Pamphlet 2022 by John J. Parman

John J. Parman

This is a selection of poems and photo-collages I wrote and made across 2022. I wrote fewer, mostly shorter poems this year compared to last, other than a much longer one that I described as "doggerel, really" to one of its early readers.

Elsewhere, she has a beau, a cat, a dog, a life renewed. Elsewhere, she has an afterlife, rehabilitation of a sort, her son older now, a man of parts, and his father's boyish face resists time while her face settles in, a mother's expression that’s predictive of her daughter. This is progress over there, not the stasis of rooms known in their particulars, swept sometimes of dust, slightly curated as if the house’s owner, carried off unexpectedly, left all these things to be kept waiting for his return.

In the winter, trees are lesser impediments to the horizontal bands of city, bridge, town lit, moon and Venus up above, and the hills that sawtooth from the Gate. Then summer fills it in, yet still glimpsed, a lover's body intuited when it's warm or when the fog obscures her yet her whole terrain's there as we add to it based on the smallest hints. In the winter, life is a lesser impediment to our memory’s more horizontal aspects. Summer makes so much overcrowded, while lives condense as days grow short, beauty made singular by their concision.

I never felt the world hung in the balance, but it may have, bounded by its moments not written out until long after or soon, or both, depending on the boundaries set so precipitously, whole families left out.

Does so much depend on such writing wherein we place so much, the graven images of what’s escaped or given up?

How some moments hinge, flanges of these great iron doors life shuts. There may be a ladder, and birds find no difficulty, the insects cross almost invisibly, beneath all notice.

Crabs dance sideways, I observe. Rain brings them out, also frogs, comes the report, a distant place where I am not, nearer Panama than here. A crab is a remnant of another time, although here inarguably. If queried, the crab would say so if it had the words.

The longest legs I've ever seen she has them, but this attribute is just something to be noticed among her others, as a woman is greater than any one thing that draws notice. Noticing is incidental, a mere glance. They live on, her long legs.

You've died without replying. How is this? Or is it your reply, this grave silence, an opposite to all that was lively, vivacious? It's my fault that I'm annoyed, self-absorbed as I always am, amid the family's surging grief, but I am: left here unrequited, expected wit, expected news left hanging, left submerged by your departure's mystery, the one thing we didn't see.

A handful of senses, a life she tries to construct, a vision of a future, aspects of which she dreads, wondering what it is she carries, dead weight of lineage within her slight, womanly frame.

She weighs her vision, how love brings it out. How that bringing frightens her, the precision of télos as they passed it down, down, down a beauty poisonous, an agent of bodily harm.

A body’s worth of senses she abandons, lines she declines to reproduce. These hard facts write themselves on the aftermath's surface, a meaning conveyed in dreams, backstories.

What just happened?

A fire like a black hole, burning bushes talking declaratively, chanting:

Mania's drifting clouds of such flattening weight, mirrors thick as thieves, blood like winter honey and her lips congealed.

A badge whose holder’s free to annihilate those unlucky, does so pyrotechnically, aflame now like a triple goddess.

Nature calls on us to whisper or stay silent so her monkeys can be heard at dawn. We're nature too, one might object, but Nature's silence respects her creatures' needs to speak in hoots and cries like babies, in the thrum of legs or wings. Her silences are like shouts, fate wrapped up in arisings of man or beast, all transient in the slippery world we love from the heart, animamundi

10.

Such an obvious thing: the world is filled with them, I note. Words repeat their presence, shorthand reflecting a verbal minimalism. Our hands and lips give voice to feelings we convey by touch, equally obvious things, species gestures among our genders, sameness or difference shared by mingling, tastes we recall later from our obvious pasts, all trial and error, stumbling our way yet with the nuance nature grants us, two minds riffing on the same arousal, acts obvious yet so crucial, time-bound yet immortal.

11.

I spare us both (can’t you see?) from what might devour me.

12.

Matter lay immobile in her bed, a carcass used up by living. Where then her spirit? The question is impertinent, a moth said, although she or it was more an argument for a soul’s migration, all being transient.

13.

Casanova, accounting for his many selves, saw that he loved them more than others. They in turn condemned him, their loves animated by self-love, self-identification. In this sense, just a bystander, seducing through advance notice, wit, charisma, curiosity most of all: he wants to know, yet notes, accounting, how after-talks live on when the rest is dead on pages.

14.

God take me, have your will, you who comes, goes, returns in ways dizzying, only to flee. To return is what we do in worlds men rule. Yet regardless, I’m your servant, grace my oracle, pointing only to light’s darkening, the twins good and evil, best becoming worst in dialectical fashion. So, why have you forsaken us? We meanwhile wonder who’s our neighbor, her and her lost dog.

