JNC ART ARCHIVE

California in summer

Applewood felled and sawed smooth
stacked under the tree from which it dropped
scissors snip through California hibiscus
cut dark wood lit up by honeyed sun

the vulture and coyote hunt through sanded skyline
a crackling dust and swirling shrubbery empty of prey
how brutal the fever
how hateful the stillness of moon and sun alike

the trees are few and green has drained from the earth
a land where the heart rests in a sandstone valley
and wearily drinks from the silent heat
it is gentle

leaves raked away reveal warm stone
dry clay soil dispassionate in fiery touch
how can such violently tranquil divinity be embodied
over a thousand thousand hills?

California is the lowest point of the world
to which all gush downhill
allow its warmth flow through you
let its sunlight brighten your eyes

Welsh countryside / rolling solitude

Rolls of green, fat, grey fields on the belly
of sleeping giants,
Their breath does not stir the modern world, nor its clients,
But the dripping wind that runs its hands down my hair,
Absentmindedly ladens my clothes with
weight.
The flowers prostrate themselves to this
unthinking authority,
They slam their heads to the mud a hand
outstretched
Until the squelch of my soles comes down
combustion hard.
All that is left in the path I walk is footsteps
that will be washed away,
A solitude indistinguishable from the
overcast Welsh air,
The place I came from, and
This mossy hermitage,
The pilgrims prayer.

The salesman step

Yellow sun
yellow shoes
walking pace
jaunty tune
whistle by
"flying soon"

such direction
such electric
hectic misdirection
travels far
never moves
walking pace
yellow shoes

on holiday
at work
black suit
white shirt
yellow shoes
jaunty tune

seventh son
setting sun
staccato steps
loaded gun
violent silence
white teeth
bared underneath
a yellow sun

The Fear of God

The eye of the bird drinks deep of the mountain snow,
listening to the deep slate grey of a sheer cliff face.
listen to it
without speaking.

in a red roofed temple complex filled with voices below
men hear the answers given to the prayers they know
clamouring glitzy wares and thousands of shrill voices crow.

and burdened and bowing, on a shelf on that face
the pure lily growing is as it is, it is
prostrated in fear, its head touches the stone
prayers are answered in its silence, by God's words alone.

Traps in Spring

I.
Jif. Not honey, not cheese:
the Jif from above the canned tomatoes.
The mouse smells it through the wall
and crosses the floor in the dark
and you lie there
knowing it is crossing.

II.
The glass left a ring on the sill.
You moved the glass.
The ring stayed.

III.
March. You ate an orange over the sink,
the white threads catching under your nails,
juice running your wrist.
A body is still
flat in the wet grass.
Small.
You knew its shape before you looked.
You looked anyway.
You don’t go out.

IV.
*spring (v.) — Old English springan: to leap, burst forth, fly up;
also, to come from a source; also, what water does from the ground; also
the name we give to the season of returning; also the mechanism inside
the trap, called a torsion bar, which I looked up once: tension stored
in the metal.*

Some mornings nothing is in it.
Some mornings.

V.
I wore the silk shirt home in the middle of the day.
The taxi driver watched the road.
A man fixing a gate.
A child on a fire escape holding a cat by the armpits,
the cat’s back legs hanging.
Under the silk, still warm:
the stain already learning the fabric.

VI.
You go back to the fire escape in the afternoon.
The iron has been in the sun for hours.
You put your palm flat against it.
Then your cheek.
The woman in 4B watches from her window
and doesn’t look away.
You don’t look away either.
She goes back to whatever she was doing.
You stay.

VII.
By April the ground gives back
what the cold kept.
Fur, sometimes. A small jaw.
What came down into the dark
toward the thing that called to it,
believing that was the same
as being fed.

VIII.
The smell through the screen. Something going
in the part that was supposed to stay cold.
Mrs. Heller’s room. The overhead buzzing.
You said the answer from somewhere in the back of yourself.
*Photosynthesis.*

IX.
You bit into the pear on the walk home.
not washed, not halved,
just your teeth through the skin.
Cold. Grit. Sweet.
Your hand kept holding it until it was gone.

X.
One mousetrap.
One ring on a sill.
One silk shirt.
One body in the grass, approximate weight.
One woman in 4B.
One April.
One morning, nothing.
One morning.

Stained silk dries, stiffens.
I wear it out.
The light finds the stain.
Knows where to look.

Squire

Stone courtyard.
Soft blade.

each dawn I carry
the sword that was my father's arm
and break bread
that is the neighbor boy's face

lessons scattered
across the training yard.
pray to learn faster
you bloody knuckle

Somewhere a horse
stands saddled in the dark,
breathing steam
that disappears.

Bright fear pools
moonlight beneath rings of mail.

Now the keep empties
man by man.

All that remains is
one dented helm,
the smell of leather,
this low drum
I cannot name
but follow
past the gate

some mothers wave
like wheat before the scythe
others turn away
they are a few small women stood together
as if the five of them were an endless tide

small body wrapped in iron
too big for what it holds:

I am eleven.
I am war.

Kyrie Eleison

Lord have mercy.

A winter in Zadar
cruel land inbetween
home and what was promised
waiting with crackling skin
tightening around spears
and muted rags, muffled glory.

