For Revery, by Mark Salerno
a+bend press, San Francisco
29 pp.

From the polarizing noise of our time comes Salernoís 29 page reverie, linked or interrupted by page turning and/or titles . Themes, word clusters, torn images meander through "For Revery": our just born century looks at its aged face. Like leaves carried into the present from the symbolist tree, O-s, a sound, a conceit, and a breathing wander from one poem to the other. A bit absent minded, a bit nostalgic they carry a Verlaine-like rococo flavor: "O reverie of my truest encounters," O journey of desire O elsewhere reverie." The "O" appears also on Jill Koetke Thompsonís cover, a sign floating in a sky smeared with charcoal clouds on top of a windy horizon, a black cutout framing words which appear in the text: "famous nicknack," befuddled longing," "probative experience." An injured world of "non plot followed by plot followed by etcetera" escapes itself in these disjoined choreographies of daydreaming: "Do human beings sing as not to hear the simple smash-up of anything around?"
     Exercising reverie is a Pierrot-like persona, sadly gay as all Pierrots are, a foolish jingle man "famous for airy." Closeby is his double. Together they are in search for the irrecoverable, "the most simple world," "a non rigid airship". A troublesome sheriff and cowboys are there too, and a painted girl :"the way she held her hand in the picture"Ö "a skated elegance never to be still." And painting is to be given up: "quitting painting was like breaking a leg" as busy political amnesiacs think "luckily there are more important things / every day one wonders what they could be." Salernoís "Pinkís" is dedicated to R.B.Kitaj one of the few modern painters who seized tradition in order to visualize and understand the (always political) present. Paraphrasing Kafka, Kitaj noted on one of his paintings:"with oneís posterior legs one is still glued to the world of the father and with oneís waving anterior legs one is searching for new ground." Possibly one of Salernoís questions at the back of his reveries.
     Posing and refined, yet fresh and moving in their theatricality, these reveries are aerial, fragile, with matter out of the way. Kierkegaard: "This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety. Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside of itself." We liked to think of Revery as a person, to whom reading talks.

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