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Archive for the 'Lossius' Category

In and out of God’s ear

May 1st, 2007

BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS

St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne on a warm Sunday evening in Lent: the setting sun pours through the yellow-paned clerestory windows and along the tall stone transept. The aureal glow trickles over the heads of a few dozen faithful attendants, tiny motionless figures far down in the dark valley of the nave. Up here on the choir platform twelve of us are singing the offertory motet, Ecce quomodo, moritur justus. It reverberates and swells down the building and eddies back toward us heavily. Gesualdo’s music is a dark sky through which opposing armies of moist air, one warmed by grace, the other chilled in mortal fear, meet above the field. The collision drags the cold under. A spiral of cloud plunges earthward, as, though inverted on different scales of time and weight, the edge of one continent is said to plunge under the other, melting into the black heat of the earth as the other rears up to form ice-catching mountains above it. Et erit in pace, memoria ejus. A chord of light spears Gesualdo’s turbulent, imploring gloom. The hell-heaven of that murdering, penitent prince is made still for as long as the twelve of us can sustain our slow, controlled exhalation.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius | Link to this Entry

With alacrity

April 1st, 2007

BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS

I snap out of it on the last hundred yards, from the figure-eight path looping through Carlton Gardens onto the busy road I must cross to get home. I cannot remember running the last gasping half-mile stretch. It’s a complete blank. Five minutes lost. Well, I must have done it, mustn’t I? Up there then, down here now, five minutes of lost time, an alien vacuum. Then I remember why I lost the time. I’d been pounding through a poignant recollection of friendship destroyed, a momentary bitterness over my ex-wife, over a brief, naïve experience of marriage. I suppose I needed to push even those thoughts aside for the last few blank seconds, as there’s always been a twinge of guilt involved in the thinking.

I will disguise details of name and face, out of respect for the privacy of a woman I lost touch with and who cannot speak for herself in this forum (she is a poet, though, and probably has elsewhere, in her feisty, filigreed way). I mustn’t pretend to be so high-minded, either. The need to be coy arises out of prudence, too. Why compromise a nearly lifeless but faintly fluttering desire to return to the United States to live, some day.

I met my one and only wife, as I’ve hinted in a previous piece, at a party in New York City in 1989. She was sitting on a cushion in the corner, alert and silent on the far side of a crowing throng of New York art and theatre types. I was immediately drawn to her deep fall of brown hair, her unpainted, freckle-tanned face, the quietness surrounding her corner of the room, and went over to chat. She was a poet, divorced, part native-American, too, she mentioned. And I was a wanderer, dreamed of writing, and a homo, a fact I revealed to create a safe zone for us both. We had a long lunch next day, with her almost-adult son in tow. A couple of years later, Sara told me she’d phoned her daughter in a giddy rush that morning, crying, “I’m having lunch with a handsome young Norwegian-Australian writer. Should I go?”

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius, All Marriage Issue | Link to this Entry

Melburniana

March 1st, 2007

BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS

Once, when living in Portland Ore., I was acknowledged at a party by an elegant old wag who asked, in patrician, Rocky Mountain-Oxbridge tones, “Larry, where is it that you’re fruhhhm, exah-ctly?” He went on, “I’d wondered whether you were from New Zealand? Or South Africa perhaps? But of course you speak High Australian, don’t you?”

melbourneb&wOn a couple of occasions during years lived in New York, having a coffee or a drink in one of the bars around Mulberry Street staffed by sniffy actor-model types, I’d had my order briskly taken by some young woman discreetly suppressing a mild kangaroo twang. On each occasion, the order taker wouldn’t quite look me in the eye. As if to convey, “You don’t mention it, and I won’t either.” I’d keep quiet until it was time to pay, when I’d inquire, murmuringly, “So where in Australia are you from then?” To ask was dismally gauche, I knew. In both instances, they were Melbourne girls. A quick flash of the eyes told me to piss off before I ruined their dreams.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius | Link to this Entry

Tyranny and the box

March 1st, 2006

BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS

The other day I watched the film Good Night and Good Luck. In the opening scene Edward R. Murrow, the famous World War II correspondent and television journalist, stands at a podium to accept an award from his peers. The film then flashes back a few years to the time of the McCarthy hearings, and Murrow’s current affairs program exposing McCarthy, or more to the point, where he allowed McCarthy to expose himself. At the time CBS was under commercial and political pressure to toe the sponsors’ line.

