now shines the sun of spring,

And honeysuckle’s scent

Soaks air washed by the rain.

The proof of God’s as plain

As sunlight through the leaf

Exposing cell and vein.

…

Your mother and I had our first date on Mother’ Day, 1979.  We ate at a Mexican restaurant and saw the movie “All That Jazz.”

Over the next year Carolyn became the Home I so much needed.  We were married, as you probably remember, about one week before our first grandchild, your daughter, arrived.

Before we were married, Carolyn asked me if I was in love with her.  Being in the process of recovery from a passionate relationship that had ended in divorce and, for me, a trip to the madhouse, I had no trust in being in love.  I told her, “No, but give me five years and I’ll fall in love with you.”

It didn’t take that long though.  We went to a dance some months later, and the memory of Carolyn in a sunshine yellow dress with flowered wrap—she’d made both herself—head thrown back, abandoned to the music—That is a memory I’ll carry with me into eternity.

In His Love,

Tom

This piece was excerpted from Mr. McClellan’s memoir: “Reflections from Mirror City”.