People enjoy exotic places; where they are not, we build them - grottos, gardens, game parks. A poet's eye has power to estrange the commonplace and to communalize the strange. MARTIN JERVIS's poem moves between and through what becomes our everyday strange.
Based in Leeds, England, MARTIN JERVIS has previously published in Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), and Outposts.
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MARTIN JERVIS View from a WindowA snapshot in time with movement October 7th Room 414, Les Citadines, Cannes. I stare down at the street sign Rue de Poussin A woman with a red coat and furled umbrella Hurries across tarmac her eyes locked on traffic Horns blare out at two black shirted students Waxy mobile phone growth in blocked up ears. Opposite a yellow ochre frontage with blue grey Shutters fix a scratched eye on Van Gogh's Arles Red tiles hosting thirty-seven sojourn pigeons And kilos of guano - how bored can a man get? A fluffy white chest feather floats slowly down. To the left on the corner of Avenue de Petit Juas And de Petit Jean a Boulangerie/Patisserie opens And I catch the smell of wafted hot bread. Eyes strain through myopia to dirty white walls And on small iron balconies pot plants burst colour Beneath stucco rectangles fading by erosion Down to pink and white awnings lightened in sun. Cars orbit a roundabout of shrubs and a pineapple Shaped palm hangs with yellow date fruits Calm is visual in a silent picture until Brakes screech hard debating rights of way For any colour you like as long as it's silver. Flats in the distance flickering TV glare Send messages out in light limped Morse. The gym across the roof tops gasps into life Shadowy bodies in dim lit windows raise weights Move in an orgiastic tangle of motion until sideways Dives to the floor empty the view. On the green triangle in front of the Boulangerie A man with a reeled out lead pushes his Sealyham Towards defecation on the patchwork of grass Dog lovers pile this town into Merdre de Chien. A large woman in a lime T shirt and jeans a size Too small strides confidently past on the path below I could spit on her head and she would not Trace its path or parabola. A clean juggernaut blocks the narrow street to unload Cocci Market in red and green reads on its side With a shuttered view as cars scrape past. A large car stops and a woman with red flowing hair Sweeping down her back directs a way through. A Chinese girl with a satchel crosses in front and Back in the car the driver slithers between metal and kerb. I sneeze and smell the itchy air. Into the coloured camera on my retinal eyes And the erratic memory base it forms and shapes Is a mundane projection of routine life patterns Constantly enacted in global ordinariness. But there remains the uniqueness of a pause button Which holds a special flashpoint to each passing phase Forming a transient vision of the relative present A kind of newborn sepia photograph catching a series Of people alive and transfixed in the now To be past breaths in the evolution of future tense I step back from the window And into my personal state of being apart Witnessing brief moments stoned in a frozen snapshot Holds tight a movement into the next instance of frames But an important meaning in the art of impression forms A static but illusory essence.
©2006 MARTIN JERVIS
