Literary Collection
moderated by Scott Heath
INTRODUCTION & NOTA
Moderator: Scott D. Heath
Assist. Moderator: David L. Herman
Adjunct Reader: Edward A. Deans
Contributors:
Scott D. Heath (above)
David Hunter Sutherland <3468441@mcimail.com>
The members of the LINK Consortium would have like to have
published more issues of "LINK On-Line" by now, but we certainly are not
disappointed to release this issue, the fifth to be sent by e-mail and the
third to be placed on the World Wide Web. The lapse between the present
issue and the last has allowed us to receive more submissions and collect
works for selection and publication. Still, those of us in the Literary
Dept. of "LINK On-Line" would like very much to receive more poetry and
short fiction for the next issue -- more specifically, we want to publish
less of my work and more of others'.
David Hunter Sutherland has been published or is about to be
published by several printed periodicals, including "Enterzone,"
"Ygdrasil," and "The Trincoll Review." He also is the lead editor for the
"Recursive Angel," a publication that maintains a website at
this location.
While are confident that this issues work is less esoteric than
what has been published on occasion, we should note that the content of
the followings are solely views and expressions of the authors and are not
necessarily those of the Moderators of "LINK On-Line" or all of the
members of the LINK Consortium; the Spectre Server; the University of
California, San Diego; or The Armory at Santa Cruz, California.
Scott D. Heath
Literary Moderator
POETRY
"Chromaesthesia"
--Scott D. Heath
[ See Letters to the Editors in the Administrivia section. -- Ed. ]
1 _in_academia_non_iam_
After I left the Academy, that high windowed
studio, my second, where the bustle
Sounded as from a shell's heart,
And page and colors met in sweet embrace--
the most delicate kiss of youth and art--
The voices of my friends, peers, and other art students
Cackled above this at times, like reed cuckoos
over Beethoven's viol spring,
Which become, each year, more and more
like the woodwinds of Mozart's
chamber music, in memory;
Apples are so when eaten after waking
with the taste of sleep.
Yet somehow I recollect it as in silence
hearing nearby water moving,
_Gymnopedies_ in mind,
While I lie awake at night.
["in...iam": Latin, "no longer in the academy"]
"INERTIA"
--David Hunter Sutherland
Sonorous laughter begs
a divine argument for
neurosis.
Of the former,
tenuous hints cast
shadows on broken teeth,
the nasty back-hand,
bruises delirious.
As i write,
no small aberration from
a fathers' abuse.
And i write,
long verse--escape--intermission...
A caesura of delusional heroes stand
between blows..
(there lies a man, half my metal),
between terse
point-blank
lines,
luxury in the macabre
machine-gun firm,
bellow in the furnace,
the whole
listless and impotent
transference.
Of the latter,
cerulean skies
fields on meadow,
the tender embrace opening..
opening...opening....
This I write.
"_Et_in_arcadia_ego_"
--Scott D. Heath
From the dewy hills
of manzanita
Fading in pellucid
steps of chalcedony
Or rose, mist
and stillness diffuse
Under the dominion
of blue, and limitless sun.
Even fog, precursor
to the sight
Of understanding,
or, at least,
The contours of things,
recedes
With the memories
of dreams
And the rest of limbs
in sleep--
A warmth, dry
and sanguine
Left in its place--
So is clay fired
in kiln
Cut from upwrought chert
whose flame
Is too white to look at,
spreading
Into depthless blue.
["Et...ego": Latin, "I, too, [am] in Arcadia." From a Classical
fable on death.]
(Untitled)
--Scott D. Heath
The groves are quiet today,
Their dry eucalypts rising mournfully
As like cypress as anything we have
On the coast. In the clearing swims
An easy air, luminous and water-like.
One pauses a moment in the silence,
Between breathes to watch the parting
And the distance. A swallow twitters;
Crows caugh here, there.
"To -----"
--Scott D. Heath
_ex_academia_
i
O what my parents couldn't guess
That I had felt for you--
The blood-borne press to kiss your lips--
The longing to lay my head
On your chest, and sleep in an embrace
I was not to have with you--
ii
Your earnestness and auburn tousles
And O your eyes--so candid,
So deeply blue--held each who looked
Into your honest glee,
Your thoughts and utter, free surprise
Whose warmth few but surmised.
iii
When we changed, I was not ignorant
Of your anatomy:--
Your massy form, tumescent limbs
Of sinuous torsion slipped
From out of shorts, or like from shirt
Of visceral topography--
iv
Here _exeunt_ idylls: "the loss
Of innocence," you noticed,
The gym became conspicuous,
My candor and desire
Are forged to dolor without dross
And I repent, repent.
v
Well bred, you remember face,
Your piety and honor,
Told me not to write or talk or
Call you at your place,
Ceased our florid correspondence,
And sailed for Labrador--
vi
Or so it felt--but now, after
The thought of a few years,
I wish to tell you "thank you" for
Then ending "us" with grace.
