hutt 1.3
  hutt - soho, hong kong
 
 
Louis Armand is an artist and writer who has lived in Prague since 1994, where he currently directs the InterCultural Studies Programme in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. His poetry, essays, translations and short prose have appeared in various publications, including Sulfur, Stand, TriQuarterly, Poetry Review, Meanjin, Frank and Van Gogh's Ear. In 1997 he was awarded the Max Harris Prize at the Penola Festival (Adelaide) and in 2000 he received the Nassau Review Prize (New York). His books include Séances (Prague, 1998); Erosions (Sydney, 1999); Inexorable Weather (London, 2001); Land Partition (Melbourne, 2001); Strange Attractors (Cambridge, 2003); Malice in Underland (Melbourne, 2003); and a volume of prose, The Garden (Cambridge, 2001). He is editor of the PLR (Prague Literary Revue) and director of the Prague International Poetry Festival.
www.louis-armand.com

 

  
   
louis armand - the distress

(for robert adamson)

what these things communicate, driven
onwards to conclusion. "their meanings
push into silence"-a stone
carved out of air, a tide drawn back
by force of attraction & opposition

it is a habit of the mind-to recreate
a world in darkened stillness, unreal
& unwarranted. what is the proper bond
of words & life?

to those who speak through us, laid asleep
in the living body … the voice deflects
& returns, it rests in others, too
to recompense years when memory lay
under dust & celluloid

a light switch lifts their shadows upwards
like costume wings, unaware of the heroic
or doomed nature of their task.
not to end in visions of reconciliation-
telling the way the world isn't
or what it should look like or be

the scenario has no wrong version, even
the most concluded journey remains
a fragment-charting a course
between the dog star & southern cross
a line beyond all reckoning

what miraculous birth could mark the
end-point of such itinerary?

left to discover the "other side" of history
by any available means (enactment,
circumstance)-its fact arising from a
moment's irritation, or fruit of nothing more
than a desire to be elsewhere