Ian Davidson & Carmen Gimenez-Smith
November 2010
ID
Through surrounding trees
If the bark of these trees was my trees I would worry. Over the ridge, memories, fresh as
a new coat of paint, how they came to these lands and showed me this and that of modern man,
in straight lines and against the grain, covered the hills with strong pine as if they never could
not have been, quarried the use less mountains for good stone to build their tall buildings
demonstrated – what messages might be in language; taught me how to count that I too might
count others and come to count on them and speak – speaking only to myself, picking
away at the peeling bark of eucalyptus revealing smooth clean trunks, bark thickens.
CG-S
I View an Impulse
The sky is a lot and this moves me. My trees worry me too. The leaves sigh their last breaths and I count
their departures as failures, one for yesterday, two for today. The leaves are the peeling off of me,
the layers of weather and time. The sun pushes its corruption through the clouds: really pastoral,
really sublime.
ID
Trunk Line
The trunk is the unbroken line Of administration the trunk Is fibrous leads away into the air Into matters of state the heart is
Stony the trunk is optical, immaterial Nothing is the same again after Guernika After empire, nothing remains the same when A whole thing appears in my mind like
Liberation or rearranging the landscape by
Planting trees in rows, the different orders
Around the bend in the road
CG-S
The Map
In a few minutes you'll see the place where we were born. It's like human, but it's stone. It's besides the ruins of late civilizations, in the heaps of autumn debris. It's west of empire and in the headlands' highest point, that pinnacle of poison plant and fog. No gaze quite as firm as a map's fixed mirror of what we've spoiled.
ID
Round the bend
I can see it through the year's leaves (heaps of Autumn debris). A place where people laugh politely and someone is up to no good, nervous, heavy on his feet. I pitch camp within the background as the fly leaf falls looking for air in small circles, as under the ground sheet worms make their way. Thinking
is easy, pull out all the pegs or strip the matter out leaving only the leaf's structure. The tent disappears, the yellow grass grows green, leaves, comes back again.
CG-S
Poison Pinnacle
The village people will be at the center of the valley perseverating like in Shirley Jackson's lottery. The king will be there to commandeer the building of a straw man, to put in the straw man's all-seeing eyes. We're numbered, we're marked. We pay the price of our excess with occasional sacrifice. Half-mast eyes. The bluster of editorial and rhetoric in lead type. We write about it, and time passes. We write about it, build paper and straw monuments, but the edifice is diamond, is kryptonite, is insurmountable. I don't know what comes next, or I do and it's so over, not just tradition, but the wind and the sounds it carries over us and across the valley.