Allen Fisher
Ring Shout [extracts]
Ring Shout [extracts]
2.
Wound blots recede as
pain latches
and dampness sustains encoding
categories of decay match a confidence
trick below intelligence
A group of loners build from
the rubble until a garden wall
is evident. It marks the millennium
It doesn’t mark anything
Drawings on the wall map out a planetary
sequence beyond this one breaks the
pressure of exactness or completion.
Another geometry will be needed.
Let’s not say that. Mark out consciousness
in a constellation map overlapping another
Two women walk by with antlered headwear
partly a result of last week’s storm
Pinch-me crossed the Park collecting snake skins
The lovers ignore this eat toadstools
and lichen. The air is full of yellow
moths and fill the mouths of those in
exercise or copulation
up to her knees in fern fronds
on his back out of view red and yellow
in the green lush, insects and humans
red ants and naked wood rot
before the wind lifts before the cloud shifts
Another wreckage more slavery instant repetition.
4.
Her small feet lift onto the rest bar
palms on knees under the occasional
watch the screen reintegrate defined
squiffiness where without exception
the utopians share the conviction
that all people, regardless of situation
bow their knee before a single moral order
driven to escape the present in future refuge
where Europeans became convinced of their
superiority using a synthesis of circular and linear
temporal myths combined with ideas of a parallel
dimension known as the confidence trap
She lifts her hands onto the keyboard
plays the last bars of Le Banquet Céleste
5.
On a moderately hilly lowland
marked either side by hills and in the south
by a river she bends over a torn epiphytic lichen
resting on the heavy, close textured loamy soil
of a marl partly concealed by an orchard of perry pears
in an April rain shadow the puzzle posed related to
the presence of Lobaria pulmonaria away from limestone
and in isolation from another plant startled
by the presence of another animal shocked
into amusement at surprise in ice movement wilted
bower larks wither hide or fill the mouth sigh a quiver
he sends beneath this shorn certain din invests in the gravity,
lost flexed balmy toil revealed before an orchid of pearls
in showers sweet the difficulty posed by asking
7.
Sounds on the tape record
the recorder’s action beyond
alternating bands of dark magnetite
and light silicates propose complex
microlife 3,500 million years ago.
Lee Morgan lives with
Freddie Hubbard in the night
of the cookers and Grachan
Moncur’s Evolution
quarrel with sense-perceptions
Resolution in excess to system
a hyperacuity reserved for angels and machines
Honour and justice based on pleasant
distinctions of product and production.
10.
Fluxus is for you the young
but young is you’re not young
life reverses near the pain
what pain life is a pain
no it’s not
life is like a cattle drum you mean kettle
drum yes and hum drum
derange issues of progress
the whole contention that pop-up
philosophy doesn’t progress – art doesn’t –
oh but science does looks frail from here
spontaneity on a prepared trampoline
irritations and scratches means
replace aesthetics with anaesthesia
16.
Between the figures of Adam & Eve
how individual cells know
what to become how they resemble
appear in a fiery Gulph
a Hox gene cluster
descending from fire
determinate body plans and axes
Told his friend of intentions
to celebrate by sharing a glass
of juice transformed into wine
with a pretty strange fellow
whose path often crossed in the course
of a journey In Eternity one Thing
never Changes into another Thing
20.
Explosions are instantaneous clouds
obliterate the moment of transformation
The third analysis used
grey uranium from blackish pitchblende
hard with cold deceit turned brown on the raft
the body of Delacroix dated against
blue-grey lead on the surface of Anselm Kiefer’s
wood rot heavy squat fluid motions
crossing ground quakes beneath the
extreme unstoppable force and power
of caterpillar tracks and complex suspension
Shrapnel ghost growth pressures to reduce
carbon emissions
or cut temperature and storm damage
21.
You want to inhibit my spacetime
you join a rich roast of fireweeds
and carbohydrates.
The antlered men stamp into a
field of tulips to gather material
This is not the last robbery
Drenched light moves through the rain storm
hits a conference a wrestling match
a hundred and more ants ascend from the
boiler well
1910 becomes 1985 continues territorial raids
Watch this, watch this! and the stick breaks
The city surrounds us and demands
river mist symmetries.
