Chronograms - 30 November 2008
© Dennis Duncan
“But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you”
(1 Thess. 5:1)
At 9:15 in the evening on 30 November 2008, Mia Alexander Duncan was born in Hampstead, London. Here is a chronogrammatic record of what else was happening at that moment, one line for each time zone.*
09:15 - In a hospital in Rotorua, Hannah Peretz (née Porter) takes her final breath. By her bed, her nephew flicks through photographs of the surface of Mars in National Geographic
08:15 - Perched on a narrow canoe that bobs serenely on the gentle waters off Vanuatu, Johnson Kelekele gazes absently as a large grouper passes beneath the boat. Johnson's thoughts are not on the fish though, and the spear stays in his hand
07:15 - The sun is up over Papua New Guinea where the rainforest in all its vivid lushness echoes with the cries of life. The ethnographer Ernest Botherby is preparing to go hunting with the men of the Orang-Kubu tribe. The prey was to have been gavagai (akin to the European rabbit) so traps have been set overnight, but now the hunters take up their blowpipes, speaking of pekee, a type of bushpig
06:15 - Tokyo: a teenage girl flushes with silent ecstasy, her hand between her thighs. Sakura, her well-fed cat, watches with scorn, licking his paw coolly
05:15 - In Singapore, Cosini, an FX trader is first to arrive in his office. (Business begins at six here.) His head aches, his accounts have lost billions, but above all he craves a cigarette
04:15 - At the docks in Saigon, a fine rain anoints the machinery. Two workers share a cigarette as they gripe about an absent colleague
03:15 - A barracks just east of Novosibirsk: the sky is clear and the air has none of the notorious Siberian chill yet, but for Private Piotr Sakhovich, keeping watch, this posting still feels like an exile, and with every fluttering of wings (the herons on the river are just waking up now) his thoughts return to Petersburg
02:45 - On to Shimla, where the poet professor offers up sonnets to Newton, forges lines on curves, scrawls stanzas on the incalculable beauty of calculus
01:15 - Tbilisi: an insomniac Classics pupil learns the Aeneid by heart
00:15 - The heavens deliquesce over Nairobi. The torrent drives up rivers of silt which pour out of the suburbs into the shanty of Kibera. In a voice barely perceptible above the crashing of the rain, a boy of six sings a lullaby to his little brother
23:15 - At the airport in Lviv, unbeknownst to the authorities, a notorious murderess texts a local taxi service then waits by the exit, filing her nails
22:15 - A hotel suite, Prague: a Hollywood A-lister opens a beer bottle then casually pushes it inside a local beauty. Another A-lister looks on, lazily touching herself
21:15 - As with one's thesis, the hardest part, which always gets left till last, is the beginning. How can I say what I really want to say without repressing it, passing it all over the globe, burying it with these Oulipian exercises? (Even in the notebook, these lines are faint, illegible.) Oh well, here goes: nine fifteen a hospital a baby girl a father weeps with love (a scene he repeats right now in the library)
20:15 - Cape Verde: a breeze ruffles the leaves as Xavier relaxes with a detective story in which the vital clue is a speck of caviar between the corpse's teeth
19:15 - Let us turn to Grytviken, South Georgia: the whaling station, once bustling, is a ghost town now. Next to a little Norwegian church, a stone indicates the final resting place of Ernest Shackleton. On an icebreaker at anchor in the bay, a group of tourists raise their schnapps glasses in a toast to the explorer before beginning their lavish evening repast
18:15 - In Buenos Aires, in the darkness of an unkept house, the ancient librarian lights a candle for Oscar Wilde
17:15 - Havana: overlooking the bay, Calvin Oliveira plays his own variant of solitaire using tarots. He shuffles then lays the cards face up in a grid. The object is to traverse every row, inventing stories that relate each likeness to its neighbour
16:15 - In Cleveland, Ohio, at a convention for fans of the great TV horror hosts, Elvira, svelte in a black satin robe with faint web pattern, receives an ovation as she unveils a statue of local favourite, Ghoulardi
15:15 - Antigua, Guatemala: in the cool of late afternoon, the consul reads Robert Frost to a young lover. The boy speaks no English
14:15, In Juarez, the optician Carlos Alvarez is hurrying on his way to his office to collect the gift (a silver jewellery box) which he bought his wife for their seventeenth anniversary but forgot to bring home the previous evening
13:15 - Next we visit the Saint Francis Xavier Convent School in Hawthorne, California, where, on the first Sunday of Advent, the holy sisters are in the chapel rehearsing carols for the afternoon service
12:15 - In search of his roots, Jobie Aglukkaq has left Fairbanks, Alaska far behind. In the northern tundra, he now stands alone in the silence of the blue of noon
11:15 - Honeymooning in Tahiti, Henry and Anaïs argue about his dirty habits
10:15 - On a yacht in the South Pacific, after a night of rough seas, Gavin Cowell and Lennox Caxton are enjoying a lull. As Gavin brews coffee, Lennox is speaking by satellite phone to his wife. “This asshole's unbearable, honey. I swear it,” he whispers, “I'll go fucking crazy.”
