#bruce bond

[goreprofonde]

- David Keplinger and Bruce Bond, Whoever is not home grows sick.

[tomoleary]

Bruce Bond - War of the Worlds Illustration Original Art (undated)

Source

[contremineur]

When, in the dark ages of the East, the Mongols took the heart of the city and poured in, room after room, to cut a path through the bodies in their way, they loaded up the illuminated books, the many wildflowers of Islam hand-sewn, penned, edged in gold, and made of them a bridge across the Tigris, shaky at best, to lead men from the spoils of their labour. This is the story of the House of Wisdom, how centuries gathered there to pool the gems of medicine and metaphysics, until the river took them, leaving us the ache of knowing just enough to ache. If history repeats, it does so without us. It returns the way a criminal returns, or a tongue to the space that was a tooth. When the bodies of the philosophers broke the surface, they floated here and there, littering the shore, their wounds drained into the current, to stain the glass not red exactly, in spite of what you hear, but rust, a fading scar of dirt and iron. The greatness of a city is how it kneels near the water, to beat its laundry there, or flood the fields in their season, to carry what: fennel, flax, cinnamon, a scholar. Beyond the necessary, a river draws the mourner toward something she cannot find— it helps her nonetheless—or the believer toward reconciliation with her god. If we hear there rumours of water going on without end, it is none the less loss that speaks. What book would not be a bridge. Or the grave of some sad misconception. Somewhere still there is a volume that says what the river of the dead cannot, that once a library fell into the Tigris, and these waters, that are a widow’s friend, ran black with ink, mile after mile.

Bruce Bond, Ink

source unknown

[alphamecha-mkii]

War of the Worlds by Bruce Bond

[bibliomancyoracle]

The messenger comes and says there is a wound.

*

from “Therapon, II, 4-1″ by Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick

[desertsongpdf]

"A life, we know, is complex. / But death is simple. A place to talk shit, / to license grief, or barring that, to kill it."

— My Death Space Dot Com by Bruce Bond

[pigmenting]

Our darkness breathes more deeply in the dark.

Bruce Bond, from “Lamella” published in Poetry

[all1980s-blog]

Alien Ship Lands on Voyager 2 Record, by Bruce Bond (1981?)

Young space cadets in the 1980s learned about space exploration in Odyssey Magazine, very difficult to find today on the secondary market.  This cover image for their August 1981 issue tied in to the issue’s Voyager spacecraft Nasa launched in 1977, in the hopes that an alien species will discover it and decode its messages inside.  This is a depiction of such a possible encounter.