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The Argotist Online |
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FRED
JOHNSTON Fred
Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951, educated there and in
Toronto, Canada. Novelist, poet and critic, he was Writer-in-Residence at the
Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, in the Autumn of 2004. He is the founder
of Galway's annual literature festival, Cúirt and of its writers' centre and
translates contemporary French poetry. He lives and works in Galway, on
Ireland's West coast. JOSEPH
BEUYS - DISCUSSION “There
is nothing to say about Art,
just
as there is nothing to say about God.”
Henriette
Patin (1834 -1887):
Letters Back-lit
by what light the hallway gives, We’re
letters of the alphabet inverted, Or
pencil-shading on yellow paper, or the sea. A
possibility of four forms scratched On
a pallid surface with shapes of books Imagined
on a wall. A chalk-on-slate scrawl. Black
garden sharding into bits of light, Hair
running like oil over a blank page,
The many faces of your
face. WRAPPING "For instance, Siculus Pontius was afraid to appear in public
unless wrapped, virtually head to foot, in his
thickest
toga. Yet if he were trying to hide, he had
made himself
the most stared-upon figure in Rome . . . .”
- Gaius Tuteis: ‘On
Explanation, bk.IV’ The
wind is like a second skin wrapping The
postman sheltering at our door, And
we won’t open it, amazed at the way His
body is shaped by his coat, his face Sparkling
with bleeds of rain, and the gasp On
his lips, a plea, not to be left to drown Or
breathe his last while two faces stare at him Through
the thin glass, as if he were no longer human. HE
THINKS OF WINDOWS -
Sun stancu de balá
De rid’e de giugá. -
Paulette Cherici-Porello: E Viva Sciaratu – (Monégasque)
He
thinks of windows flying in the blue heat A
room that flies, the sound and breath of a wing Beating
in the tremulous air, coffee sweet And
first-thing, Sipped
standing on his own terrace in bare feet. From
the ‘bus which stops, it seems, for everyone He
has a view of a sea without end. A gate, A
plate left out on a garden wall, a white sun Lightly
powdering A
sky as brutal and unnerving as a gun. He
has photographed the silly flap of palms, And
tasted something local, meaty, hot Played
at spotting girls like lovely psalms That
rolled along the eye, Line
on line, languid as traffic-jams. He
saw the great battalions of his thought Roll
dead in ditches, slaughtered by the heart. He
was himself and himself distraught, (And
now the ‘bus drifts off), as if Some
barefoot god had split him
With a promise or a gift: or worse,
Thrown him a purse of hope
Which he’d seen fall, but hadn’t caught.
copyright © Fred Johnston |