15.

She does herself in. We view this circus gingerly, accepting all nine of its rings. Narrative’s problematized when death steals in and robs another of her future that is, another and another and another. Pry minds open and hold their tongues long enough for time to pass, a stitch in the warp that some say is a saving grace when grace is scarce as sense nowadays.

16.

I can touch it and the smell wafts across the patio, yet could I be projecting this?

I find myself seated here with an iced lemon spritz. My old dog lies sleeping on warm red tiles. Even so, I’m awash in doubts It might be a construct as in dreams, gossamer yet credible. You swear it’s there, then awaken to find it’s vanished. So, despite my napping dog, questions are recurring.

17.

It’s awkward, not like when we felt our way and mostly spoke warmly until those reasons we wove so close unraveled, as the French say of endings ribbons we untie, finding they’re straight again or kinked, or left in pieces, useless.

18.

“Whim,” his lintel said, reason enough to disregard one’s relations. Genius calls me and I hear her. She wants to write my life so you can read it.

19.

Horsing around, I think, then look at the half moon amid clouds. July is dramatic with fog or without it. To horse is to ascend again, lit with fervor for a minor pleasure. It’s quixotic to fasten onto this. The world unthreads. I attend to the tasks that come to mind, inconsequential yet demanding. All doors opened remain open until I notice them or the wind gusts through and closes them.

20.

Perfection could be claimed if anyone would want to or dare to label a poem as such. Dead to rights, such a claim-maker, and pursued by karma in her furies mode down aspic halls, their smooth, rounded walls the color of fresh-laid dreck.

21.

Here then the fucking gods, goddesses, butch and naked: bonobos hang footloose, couple, but these deities take us baptismally in a way, hair left soaking. How else does wetness figure? She’s here to instruct us, clearly, Nature, strayed as our species did from Her parade of contraries and non-binaries, rescued from the older tales, how males and females were Victorian pure types until all the others raised objections, so much crossed out, truisms superseded. Nature pairs us nonetheless and gods and goddesses wield their wands. Left clench-less, worse off than the bonobos, we put our clothes back on then tend the wounds departure leaves, find again life’s toted barge, payments it demands.

22.

In the garden, the lavender reached an end and blight is noted. One tree goes; another is slated for chopping, but those tomatoes are left alone because their fruits, ripening, are too plainly there. The apple tree’s also spared trimming, a similar sort of reprieve. In the world, the usual story. No end to it.

23.

Summer, only here the water’s like ice. Elsewhere, women undress maximally. The sun beats down on them, the sea’s just so before they plunge, their hair soaked when they emerge. But here skin shows cold’s effects, turns blue. My mind is back in Monaco, twelve, women topless, the pebbles smoothed by eons of tidal lapping; in Nice, fish soup not to be found anywhere else.

Surprised a spider on a wall, saw it shrink, let it alone. Another spider crossed the floor. They are the barn’s wild, feasting on hapless bees and flies who flit in and then bat around in confusion. Feasting is too grand a word for the roadkill nature of a spider’s existence. The grapes are blue, tart when I ate some earlier in the kitchen, but they’ll age sweet.

25.

Done with society, she texts. I’m not, though, not entirely. It rained unexpectedly, deck wet when I rose. Rain again and cooler. I wore a sweater.

26.

Sliver of a moon waxes, becoming full as hearts do in season, a moon’s cycle, its floods, babies coming on a high tide.

27. Stop or leap. (A moth’s affection, not a birdcall.) Leap because the stop’s too hard. Stop because to leap is to forget, to pretend to do so, to deny. If the earth’s still rough, then mothers scream. (She sought me, this moth, to get her bearings. Perhaps disguised she drifted along, “one of us,” we thought, not knowing precisely who was who.) The earth, brought up, set down, lies in between, neither stop nor leap but something else, awaiting the rituals of such a place as this, sacred even now.

28.

Names, epithets given the other: my dragon, Krakatoa; and questions: Who are you? (Who proved nameless yet gave his name in full and heard or read it repeated back?) Anger then, parting or departing as themes, expectation denied over coffee or on a park bench: “You made it clear.” Yet not to deny the rest: desire and its names, epithets.

29.

Hold on, I tell myself. Evening putters on, papers read, tea made, consumed, lights announcing a room in use, then darkness. For some reason immortality is hovering again, a talisman of some kind, rolled out elsewhere as a question, but not possible, I think once more, despite blandishments of an abstract sort, like grave insurance. I’m warned of time squandered. Time sings a waning song, reedy, coughing. Habits die hard, the ritual of evenings where our mortality goes undiscussed. Should it not be Topic A? Too boring, we both agree. Here, I’ll take that cup.