"A Concert with Pan"
--Scott D. Heath
The Speckles Organ,
Pink and rosen, chalcedony splendored
Against the gouache blue and trees (Eucalyptus)
Up rose the moon, butter-yellow beyond goat cheese,
Upstaged the performer, Japanese,--
Rally the pipes Baroque
In this wall-less burgeoning Renaissance pavilion,
(So what if he brittled Bach
And turned Listz's aforementioned name variations
In thematically delirious assonant scintillations,
Into indeterminable Muzak?
He played the twentieth century well
Satie in diapason and full stop swell
And some other French dude grey and mystical.)--
Rose he did, through Brahms and Mahler,
And left us leaving after the setting
Of "Old Londonderry Town"--
Crept up along the stucco facade--
To shadow a 'goyle of Pan
Who over all trumped and smiled.
"Fair Is My Love"
--Scott D. Heath
After the painting by Edwin A. Abbey
Fair is the Maiden, ruddy and wane,
In countenance, the two not twain;
Water-white rolls her dress,
And slowly, softly, does she sing.
Brilliantly as the leaves become, floating
Garlands in aerial wine,
The modes hang from strings that dreamly hum
So sweetly strumm'd, run o'er by cream.
The amber flows from our hearts' _cors_
Woke by her and Corelli's mandolin
That lulls the peach-warm Page that lays
Behind and by, gules and black in tabard, mane,
Hand-rapt, down-glanced, no swain,
Beholding Autumn's train; so set before
A lake of peridot and oaks, lit above,
I care for him the more:
Fair is my Love.
["cors": French, "horn," esp. the "English horn"]
(Untitled)
--Scott D. Heath
Sweeping the dried husks of the trees
From the dust of the well-swept concrete
I see the moon rise through tenuous branches,
The barest prehensilities, backlit by porchlight--
The Queen of the Night extends her gibbous reign
Days before the longest encore,
Yellow and white behind the crepes of yellow-black
And before the drop of the blue-dark
In her alchemeic spotlight.
Schinkel was never as Romantic as this.
(Untitled)
--Scott D. Heath
The precipitate grasses descend
The downs to the cliffs and the sea.
The diffuse and indeterminate
Youth of the day, its gracious aquamarines,
Overarch beguilingly the acute greens
Growing in singleness of thought,
Adolescent and untaught. The Ocean
In concomitant steels and tourmaline glints
Facily conveys the day's enthusiasms,
Equally at ease to express, later,
The citrines and patinas, alexandrites,
That please the cliffs more than the leas.
"_Azure,_gutte-d'eau_"
--Scott D. Heath
Night. Blue thoughts drift to be considered,
Sophisticating the average drift of things
To simplifications, reflections,
That allow themselves to be seen, conceived of,
Perhaps, to consider to universal ends,
In the nights' virtue, distilling, as it were,
The oils that separate and rise to the surface of the waters
From the emulsions that are our days:
A grand sophistication, a temporary
And extemporizing order of things.
["Azure,...eau": French, obsolete, taken in British heraldry as
"on a dark blue background, drops of silver/white".]
"Chromaesthesia"
--Scott D. Heath
2 a watercolor
The first thing I drew was a chalice
tricked out in gold against marble,
Veined and spotted like bunched Bordeaux grapes
In a coral niche, columns sprouting green,
the shell of whose arch was translucent blue.
The last thing I painted, was
the Lady of the Harbor, from the west
Facing the ocean of her immigrants--
rising torchlike in her magnetic stride,
In one clear chrysalis, of which only a corner
is washed in cerulean, leaving a nimbus
Of pure hyaline. In this oblong composition
not unlike a Japanese print, such a void
Of aural luminosity, is joined in such light
by chromatic shards, unsheaved green & light, the children
Of the prism and the rotate triunity of yellow,
cyan and magenta, that melt into one white light.
So she stands, and undulant hypostasis of azure, ultra-
& aquamarine, teal, emerald & patina; the drossed
Citron lodestar of daisy-gold; and the deepest purple
in which the stars of H. D. wheel--
So set off her billowing, Grecoesque form
from the silky _legato_ of nonuniform bows,
Tone against tone, of undulant yellow, blue,
green and violet, that intone behind--
As Holst's brilliant green 'cello blooms that rise, so, up
from the sea, in _Venus_, as in Chaucer. Thus
Colors, water-borne, sing together, chromatic
as a modulation in tinctured harmony, chords
Like Dvorak's dawning _adagio_ of near Pauline faith
this embodies genius inspired:
"Old Hopes, New Dreams"