Cast a cold eye
On life, on death,
Horseman, pass by!
Irish poet William Butler Yeats
June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939
Horseman, pass by!
Horseman, pass by!
abstracted painting blended
with arcane images
of ancient Egypt
suggesting influences
of the esoteric
and modernism
upon
Yeats
public domain Egyptology image: Internet Archive
painting 2003 S. McCabe
Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a stranger,
Only to someone who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.
Hafiz (or Hafez) a Persian poet: 1325 – 1390.
I find the vivid imagery in his poem, in a sense, circular.
Which explains my use of repeated images.
While addressing his echo across the centuries.
Poetic testimony a’shifting
mother barely
threadbare stirring
peas & porridge nine days old in the pot
shadows
a’shifting
golden vibrations overflow
cauldrons
circling
three places
the oak the stag
a’shifting
Black and white images influenced by readings of Ferdinand the Bull as a child
Ferdinand’s delight inhaling perfumed flowers beneath a gnarly tree
papery Spanish ink ascribing metamorphosis to performance
in emanations of the ancient, kinetically flowing spine
in rainfall of visionary code addressing wounds
strenuous chalking of shamanic timelines
body politic of dreamtime silence
battery pack wire testimony
pale butcher’s twine
binding frayed
poetics
June 10, 1974
Edinburgh, Scotland
Joseph Beuys:
Blackboards and drawings of pots from
Three Pots for the Poorhouse Action
Photo credit: Richard Demarco
Physics again standing on its head
Physicists discovering an upside – down world
The elementary particles comprising stars can leap
It seems
Across time (if there really is time) reappearing
And appearing in numerous locations at once
The simultaneous stars stretching across infinity
Are one and the same
Projections of one star
One star only we see here and there
As if altering as if shadowing our days and years
With a spectacularly aloof performance
Like the lover
You just can’t forget
Previously published in my fourth book of poetry Hierarchy of Loss (Ekstasis Editions 2007)
Digital art based on an ink sketch in my moleskin sketchbook.
Speculation into the investigation:
An inked manuscript penned by sure hand,
billowing dark Satanic mills,
a winged and weightless choir,
shadow of a blooming oak
across the bowling alley,
7 – Eleven coffee to go,
shoes with blinking lights.
Bukowski’s Bluebird and Blake’s Tyger
in performance.
We could say the ice arrives leaping like a cat.
And the cat silently contemplates windows and branches
before moving on.
My simple paraphrase reworking the short poem Fog. To address recent weather: silver & luminous with shattered trees & a million people without power. Upon us like a thief in the night.
Fog by Carl Sandburg: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174299
One question I would ask Carl Sandburg, whose answer would intrigue me greatly: Baudelaire or Scarborough Fair?
You have done well In the contest of madness.
You were brave in that holy war.
You have all the honorable wounds Of one who has tried to find love Where the Beautiful Bird Does not drink.
May I speak to you Like we are close And locked away together? Once I found a stray kitten And I used to soak my fingers In warm milk;
It came to think I was five mothers On one hand.
Wayfarer, Why not rest your tired body? Lean back and close your eyes.
Come morning I will kneel by your side and feed you. I will so gently Spread open your mouth And let you taste something of my Sacred mind and life.
Surely There is something wrong With your ideas of God
O, surely there is something wrong With your ideas of God
If you think Our Beloved would not be so Tender.
– The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the great Sufi Master
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
The smiling image of Jacqueline Kennedy in Dallas contrasting with the shock and horror she soon experienced has haunted me since my youth. Is it enough to say this Hafiz poem is about coming to terms with grief in a metaphysical context? I do not claim to be an expert on such things but with this project I attempt to address grief. I created digital variations of a coloured – pencil drawing of Mrs. Kennedy in Dallas, November 22, 1963. I used seven of these drawings for a collage series, including drawing & painting, on handmade Japanese paper for a 2003 exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of JFK’s death. The poetry video My Story Is Not My Own (below) continues the theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17LZ1XqubyU
The world through your window
is screened into rows of tiny cubes
that means we can remake
the world by shifting them
a pure pane of sky shines
from the pine’s arthritic roots
the library is strewn along the walk
which itself winds over
branches, bedrooms. Shadows of things start
elsewhere and cross where they might be cloud
the pedestrian’s two left eyes
regard the sun strolling on her leash
as they move cube by cube over the clear blue lawn
her heart is (not is like) a bird
The World Screened was previously published in Time Slip (Guernica Editions, 2010). John Oughton is a Toronto poet with five books published, and a professor at Centennial College.
I wanted to capture the sense of real/unreal within this poem’s surrealism. The piano motif relates to background music, or a composition, in which the poem seems to move… I juxtaposed pictorial elements playing off the poem’s (in part) bright, Miro-like mood as well as the more subtly expressed romantic, melancholy yearnings.
He said, I am old and
everything has a bitter
taint and besides
I have only these oddments
to offer; things broken,
unfinished, unused and I’m not even
sure why it is that I’ve
kept them so long.
But she saw how his body
radiated light and he carried
not just a jumble of wheels,
coils, springs but the very
ones she’d been needing to
mend the faltering
mechanisms of her heart.
And his eyes were pure
as a child’s
and she knew
from that moment on
she was his
entirely
Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Ireland. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Angel was first published in THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (ed John and Hilary Wakeman).
I found this love poem very moving, beautiful and rooted in reality. I was intrigued by deeply felt emotions relating to the word ‘Angel.’ The air and thought around the word Angel called for earth and water, both surface and interior, to flesh out the wishes and realizations being expressed and conceptualized. To create several of these images I remixed a photo of waves crashing onto a beach in California uploaded by user Tewy on Wikipedia Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/deed.en
Fragments…traces… of a mathematical formula by Nikolaos Manolopulos appear ever so faintly, unknowable, perhaps in three images, from my first gestures integrating Wikipedia Commons material with my ink drawing.
A trout flares at dusk,
silver scales
in the heron’s ears.
Colin Carberry is an Irish-Canadian poet and translator and the director of the Linares International Literary Festival (Mexico).
I am struck, reading this haiku, by the heron hearing silver scales. I imagine sunset splashing chaotically on thin, reflective surfaces and the heron’s acute sensors turning and tuning. I remember summers (it seems long ago) driving cross-country, through the night, listening to the radio. Car radios were manually operated. With your free hand you would find the spot where there was no static, bringing in the station clearly. Adjusting the dial frequently to receive the perfect reception. Ambient static would slowly creep back in and you would fine tune again listening carefully. Though, unlike the heron, your aim was enjoyment not survival. Surely our ancestors knew the life and sounds of water, within and without, like a heron. The poet, crafting this poem, brings us to the edge of our deepest memories.
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