30.

I have a good memory for moaning, experiences by the yard, one thinks, each bound up in feelings ranging, shaped by the nature of an ending. I sometimes recall how, for example, she leaned her head, surprising me, but it proved to be a test, one lover against the other. Horace versed comparable scenes. They happen.

31.

In keeping with summer’s slipping, as it always does, despite a longing for delay, winter forestalled, leaves green for longer, bees out of hives, I put a sweater on, gazed at clouds. The days were filled with marches and reports of anonymous graves, hundreds, not the old queen’s tomb but a field cross-marked as turned over and the bodies found. Winter lays its blanket on the earthly dead. The living shiver as it approaches.

32.

The long journey from bourgeois starting out with its parental safehouse and grand tour of monuments, ending metropolitan:

his fate became clearer over time despite the commissions rolling in, so, the sea’s chorus, inviting oblivion, grew audible.

All resurfaces at such liminal moments, air scarce, the heart pump slowing it clears the mind of distraction, allows a summing,

How briefly he was modern, that terrazzolike word so Venetian in its viscosity. “Ebb, flow, tide of my reputation, I die. I revive.”

Many more questions than questing, not a saint, but sinning seen through even as repeated, reportedly a sinner, repentant in one sense; raw material in another. Dubious conduct, a list memory provides, sometimes to be pondered, sometimes savored. Sweet comes along with sour moods, regrets. Still, a plot of some kind, how destiny strews the everyday with hints, signs pointing toward dead yet inviting ends, a crawl through diversions, lingering smells, sounds, and sights that come with them, oyster and rose, Nature in Her particulars, in their beauties. 34

When you wrote “Berlin,” I remembered how I love you proximate, a presence. When he displayed a book or three, extolling one, inviting others to hear, I remembered how mine spark doubts until I read them and their language speaks to me at least. If I wondered what they meant, really, a world less obvious than what the others shout, it isn’t that I don’t see why they do it, but my life is rooted elsewhere, soil to be turned over, replanted as one does when the winter’s finally done, life being this fecund thing even as it goes to ground, food for thoughts that arose when you wrote “Berlin,” tacked it on, some sun in autumn.

33.

35.

For you, darling, I thought but didn’t say, asked (or asking myself rhetorically) why I write. The object of my thinking waves within her form, the kind I once desired. Dancing in Chicago, another laughed. I’d grown hard, pressed against beauty so expressly warm, the way babes reach for the tit knowing it must be paradise.

36.

Desire has its loping dogs of doubt, its qualms, doubled visions that see around the corners of steamy days, through the slats, a parted curtain. A dog’s, too, this impulse to go out and sniff the ass of things, to nose, dog and man together, and know.

37.

Wisteria bare, the sky gray behind: winter speaks in spiky blasts, rain darkening the deck, a pale moon rising before the night. Yesterday it seemed to fly as clouds shifted. It races, yes, but the arc is slower. The deck dried off then it rained, I sat a German hour, the singers Bach imagined. They sing now. Christmas looms, New Year’s.

38.

Creativity, Whitehead said, started it all, but has an agent (as they do) to sort things. Neutered, rumor has it. Creativity’s a pro, sidling in like old Zeus. Word gets around he’s on the make, but then she sits back, denies, shapeshifting like Kim Kardashian. Out here in the suburbs, it’s just in and out, baby mamas the doubled form these takings take, the run-on cycle Creativity needs to cosmically get off. And then the flood, streetwise the strollers, tats, tinted hair, earbuds to muffle their screaming.

39.

Almost fifty years, I noted. I wrote to try to say how it happened, love being this oddly malleable thing if that forging’s what the gods intend.

40.

Grief takes different forms. Some welcome distractions others hate. Some resent as shallow sentiment that’s there because inexpressible is the reality and yet desire’s there to say something, try to fill a gap they know is unfathomable, wider than an ocean at its flood, no sign of receding but it does or they cope better, which mimics the recession that almost lulls them ‘til it doesn’t.

41.

How many have seen her thus and thought she shone for them? You are faithful, oh floating boat. North by west your arc’s traced while looser coordinates define where her trail left off, the date there but otherwise unmarked.

42.

