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.
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.