poetry – Page 18 – Bonnie McClellan-Broussard

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: El Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Il Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring — El Pescador/Fingerprint: Ring – a multimedia collage from “Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embroidered Errors.”

This will make more sense if you take a look at the previous pages of the Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors

The title El Pescador is from the Mexican lotteria card (that somehow emigrated from Texas to Italy tucked between the pages of a book) included in the mixed media collage on the left hand page. Behind it is another hand print in marble dust on tissue painted round with lampblack. The hand print reaches towards a neon-pink sticker with my mother’s handwriting, towards an unreachable past from a composite future represented by El Pescador – the fisherman – who must always be anchored within in order not to be lost. Ironically, although the image is taken from my Texas cultural roots, the landscape on the card looks surprisingly like that of Lago Maggiore with the Alps in the background, a landscape I’ve addressed in two poems: Monte Rosa or the Picturesque and the Sublime, and Lombard Spring / Rondeau á Lago Maggiore.

The left hand page is connected to the right by a coat of white paint that covers (on the center left) an image of a person who has just opened a box (Pandora’s?), and is holding instructions for what to do with the contents but looks doubtful – again from IKEA. Living in a different cultural context with a different language and only the cultural map from my ‘mother-culture’ to navigate by was a bewildering sensation that I explored in Testimonio.

I found myself searching for constants, strangely comforted by being near the Mediterranean sea whose waters – in some slow, circumnavigation through white clouds and shifting currents – must have once broken on the sands of the Gulf of Mexico. Fingerprint:Ring expresses that unity through another universal language: hardware (no, not the computer kind). A pencil drawing of a hose clamp, comfortingly the same in any country, neither metric nor standard, adjustable with a flat-head screwdriver, a slender coin, or the tip of a butter knife. At the top left of the page, my pale, smeary fingerprint, an intentional error, both unique and universal.

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors

I’ve been working on some pages for the “Sketchbook Project 2013” that are a visual way of digesting my experience as an emigrant from Texas to Italy. Click on the links in the captions below each image to read the essay/story that goes with it and find links connecting the images with poetry.

Cover

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors – (Pax Texana)

Pax Texana (detail)


Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: El Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors – (Pax Texana)

The inside cover of my Cultural Atlas is covered with Italian shelf-paper. I used it because when I tore up the front cover, I thought that the inside should be stabilized (another embellished error). This paper is still made in this country; a lovely, heavy, egg-cream ground with black, red, dark blue, or green patterns. When I had first moved to Italy, I lived in a rural valley outside Florence; I was trading work for a place to stay with an American-Italian couple. One of the first things Adele asked me to do was strip off the old paper from her kitchen shelves and re-cover them with new paper. It marked one of my first trips into the treasure-palace that is the Italian ‘whatnot’ store. While I was living there I was in the process of a separation that turned into a divorce and a cultural shift that involved re-evaluating the (then) 38 years of my life in Texas.

The poetry/story of this can be found in my Orphan Poetry series; however, later, I also made, from the empty tissue paper ‘books’ that remain after one has used up the thin sheets of gold leaf, a series of impressions of my left hand made with white marble-dust and gum arabic. In these two ‘books’ there is one page and one hand-print for each year of my life with the year written in pencil on the bottom-left and my age on the top-right. They overlap and stick, they are messy (as my life has been) and made of the dust of rocks that were once marine fossils, our common calcite frame.

This attempt to make peace between my Texas past and my Italian present is included in the collage on the first page of the Cultural Atlas. The envelope from the gold leaf (delivered from Italy to Texas and then repatriated when I moved here) holds the book. Above the envelope is the word PAX – which speaks to the common Roman/Latin cultural roots between the two places – from the instructions for an IKEA shelving unit – representing a more recent, consumer empire that uses those common roots to try and make clients feel ‘at home’.

REGULATOR A: love song to an analogue clock

REGULATOR: love song to an analogue clock

I have such a tick tock
pendulum clock on the kitchen wall.
Though it came with you, I’ve called it mine
(after all, it sat in my lap,
my fat, pregnant belly shielding it from the shock
of a stone paved road, gone to seed)
since it was brought from where you were
to count your. my. our. time.

