The transistor radio beneath my pillow
Like a Rolling Stone
Bob Dylan making something new
ancient again.
A Study, No.1
1901
Rudolph Eickemeyer (American, 1862-1932)
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Accession Number: 1972.644.2
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Toronto street, March, 2014
all was still
There’s a new rattle in the wind, a new texture to what blows
around the continents. Spinifex bushes dot the outback’s
blowing sand, its slopes and hollows. Mixed in with red
sandstorm dust: gum wrappers, foil bags, plastic water bottles,
empty tinnies. In the old days, says the Uluru guide, the desert
and its people were self-sufficient – what they discarded
enriched the land. A second Gonwanda is emerging, the mid-
Pacific Gyre’s garbage patch, mirror to the four thousand pieces
of space flotsam hurtling through the stars. Daily I trouble myself
with the household’s petty excess, jam jars and junk mail,
a bag from every airport I’ve visited. I carry twenty unmatched
lids and eight containers to the bin, the half-life of glass
nearing that of plutonium. Why not create something of value
with all this carboniferous energy? Yesterday a thick grey
cloudbank was towed across the evening sky by a thousand
invisible strongmen hauling in the snowstorm, obscuring
the sunset. I have finally decided that my preference is cremation.
Maureen Hynes is a past winner of the Gerald Lampert Award and the Petra Kenney Poetry Award (England). She has published three books of poetry, Harm’s Way, Rough Skin, and the most recent, Marrow, Willow from Pedlar Press. Maureen is poetry editor for Our Times magazine. http://www.maureenhynes.com
I modified a photograph from Wikipedia Commons (in images 3, 4, and 6) of descending stone stairs in the ruins of Vlotho castle, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, posted by Wiki user Tubs, GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
“When it is gone,
passion leaves behind a dark longing for itself,
and in disappearing
throws us one last
seductive glance.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Remember
that time you were young
and you saw something
you almost forgot
and the faster you ran
the slower you arrived
Van Gogh
was a bit like that
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
I taste the light
coming through the window.
(from “Odysseus and Circe,” Anne Simpson)
Pouring, like you,
into my heart,
washing over my skin
falling
through glass
lightly
flowing waves and circling particles
currents of surprise, delight.
I am water, and I am a gull, flying …
a gulf wide and deep as Mexico
replenishing after spills and spoils
You fish me, for stars
for pearls
lost boys and missing girls
fallen into the hole of our fears
O is an open mouth,
one closed eye,
and one open
a black hole where light cannot flow
out
now light from the window of opportunity
swallows us whole
and we shine
we
shine.
Ellen S. Jaffe’s most recent book of poetry, Skinny-Dipping with the Muse (Guernica Editions, 2014) has recently been launched. Tasting the Light is a new poem, not yet published. Ellen lives in Hamilton, writes poetry and prose, and teaches writing in schools and community centres.
Like a certain famous red wheel barrow
so much depends
upon the red
wagon.
My brothers decided to light up a tree. Not sure how much damage the (few) matches did to the knobby crevice where the unfortunate had, seemingly, been struck once upon a time by lightning. Nevertheless, our father, with an abundance of caution ordered buckets of water to make sure the riverbank didn’t burn. Perhaps to teach a lesson, perhaps out of a respect for fire, he kept the buckets coming. Eventually my brothers tired and remembered the wheel had been invented. Wheels and fire. And for whatever reason, like the wheel barrow for William Carlos Williams, much depends upon the red wagon.
Photo of the wagon from the internet, copyright unknown, used non commercially to refashion a new work for purposes of commentary.
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