SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Fourteen
GERALD FLEMING
After Magritte's "The Discovery of Fire"
—La Découverte Du Feu (1934)
I came to the materials with humility, certain that feeling couldn't be expressed in words—even music inadequate—only sculpture could bring it forth—solid, formed, bent, reformed until sound itself solidified, all light escaped. The mockingbirds, incessant, interruptive, hurt my ears—I hated them, so intent was I to sculpt metal, touch stone. My hands bled at the bench, I bandaged them. Sleep-masked by day, spot-lit by night, half-drunk half the time, feverish the other, I didn't know what I was forming—it was touch, it was brass & torch, tube, it was weld & braise then pour hot pitch then twist & bend again, burnish, ears stoppered. Self was heat, was precision, & soon I understood that sound itself guided me, tone through bone, and at last it was done, only the dry ice of my history left; then you came, my bright flame: picked up what I'd made, played.
Gerald Fleming lives in Northern California, USA. His most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop (Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn). Among his other titles are One (Hanging Loose), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). At the end of the last century he edited and published Barnabe Mountain Review, and has since edited the limited-edition magazine One (More) Glass. He taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco's public schools.
