inexorable weather
(poetry)
louis armand

todmorden, lancs. (UK): arc publications, 2001
isbn: 1-900072-59-9
48pp
available from shakespeare & sons, prague
available from amazon.co.uk

"a poetry filled with guest appearances by the languages we normally delegate authority to; which knows more than all of them put together." --rod mengham
from INEXORABLE WEATHER


LOCI MEMORIAE
(for daniel ferrer)


1. "what the camera doesn't see
can't exist" the negative
luminosity of sky
through a closed window
in march-a palimpsest
of dead memories-
carrion-their danse macabre
(everything calculated
to increase the burden
of visibility)-& the prescience
of an elsewhere,
as they say: "elements missing
are most active"


2. a vendor of
souvenirs
outside the
crematorium-
a wall hung
with bouquets
of petrified flowers

the scene
repeats itself-
the interior
arrangement
of empty rooms
"haunted
by memories
they could not
possess" 

& grown foreign
through familiarity


3. disintimated in a crowd-the separate
sky its striations of too-emotive
light-in the piazza di spagna-
on the steps watching the flower-
sellers weave & unweave the faceless
labyrinth-voices mingling with
traffic sounds-& the streets-
the outward looking windows projecting
interiority-& distance
"just hanging there" suspended
in the city's polaroid gaze


4. ... cf. o'hara's architecture of the nerves or
humid cerebration in disruptions of
narrative encoded ruin-
a chronoscope for unthinking reliance on space
as ontological paradigm-local & remote
in the knotted feedback loop (certains d'entre vous savant
qu'avec ce cercle & cette croix je dessine
le noud borroméen) at another time in the other
imagination where it breaks off & re-begins
dying & returning like the ghosts of a noh drama


5. episodes of [...] the train journey takes you from rome
to vienna to prague-
           crossing imaginary frontiers
as analogies present themselves
at various points between technology &
history-
      the unsecured exterior
rushing past in the panicked traversal of endless
metonymies-
   a documentary
of the pastoral tradition from petrarch
to the current welding casting
moulding of "interpretive communities"-
re-processing depth of field
out of the filmic sequence (ambivalent
to geo-political espacement?)-
           as cubist landscape
or nature morte: the unrelenting, paranoiac tableau
inscribes itself
between exhaustion & pretence-
            knowing
that the horizontal curvature of the earth
is contingent upon perspective & not necessarily
a matter of fact-
   arriving at several possible outcomes
from each line of reasoning


6. "everything has its limit" is a quotation that can never
be attributed without denying its universality, etc.
relying on the significant cliché to bring the argument
to conclusion? or summarise the tedious allegory
of train tracks that have already robbed us of our selves
during the night ...-this reminds me of
pirandello sei personaggi in cerca d'autore
& other "works of fiction" written on the same topic
(during the journey the compartment itself becomes a
theatre with other characters entering & departing
from one station to the next-there is also the "dis-
embodied voice" of the conductor, although it is
barely audible, confused between languages ... (re-
cognition of place-names hence becoming a function of
visual apprehension? the resemblance of one to
the other?): glissant sous le réel, c'est évidemment aussi
sous l'imaginaire que vous le trouvez)




(c) louis armand, 2001
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