The ship was the first echo of
the simplicity of real conflict, where men died before
the holy city
the holy waters

just as quickly I was taken from that bad dream and
Palestine! Stirring     dust
spirit air                            dancing.

By the time we reached Acre
men sold
dead horses for more than living ones;
the meat, the marrow, the boiled hooves
Flemish night passes over encampments
smelling of rot and a few electric stars

Duke Leopold took command of what remained
of the Germans. What remained
was not much:
Frederick dead before he arrived, but moreso
more numbers of boys like me, and their lords,
two years
a great host of Christendom reduced
two years
to the memory of what it felt like to declare to their families:
two years or more
I must go now, for God is calling me.

I cleaned armour everyday
at first the Marquis' only but
blood is iron and so is honor    it rusts when
it is not taken care of
I learned to work with mail and plate
to ignore the smell
and
I learned the shape of Austrian men more closely
they were bloated and stiff with enough time
that I should get to the armour before
they leaked        leaking.

You may notice I do not yet speak of
the glory of combat
the    asphyxiating thrill of siege and
service in battle
it is not because I did not have my fair share of combat
and I will speak even less of how the first month I learnt
our enemies, steel, motion, celestial bodies just the same
saracen and Austrian, both children of God in face of
Alien hand which reaches through sickness into a man
death spoke flux
apathetic, not even hateful to
the last prayers that hang around a man in throes of illness,
flies,
I will not speak of how I learnt faith.

Christ have mercy.


8 June
100 ships
how many men?
hope's name
was Richard
Revelation 19:11-21
the armies of heaven.

I was not happy
I was hard and upright
a nail in the door about to be struck
but bathing in the feeling that it would finally
be delivered deep into it's glorious place.

Lionheart who fought from a litter
his hands
used to moving moving chesspieces
somehow I knew they were warm in a way
the rest of this sickness, brutal heat wasn't
Glorious sun.

We Austrians were not the sunrise
we were the sickness
you become what you eat and we had eaten
oceans of swords, death throes
tempered by our older faith or a lack of hope
tide of eagles
fly pretty boys fly.

I was there when Alberic Clement died
holding the French standard as he was stabbed on the wall
I was there when the Accursed tower finally gave way
under the weight of bodies of men, under the weight of

I was there when Austrians
those Austrians
we

tide of eagles
fly pretty boys fly

tempered by our older faith or a lack of hope
I was there
I was there when the garrison surrendered too.


July twelfth. The city opened feverishly
a wound. We walked through streets
we had stared at for months
from the wrong side of the walls,
and everything was strange and familiar,
a recurring dream
flesh
writhing flesh
it was done, my God
God do you see me?
God my father
my father
dad please

They raised the banners on the battlements.
Jerusalem's cross. The fleur-de-lis.
The three lions of England.
And then
ours - the eagle
a tide of eagles finally flying
flying overhead.
For a moment I finally understood it
as more than Leopold's colors
the flags were
our bodies at last in flight toward
our heavenly father.

I did not see who had climbed the battlements
or how the eagles had lost their wings but down from their poles
down from their battlements
down from the skies
they
landed
in the moat. The moat
where we had thrown our dead
to fill the ditch for the assault.
Sweet children with brown hair brushed to the side
eyes watching in silent purgatory
the violent stillness

some of the English laughed
many did not.

the Duke's face
I had seen him in battle,
seen him when he took his meals,
seen him when the fever took
three of his knights in a single night.
I had never seen him look like that.

there was something had been cut out of him
that he did not know he had
until it was gone.
I knew that look from    bodies
I knew that look from    my face


We are not kings. This I understand.
A duke is not a king. Austria
is not England, is not France,
we are a great many things,
the ones who hold the passes,
who guard the roads, who do
what must be done in the margins
of other men's glory
perhaps we were arrogant in
helping ourselves to a share of joy.
Austria
is not the great powers of the earth.

But we were there.
But we are God's children whose
mothers kissed our foreheads,
bled in the same dust,
ate the same rotting bread,
filled the same ditches,
watched the same walls
we had helped to break.
And
and nothing.

nothing

Austria! The name means
eastern march, the edge
of Christendom, the place
where the empire frays into the real world,
Ostmark, motherland,
Blutsbrüders who would lay down their lives
for mouthfuls of honey, for the Lord.

Lord have mercy.

The banner fell.
I saw it fall.
Lord have mercy,
I will not let it fall
twice.

過豐沛寄元

Sent to Yuan, after riding past Feng village

朔風吹三日，
江草偃難移。
深宮老天子，
對酒未傾巵。
雨霽乃出門，
騎過豐沛陲。
童子戲淺瀨，
滿手泥淋漓。
其背挺然直，
我馬立多時。
看之不能去，
既久乃旋騎。
持此書寄元，
聊報故人知。


Three days the north wind, and the reeds along the river
lay down and did not rise.
In the inner court the old emperor sits,
with his wine unpoured.

After the storm I rode out past Feng village.
In the shallows a boy was at play,
his hands full of mud, his back straight.
I sat on the horse a while and watched him,
and then I turned back.

This I send to you, Yuan, that you may know.


*not a translation, an original composition and attempt at the tang classical style. And subtlety. If you need a real hint as to what yuan should know, just think of tianming.*