Like my grandfather’s banjo clock
but older and cheaper,

MADE IN JAPAN
A
REGULATOR

with face of printed paper,
case-wood painted
to look like wood,
tiny gilded flowers faded.
A late addition atop it sits:
(India slender not China round)
a small, golden Buddha
from a town just north of BEE. Be. Being. Was.

I’ve grown so accustomed to the sound
I notice it only, when paying attention
(like now).
Reliable ghost of the town bells,
which ring the mass and the hour / half hour
(though my clock, by choice, does not).

I am like my grandfather these days
(awake at 5 by 9 asleep);
I don’t, like he,
get out a shortwave radio and
listen for Greenwich’s distant beep,
add six to arrive in Central Texas,
then wind and set my clock
on a given day each week.

I can hear the beep on the BBC’s
un-crackling web-cast
but I rather look past,

where my clock’s hands have stopped time
on its foxed paper face,
to the prescient clock on the town’s bell tower.

I open the round glass,
open the pendulum case,
remove the dark and heavy, little key,
turn ten times counter clockwise in its given notch,
remove the key and hear the
hollow clonk
as it touches the bottom of the case
in point.
Not closing it,
I raise my finger and catch
time’s arrow-tipped minute
hand and turn it clockwise until it twins
the tower time.
I try to keep my index fingertip
from touching the foxed paper of the stopped face
not wanting it to scar,
over time.

I close the glass
over paper
over scissor-like hands and

set the round, bronze
pendulum swinging
on its slender, stem of lacquered lath.
Check for a tick equidistant from the tock,
close the case and turn the lock.
Time springs
into action,
A REGULATOR.

Seed Catalogue: by Bonnie McClellan

Russian Lavender
and spring rhizomes.

Meaty white
lily bulbs,
waiting,
to ease forth their sweet green tongues;
gasping into bloom
at the first pressure of March’s holy breath.

ENGRAVING (for Angel and Ronit): by Bonnie McClellan-Broussard

ENGRAVING

Grief must sometimes be taken in sips,
like coffee too scalding and bitter to swallow.

Each new grief holds within
an elder one in-nested.

The ‘no’ un-screamed arises:
is shattered, then compressed.

The terror of resignation
(winter’s hard companion)

reverberates down through
calcified strata all the way to

the first pearlescent grief:
a burst balloon, a lost gift.

INCISIONE

– il dolore a volte dev’essere preso in sorsi,
come cafè troppo bollente e amaro da ingoiare. –

Ogni nuovo dolore racchiude
un vecchio innesto.

Il non-urlatò ‘no’ sorge:
va in frantumi e si comprime.

Il terrore di rassegnazione
(dura compagna d’inverno)

riverbera verso in basso, attraverso
strati calcificati, fino all’arrivo

del primo dolore perlescente:
palloncino scoppiato, un dono perduto.

Angel Pfeifer Raiter, poeta : 11 dicembre 1979 – 3 febbraio 2012
Ronit Dovrat, pittore: 12 maggio 1955 – 15 dicembre 2011

Bonnie McClellan-Broussard

sexta-feira, 20 de maio de 2011: by Angel Raiter

I am making an exception to the normal practice of IPM in which all of the text versions of the poems are deleted on March 2nd.

The following English translation of the poem was made by the poet, Angel Raiter, just two days before his untimely death on 3 February 2012 at the age of 33.

His voice will be missed.

This is What Democracy Looks Like: An Occupy Everywhere Poem by Maxine Beneba Clarke

The written version of this poem has disappeared from this blog, read this poem at Maxine’s blog HERE.

Find more poetry, essays, and visual poetry by Maxine Beneba Clarke HERE

her work can also be found at, among others, OVERLAND and CORDITE POETRY REVIEW.

Jesus Saves: by Adina Richman

The written version of this poem has disappeared, to listen to a reading of this poem, click on the player below:

To hear more poems by Adina Richman, click HERE.

…per cancellare: by giacomo gusmeroli

La versione scritta di questa poesia è scomparsa. Una versione audio possono essere trovate qui sotto con i link ad altre informazioni sul poeta:

lettura di: Marisa Colognesi

Trovate QUI più informazione sul Giacomo Gusmeroli, incluso il suo nuovo libro Lucore d’acque

The written version of this poem has disappeared. More information about Giacomo Gusmeroli and his work can be found in Italian at the links above. A reading of this poem in English can be found below:

to listen to more poems by Giacomo Gusmeroli on this blog, click HERE.

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