Paul Holman... Tara Morgana, excerpt, 2014

from Tara Morgana by Paul Holman published by Scarlet Imprint and illustrated by the photography of Paul Lambert

Paul Holman... poem... 3

3

 She had been earthed

( had i earthed

her by my intrusion? )

eyes no longer turned

upon phenomena I

could not locate.

She considered me a 

plunderer, a facund man,

a madman: one who

scries alphabets

of daggers, of arrows.

Zigzagged tights in a

knot in her pocket,

the tip of each

hair luminous a fox-

fire or rotten wood,

she opened the violet

gate at her throat

to release the fractal

silhouette of Pan.

Published in a wonderful collection of esoteric poetry and essays > Datura by Scarlet Imprint 

previous POEMS

 

PAUL HOLMAN is the author of The Fabulist (1991) and The Memory of the Drift (2000). He was co-editor of Invisible Books in the 1990s.

AND ALL IN ARMOUR ON HER BED SHE LIES by Paul Holman.... & new drawing

Dolorosa 09

AND ALL IN ARMOUR ON HER BED SHE LIES ...

Her drawings show how she thinks we see her, but it is not the predicament in which she finds herself in the course of each implied adventure, shackled to the steam engine or discharging ectoplasm in some darkened room, by which she is defined, but the quality of distance she brings to these situations,amused and just a little haughty.

This detachment causes her to appear most distinct from her sister - the unicorn might be prettier, but does not gleam so, though both are made up the same -
yet, even in her more recent elegance, the twin we follow may allow
herself to be weirdly exposed, to look not composed but engaging: a
controlled goofiness in a moment that she chose to treat as if
unobserved, as if all eyes were not upon her.

Girl as landscape, girl as costume: how she permeates, sharp faced and quizzical, still unmistakable in the demon mask.

from Tara Morgana
Paul Holman

Paul Holman...Tara Morgana IV

Tara Morgana IV

1

The memory of a bewildering romance:
her tongue had turned white, the
ugly flight jacket bought the day
before had suffered a three cornered
tear. Her eye imposed the spectre
of a building upon a gap
in the city, but I found
nothing better to do than sketch
the map of mountains, fissures and
interconnected lakes which the action of
heat and sudden rain had developed
upon the path.

2

She gazed into the mirror treated
with seven excretions: ophidian skin, mottled
breasts and shoulders. The fumes settled
into the handsome animal mask of
my father, not as he was
in life, but as it had
proved convenient for me to represent
him to myself. By this time,
she was delusional, ransacking the house
in search of the one object
that caused her damage. I marked
a cross upon the tablecloth, then
added four dots at the intercardinal
points, connecting them with the looping
walls of that labyrinth through which
I follow him now.

3

She vanished among men of unguessable
temper, always older, who made no
remark about the tremble of the
skeleton at the foot of her
mattress.


From V

The transmission I failed to
summon again, as if it could
be recovered by walking in a
stupor beside that same river,
stinking of beer and mud,
above which I had glimpsed a
moth patterned city, my hand
upon the waist of the first
girl I tricked into performing
an action significant to me
(game to accept the hazard of
my company, the boredom).