Suzanne Bella Land

 

 

(England)

 

 

 

What I saw in the fire

(Sphinx)

 

Baffled Sphinx

thinks and thinks…

 

a film in slow motion

Rumble of a train approaching…

 

Everything was somehow charmed

He still loves her,

she on the bicycle riding free

He doesn’t know he’s on the track

 

Rumble of a train…

 

A forgotten line from a song

An abandoned house in the middle of nowhere,

clothes and dusty objects

scattered

Snug and warm and cheerful

in their sleeping lives

(dead)

in the belly of a boat

 

A storm

Like armies surrounded by skyscrapers

turning into crucifixes and airplanes

 

We say goodbye

and get into elevators,

“What floor is the party on?”

We don’t know why we did that

and that…and that…

 

A story gets told in my head about tigers escaping the circus.

I can never forget what I saw in the fire

There was something about a winding course,

a land I knew existed

and the serpent that lives within it

 

Standing in bookstores for hours,

reading lines and chapters…words,

forgetting as soon as I remember them

 

Jumping into a fast moving car

going for the ride

 

Still in my mind

a snake within a shell,

all of time dispelled

amazing to behold

as if the beginning of the world

the dawn of things

laughing through its tears

 

The waves had been soothing…

I seem to remember…

She smiled at me

with a painful frozen smile

while handing me dead purple flowers

 

Flashes of life from the 60’s…

Now a woman in a long coat approaches

sits at the top of the stairs

and starts singing

with mouth wide open

Mouth wide open

 

Voiceless

 

A large black moth flaps in the ceiling

Faces become featureless

Sludgy sand below

Crawling waves

 

Scrambling up the sandy hill with a camera

to the Amazon on the other side of the river.

Packing a suitcase

nowhere to go.

Touching her lined forehead

as in hypnosis,

Loving every furrow

I can see her face

her dark hair

her grey eyes…

her forgotten eyes.

I created an effigy,

a paper face

following me at a distance.

I tore it up

I created it

so I could destroy it

 

Death died

He laid a pearl necklace on my back

raw pearls,

then a golden necklace at my feet

and put his tongue in my…ahhh…

 

Women waited outside at a picnic

White billowing dresses

Wine

Ribbons fluttering and hailing

the end of the world

but you wouldn’t know it

 

A salty sort of morning.

Black shoes

Crooked faces

Empty shops

Cracks

Ghosts of car crashes

phones all smashed

 

Gone all the noise

No right or wrong turns,

 

left or right.

Up a staircase,

down a corridor,

 

around a corner

 

around nowhere.

It’s all nowhere.

 

Into a church,

light a candle

Drink anonymous spit from a small glass

 

Then we were holding hands

Sometimes, I was her.

Someone said,

“who said that?”

No one was there.

 

A carnival was outside

I could see the lights out the window

Live miniature horses

dancing in a carousel.

 

 

What I saw in the fire

 

 

Eme-bal

 

We have discussed the various matters

Seems likely to be

something exists

because of what isn’t

 

We are happy to remark conclusively

 

Language turner

twisting hairs

forms of life of old

dank

patties of clay

in apricity

basking

thankless

guardians of memory

 

Calendrical codes

scored in stone

celestial maps

 

Hard baked

dredged

Broken gods

Oracular alphabets

scarring caves

slipping universes

deeper than time

 

In the geometries of snails

Turtles, snakes, whales

Sing the forms

Seasons of floods

sigils, spirals, hieroglyphs

libraries of sound

Holy wells, leys of the land

Megaliths

direction of currents

 

Between cultures

Between sheets, wars, epochs

Anarchy of language

 

Throwing out a line

a bite

to bear across

chthonic currents

saltwater tongue-tie

linguistic roots

dangling

 

Eternal return

We are

Ouroboros

Well of Mimir

Re-remembers

Fish lullabies

 

Lost gardens hidden door

 

Eleusisian path

 

of spells

Eme-bal Eme-bal

 

Turning in sleep

 

 

Post script:  This symbol above is a Sumerian cuneiform script, pronounced eme-bal, with a form emblematic of a fish, it means “language turner” and is the equivalent of the word “translator.”

 

 

 

 Bearing across

 

My soul would sing

of the solar cross

Miraculous crucifixion

in ecstatically

birthing rays

spoking words

within wheels

spinning worlds

elocution!

 

 

– Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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BIO

 

Suzanne Bella Land, aka Trimble, is a British multi-disciplinary artist and poet based in London whose work spans across painting, drawing, sculpture, text, conceptual art, dance, live art/performance, sound-art/music, film, hypnosis and multi-media installation.  Work is in the Soho house permanent collection and select private collections across the UK, Europe and USA.  Her short film ‘Annex’, screened in Venice during Biennale 2017, showing around Europe since then, connects narration of the artist’s prose with moving image collage.  Music, art, dance, yoga and consciousness studies combine with an intensive background in Avant-garde Polish/Russian theatre under the tutelage of Leonidas Ossetynski and the legendary Jerzy Grotowski to inform her practice. Paintings have appeared in Modern Painters Magazine and Spin Magazine and critical writing includes an essay on Louise Bourgeois alongside her interview with the artist published in‘Third Text’ (Samuel Francis/Routledge 1998).  The artist appears within works by some of the innovators in modern photography, such as Matthew Rolston, Philip Jones Griffiths and David La Chapelle.  Currently Land is working on a book of illustrated poetry with intent to publish and translate into performance and other mediums.