Issue 14: February 2007

Matthew Caley| Tim Cumming | Valeria Melchioretto | Kathryn Simmonds | Mark Waldron | Tamar Yoseloff

VALERIA MELCHIORETTO

Free Jazz

It is pure Jazz to the ears of the steamboat captain.
He is hooting his foghorn down the misty stream.
He wanted to be a saxophonist and transform the vapor
in his blood into sound to reach across smoky nightclubs.

The river beats the planks with an offbeat rhythm
as the pitch of his hooting haunts the banks for miles.
The hoots are improvisations inspired by the engine
and he adds brief pauses, only to tease the air again.

He plays the damp darkness with confidence, plays
with a conviction that makes the clouds shift their shapes.
Each note strong and bare of variation, each moment
dense with musical gist, lost on most who hear it.

Papal Blessings

Hermetically sealed matchboxes couldn't save the holy mission,
sanctioned by Pope Pius XI to bless the very tip of the Pole.
One morning in May, the zeppelin reached that point
where meridians touch like segments of a forbidden fruit.
The crew threw out a blessed crucifix, some coins and a flag.
It showered the snow below like a Pentecostal sacrament.
They dumped all that was sacred upon the melting desert.

On their way south the airship crashed. Mayday signals
came out of the blue, stirred only silence and vanished.
They thought to be prepared for anything but never used
their ice axes. The windproof-overalls were only worn
by the wind and the lifejackets saved no one's life.
The brand new Finnish shoes didn't carry them to Finland,
no walking on water after the artifacts fell out of the window.

The Art of Life

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger,
of having gone through an experience all the way to the end,
where no one can go any further. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Nan's eye-white glowed porcelain blue
like a pallet for painting the world by numbers,
In her eyes a blue sun filled an almost blue sky
only later did I notice the blue, three headed dog.

When I did see it, it seemed as if the blue extended
to the end of an optic nerve, deep into thought.
Perhaps that is where hell is, not underground
but in the mind, in the porcelain blue of the brain.

She was a contemporary of Rilke and Matisse
who in letters discussed the impact of black in art.
They thought it potent like punctuation, fattening fast
like the pupils, the focus and centre of the beholder.

It had been a particularly cold February when black
seeped into my grandmother's lungs and placed
full stops on soft tissue, outlining the medical picture.
The blue x-rays were a proof but it was too late.

From her I learned that light is an internal organ
between the heart and God, while doctors examined
the shadows in her lungs as her handkerchief
became a canvas, gradually staining with sunset.

 

Valeria Melchioretto was born in Switzerland and now lives in London. Her pamphlet Podding Peas was published by Hearing Eye in 2004. She won the New Writing Ventures poetry award in 2005. Her first collection is forthcoming from Salt.