Gwen, biking east, encountered rain, a real downpour, wind at a slant, wet in an oceanic sense. She took shelter among the river alders, dense and dark, spotting a light, wheeled toward it, finally found a ramshackle cabin and a woman. “Come in!” she said, “God, you’re a mess!” “Gwen,” Gwen offered, wanting to be polite. “Queen of these parts,” she answered, “ a river queen, queen also of the alders, deer, fish, all that prey on them.” “Pleased to meet you,” Gwen said. “Even in this flood I sense a dryness,” the queen answered, “ a consequence of the King of Lies.” She handed me a spare bathrobe, blue, a glass of hot rum, hung my wet clothes by her stove, and wiped down my bike. “Tub water’s hot, please immerse.” I did. Revived, we ate in silence. The rain beat on the roof. Aridity felt foreign here, yet she felt it to her fingertips. “I’ve expected you for a while,” she said. “You seem clearer, indeed, yourself again.” I felt so, too, owning my poem. She drew herself up. “The Dark Mage is my dad. We’re ancient here, but he went abroad to apply his arts, a man of power, and power clouded him. I stayed on, once he stood down. But the King of Lies and I jousted. I lost, but left him wounded painfully, not fatally, they tell me.” She poured a drink, refilled mine, then stoked the stove.

“We’re ancient here, as I said. So, I fled, and while it storms like no tomorrow, I feel the earth drying on his account. My dad’s much troubled and hobbled now, who men feared, minder to an impetuous prince whose seasons ended, reviled for wars of vengeance my dad countenanced, wicked men overthrown but left a mess. But Gwen, this is your quest. Ride on, revive what the King has ruined. Save us. Gwen!”

Refreshed and better weather, I set off, bid by the river queen to visit her dad: “the Mage lives some ways up the road, then left, you’ll see a sign.” Shook my hand. I rode. Found all scorched, arid and hot, as she’d felt. A lone sign: black glove that held a heart. Unsure, I left the road, passing stalks of parched corn, my path soon narrow, coming finally to an old stone house, deserted but I knocked. “The river queen told me to come,” I yelled, not knowing what else to say. “In that case, come in,” a voice said. “The door’s unlocked.” I stepped in the vestibule. “Down in a minute.” Slowly her dad descended, sat down heavily. “We’re eclipsed, the queen and I. Blame myself, error of my ways, a blight became a plague, a land desiccated, young lives cut short and the old embittered.”

“Is there no more magic to be done? The question’s not rhetorical. I had them all tied up in knots with my learned sophistry, but the King cut through them all in a stroke. I speak now but no one listens, my hair gone white with age, my body living on despite my dodgy heart. Everyone was sure I’d drop dead from surfeit of terror, all the karma they were sure I’d collected, but a mage is too busy to notice. Only later, here in this place full of long hallways and empty rooms, has karma had her way with me, healing my heart only to stretch out my penance. Remorse! Remorse! At night, the footfalls of the dead circle my bedroom. Oil seeps through the door, the floor glistens and shades leave a wake as they float just above it, then they’re gone, no sign of them at dawn, but I’m a realist. I go make breakfast and scan headlines.”

“Every mage has his book of magic. This is mine, so here. The annotations are worth more than the text, my jottings as things went, for magic finds its footing or tries. So much is just cold blood in the face of these reversals, You’re young, Gwen, green and untested. I was this way myself and karma laughs now in my face: a purity youths tend to lose or throw away. I struggled to hang on, but power is sweet poison to a mage. My headstrong daughter kept her head. Keep yours, dear girl, but take this book, it may be useful. It’s short, easily absorbed. Its author uses words like ‘extinguish.’ Easily said!”

“Only evil can pull it off, and despite my baleful appearance, I shrank from his prescriptions. The King of Lies finds evil a source of fascination, cozying up to the real items, at play with the toys of his office but blind to their purpose, deaf to all but his own voice. Plain speaking roils him, the lies are so many bouquets of flowers, so much gilt and chintz, blandishments bought and paid or demanded in homage. The book touches on this, but assumes the mage counts the cards, grasps the table stakes. On this too I fell short. How awry my magic went that I so confidently invoked. Dear girl, when you reach the outer edges of dryness rock-hard dirt parched and dying, leave the book there.”

I suppose that evil is in the mind of its beholder, a mage or an ordinary villain. He had a reputation, after all, yet in his dotage he seemed quite harmless. I took the book, but the next step in my journey remained a question, so, I turned to him and my expression prompted a remark: “Ride on, ride on! The land will tell you where to pause.” He took my hand. “It isn’t simple, mixing with the world. I was just a hick when I set out, and it went to my head. I counted the cards of my own destiny; others suffered.” He shook his head. “Nothing left but to wait for death.”

John J. Parman lives and writes in Berkeley, California. His poems have appeared LittleRiverand WestMarinReview .

(Photo taken by Madeleine Stearns in mid-December 2022.)

thepallasgallery.com

SNOWDEN & PARMAN

spedit.net

(Opposite: Elizabeth Snowden at Pallas)