M!

Mark Ismay

Having a Coke with You

by Frank O'Hara.

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne   
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona   
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary   
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still   
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it   
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth   
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint   
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                       I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world   
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time   
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism   
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or   
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me   
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them   
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank   
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully   
as the horse
                   it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Or, read by the author...

I cannot convey how much I adore this poem. The puerility of the form both belies and exalts the message.

Clasp

Fumbling inside an art deco cabinet for an attractive shiraz to warm an otherwise unassuming evening, my hands caressed the clasp holding the opposing door in place. I was fascinated by this mechanism as a child, an equally unassuming aspect of an heirloom from my great grandmother. The brass clasp would break the symmetry of the piece by appearing on only the left door if it was not for its position inside the cabinet: to be felt but unseen unless sought.

Perishability does not cause childhood fascinations to fade but rather broadens curiosity's crosshairs along with an opening world. Corkscrew in hand, Chopin's Op. 28 prelude: No. 7 in A Major seemed to synchronise perfectly with my dance opening the wine bottle. Coincidence is to seduction as screw tops are to veniality; cork taint be damned.

Driving with discourse

All clambered into a car on the way to the snowfields, a tangential discussion about the nature of God and whatnot (you know, the trivial questions of life) reminded me of the song In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel.

The song concludes with the lyrics "can't believe / how strange it is to be anything at all" that I've found to be a starkly frank statement of the singular abstruse absurdity that I find completely unfathomable irrespective of the effort I invest in the problem.

I fail to understand how some gloss over this truth so lightly.

Now, how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through your mouth
To make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
And now we keep where we don't know
All secrets sleep in winter clothes
With one you loved so long ago
Now he don't even know his name

The image of Anne Frank's Father Otto Frank placing his fingers into his daughter's mouth on publishing her famed diary account of her experience hiding from a Nazi occupied Netherlands is a stirring one. Equally well, one can imagine the reader bringing Anne's voice to life as they flip through the pages of her diary. The symbol of Anne stands for many: including my Grandmother fleeing Latvia, her home, from the Soviet 'sphere of influence' to the relative refuge yet lifelong displacement of the immigration camps.

Leica2-1

What a curious life
We have found here tonight
There is music that sounds from the street
There are lights in the clouds
Anna's ghost all around
Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind.

When I looked outside right into the depth of nature and God, then I was happy, really happy.

As the Anne Frank tree ails with disease, The Anne Frank Center's plan to distribute saplings across the United States seems only fitting as it mirrors how my Grandmother's family was cast across the globe like thistledown in the wind.