* Each line is a chronogram for 2008, that is to say that the sum of all the Roman numerals in the line (M, D, C, L, X, V, I) equals 2008.
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Fathom
© Lisa Manning
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are corral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.”
(from Shakespeare, The Tempest)
Not so in the sea,
nor anywhere else earthly or water-like,
can you, will you find his rotting corpse, no,
we burned him up, as he was gone,
what anyway was left of him
sick and thin, as he never was before, all through and through.
Done he was with that form of his
however we were not.
No, his gone and faraway body is no earthly thing,
but the changeable, flickering cast
of the fire at the corner of your eye.
You might just find him at the ocean’s bottom,
or anywhere where there are glittering precious things,
and songs to hold your ear.
He is dead.
Nowhere and everywhere he wants to be,
or where, perhaps, he is apportioned or appointed.
For quite some time he was very near,
preeminent all around my milky-way head,
with the dazzle and blink of stars and their light,
the startle and boo!
of edge-of-sleep appearances,
full of caprice, too much gladness in new-found abilities.
Unwelcome, unappreciated, he didn’t care,
standing regularly in the dark fog of my grief
calling my name and dancing away as though
he didn’t know my fragile head couldn’t abide one more kick.
He called my name, sang little ditties off-screen,
made the stars themselves look strange and out-of-place,
all the time laughing as though
waiting for me to join him.
I did not appreciate these attempts,
they pushed me further into the dusk of uncomprehending loss.
What use was he now to me
further fracturing and puncturing my peace?
Maybe it was that one pearl of things he didn’t quite have,
but seemed to always be trying to pass on to me,
the thing he knows now,
that, still, I do not.
_______________
Mirror
© Brooks Roddan
I look at him and say
he’s my son
and see perfection
finally
The Falcon 500
© Christian Hanz Lozada
if creation was an RC airplane
(the kind your dad buys from Radio Shack
two weeks before Christmas
as a present for you
but is really for him)
complete with buttons and sticks
for pitch and yawl
god should have put a few more bucks
into the strength and radius
of his remote control
or maybe he enjoys watching
the effortless, powerless glide
the pull of inertia and,
eventually,
gravity.
______
© Christopher Mulrooney
the name of my single father was Maria
the dump-stairs led me now to the city
and I prose explained in so many words
for many children who have dried up since then
and it can’t have been quite decided if or not
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Majestic Beneath Her Umbrella
© Michael Estabrook
Each morning Mom
remained behind in the cabin
at the shore to vacuum and cook
and tidy-up while the rest of us trudged
down to the beach
in our flip-flops, lugging chairs
and balls, blankets and buckets, rafts,
food, lotions and towels.
But my wife
doesn’t do that today
when we rent our place on the Cape.
Instead she sits majestic
beneath her umbrella moving her lips
as she reads her book.
___________________
Sisters
© Kyle Moreno
1. The one
has a head of curls
orange and intricate as a new Brillo.
Perfect white half moons gleam
at the tips of her fingers and toes
and rise out of her placid bodice.
Her cheeks are pink as fever
and when she thinks, when her little
round mind forms words,
her cheeks swell and swell, deepening
her dimples as if a witch finger
had poked a muffin, and her red mouth
tightens to a candy heart.
Just when her chlorine-green eyes
begin to protrude and a gagging
noise gurgles in her throat, suddenly
a fat rose bulges her lips apart,
a dozen pearls splatter around
the room in a volley of coughs,
and a hummingbird pops out of
her face, officious as a cuckoo,
mumbling gibberish with its wings.
______________________________
© Shelagh Davis
Unhallowed
His mind,
I bent and tied his shoes
Old man
Unfortunate, I’d concluded
Pasteboard
He had drawn me to scale
Seduction then insult
I bent and tied his shoe
Memories gather
Notification
I split inside the helix
Avert my eyes
Proof
Shut Up
Confounded
We grew up.
__________
Prayer for Winsett Street
© Jeffrey C. Alfier
Passing houses, a man tilts a market
bag to his lips and squints over the bright
green can of malt liquor it hardly hides –
even as froth baptizes his thin beard.
A young woman screeches up a driveway
in her smoky car. She pounds a front door,
demanding that the renter unbolt it.
The drinker glances back at her, mumbles
that family life has gone all to hell,
unaware that her overdosed father
can’t untie his daily knot of vices.
Oh Lord, forgive our unforgiven streets.
Bless what won’t kill us when hunger takes shape.
Heal every prayer rustling through paper bags.
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