Poetry Inspired by Springtide


Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Emily's coat on black table), 2005, Conte on cotton, 40 x 50 inches.

The Car, a Window, and World War II by tom devaney

We grew up facing the despised backside of
an otherwise honest house.
As in all good tales, it is a Period without a period.
The atmosphere in which shirts were stacked
in a Chinese laundry and now live on in us
like an ancient fern.
Forget forgetting; we depend upon the pin stripes.
Memory calls and says, Shut the window,
we're CLOSED!
A pledge of discretion, I guess it's a yes or no thing.
The way the remains of an intractable fact remains:
some furs are fake, some are not; a true blond
poofy hairlet;
the more obscure hood of a car (not a place to sit).
I can't remember all of them that well.

A car is an object like a small country.
World War II: The Palindrome War, WWII.
Mom, Dad, car, window, the never ending WWII.
Das Boot, Enemy At The Gates, Sink the Bismarck,
To Hell And Back, A Bridge Too Far,
to name but the most memorable Memorials.
First Blood, Drugstore Cowboy, The Terminator,
Blade Runner—everything on video and
DVD forever.
To go the distance is not to close the distance.
It's an inside/outside problem.

Once, after the war he shot his gun into a pond,
the dead fish soon rose to the surface.
I could see that he could see it, but that's all I could see.
Not another one of his fish stories; he told me once and never
mentioned the fish, pond, or gun again.

Three inscrutable fingers rest gently against the glass,
the darkness, the page.
What becomes of a hand in a window,
the shadows cast by a magic lantern, a simple fire?
Losing track of images, losing track of people—
the secret destiny of HDTV on HDTV.

The experimental film Walt Whitman Nurse and Poet,
it's not bad; we enjoyed the catalogue of birds.
The dull and unmusical notes of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo,
like the cow, cow of a young bull-frog repeated eight or ten times
with increasing rapidity.
The way sounds become words, and words
can store their sounds, and return back to Sound.
As we learned, some of the birdcalls and songs were recreated
from written descriptions.

And T (like me) adores the tabby and often says,
"It's not always better to know better."

Ask yourself this question:
Does silence have to mean a lack of sound?
I hate the lack of sound myself, though crave the silence.
Yesterday, three people were shot at a check-point.
The difference between a moment of silence
and a decade of silence.
A lone piano plays into our daily commute.
Gravel, pretzel bits, a penny on the floor. VACUUM:
Fifty Cents.
Sonic Youth behind another pane of glass, glazed.
They didn't invent flesh as material, only the name:
"Adaptation Studies."
The light through the painted window
becomes part of the notes on the page: pink and perfect
in the here and now of the there and then.
Trace the tire marks, the fuel leak on the carpet,
call them "relics."
She was emphatic: "I don't read the quotes, I skip them."
A statement which clearly gave her a lot of satisfaction.
This was years ago, hence the spaces, hence the space.

Tom Devaney
(b. 1969, Philadelphia, PA; lives in Philadelphia, PA). Devaney is the author of Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999). A Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, he is coordinator of the Kelly Writers House and produces the monthly radio show "Live," on 88.5-FM WXPN. Devaney's poetry has been published in the catalog for "Greater New York" at P.S.1 and in Arsenal, Java, Poesie, and Double Change. In the summer of 2004 he conducted a series of tours of the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site called "The Empty House" for the ICA's show "The Big Nothing."


Institute of Contemporary Art | University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St. Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289 | T 215.898.7108 | F 215.898.5050

Copyright © 2004-2008, Institute of Contemporary Art. All rights reserved.
Website developed by Zero Defect Design LLC.