The film is about a brief few years, a simpler time when truth seekers had a voice within a new medium, and when the forces that nourished and opposed them at the same time were easier to distinguish. But at the beginning of the film, at the podium accepting his award, Murrow laments the rot that has set in already. I am astounded, as he is speaking in 1958, soon after the beginning of the television age.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius, All Television Issue, Television | Link to this Entry

First and last Christmas

December 1st, 2004

BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS

Silent wooded hills surround our valley of fields and farm buildings in Maridalen, the Vale of Mary, a few miles above Oslo. Near where the road divides and hems each forested slope sit the ruined remains of an ancient church abandoned after the Black Death: a thick stone wall lanced with Romanesque apertures and outlines of rubble. In the summertime the site rests on a mound above a waving meadow of gold at the northern tip of the lake, but now most of cottageinsnow.jpgit lies buried in snow. A mile farther up, past the new school and the old wooden church, a few dozen brightly painted houses huddle under the hills above the western branch of the road. Below that several farms divide the long bowl of the valley. Through it the river winds south under its winter ceiling of ice.

The seasons express themselves intensely here. Halfway through spring, masses of tiny violet and white flowers push themselves up through gobs and rivulets of sunny slush. Summer is for bike riding and berry hunting in the forest; tiny strawberries, then red currants, blueberries and hazelnuts. Days are long and yellow as the grass. We go to bed with the sun still up, heavy curtains drawn against the blue.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius, All Christmas Issue | Link to this Entry

The woman bore

December 1st, 2004

BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS

The woman bore her last child alone
through a cold crowing village wind
her breasts swelled into a barricade
against the oracle the soft voice
behind the bronze grille in the wooden box
and then weary of labor and the smell of blood
shielding the child from earth soaked in dreams
she watched his body tremble itself away
heard his little lungs shuffle him
toward the westernmost gate

Cradled in the shadow
of mortared stones
chalk smeared with sweat
crumbling pink stucco
dust wraps her face
with pale powdery lines

She no longer strains to hear the feathery voice
the rickety hearse wheels squeak at each turn
he is no longer with you
he has gone away from you
gone up to heaven
we all cry in our turn
save us from the dust
he is no longer with me
she has gone away from me
prayer becomes a ritual pinched dry by the wind

But our tears are living water
and every sunny mote of dust might be an angel
singing highly beyond our sight
inside God’s enameled heart
within his torso of gilded wood
below the skin of rosy gold
the arc of steaming frankincense portends
a paradise a heaven of sweet faces
roses lace cloud hierarchies
marble tables million-armed cherubim
rocking fields of souls in cradles

The dust under her feet spills over the coffin
as it sways and sinks into the earth
the resinous crust crumbles away from her eyes
God is as timeless as the vision of a statue
and Time is as godless as hot sand in the wind
what will save us from the dust
dust is as true as a box of holy wafers is
protect me from the dust

— Jacumé, September 1990 •

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius, All Christmas Issue | Link to this Entry

Author profile

December 1st, 2002

Lorentz Lossius has been writing poetry, prose and music for years, and for the past three has been scribbling for Black Lamb. A native of Trondheim, Norway, he is currently watering his roots back in Oslo, after having gone full circle over forty years through Europe, Asia, Australia, and the United States. His Black Lamb column was called Walkabout and is now called Wondering Gentile.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Lossius | Link to this Entry

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