Lovers
Swept up by a spark
A kiss after dark
Beneath a bridge
Shadows
Whispering
Soon
The future cascading
Tarkovsky studies music and Arabic
Soon
He will create
Ivan’s Childhood
Winning top prize at the Venice Film Festival
“Tarkovsky…
captures life as a reflection,
life as a dream.”
– Ingmar Bergman
On the bridges of Sochi
Beneath starlight
Hand in hand
Lovers
Cascading
A scene from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNiVFCWMrqI
Blake’s ocean
A gas station
Black medicine
In a vial
You said I thought I was Jesus
You said I thought I was Jesus
In exile
We handled snakes
I was yours truly
I was yours truly
I swallowed a shot of ink
We faded
We faded
Vibrantly
In retrospect we were children
In retrospect we were children
At the carnival
Deep sea diving
The
black and white
television
flickers
reconfiguring
now
*
Flowers blooming
with
signs & symbols
reconfigure
a
flickering
*
My father
on the sofa
refolding
the creased and worn
shaking his head
Step forward
sideways & back
in
physical education class
repeating the Fox Trot
with L
again Jingle Bell Rock
she quivers and laughs
flat feet she offers
we were rocking
no reason
to watch the clock
*
C
my friend
fingers aglow
his urgent hand
Introducing The Beatles
I was torn
in steam the flowers were worn
*
C & L
exhaling
into the frosted black air
cloaking almost touching
one another
oceans of diamonds
rolling overhead
*
I couldn’t make out every word
the album cradled like an
illuminated manuscript
under his arm
*
My gloved finger
drawing in white snow
uncovering the dark metal
of a late model sedan
*
I Want to Hold Your Hand
A dinner party ceremony for
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
*
Cellophane flowers
dissolving
in crystal glasses
*
Comets curving
free fall
a sign
*
B, D & R asleep already
I walk beneath
into
awakening sparrow song
tiny electric sitars flitter
through branches green & brown
*
Translucent animals bounding leap
*
The solstice pulsing in waves
a pushing tide
subsides
*
I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
to stop my mind from wandering
Aluminum & ink folio
jukebox affixed to the counter
Strawberry Fields Forever
*
T dressed in black
opening a black umbrella
hitchhiking after dark
*
Living is easy with eyes closed…
What a trip to travel
through space & time emotionally and imagistically
enhanced
by these Liverpool musician/storyteller
icons of the cultural landscape
***
Introducing The Beatles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFWXBn2d1d8
***
Jingle Bell Rock (Bobby Helms)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itcMLwMEeMQ
***
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYRSgbDw7xA
***
Strawberry Fields Forever
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nehRB1FTeTo
***
I Want to Hold Your Hand
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipADNlW7yBM
***
Photo credit: CBS photo archives – Comet: Visoki Decani Monastery, Metohia, Yugoslavia, 1330 (approx)
I do not own the copyright to these works have simply reconfigured for non commercial purposes of commentary
***
Petulant sun quarrels with crabbed sky
It probes, prods, sneaks
Through gaps in broken cloud,
Catches the crests of waves that roll
In deep swells across the estuary.
Gales lash the craggy headland
Pummel long-stemmed grass into submission;
Rain shards pierce weathered faces
While wrens search out the whin’s snug core.
It is midsummer’s day and Nature rages:
Brother Man, row back, row back,
Our world is not, is not, yours to destroy.
Mike Gallagher lives in splendid isolation in Lyreacrompane, County Kerry, Ireland. His collection ‘Stick on Stone’ is published by Revival Press.
For she, whose parts maintainde a perfect musique,
Whose beautie shin’de more then the blushing morning,
Who much did passe in state the stately mountaines,
in straightnes past the Cedars of the forrests,
Hath cast me wretch into eternall evening,
By taking her two Sunnes from these dark vallies.
Or to approach this romantic doldrum from another angle:
Hath cast me into a perfect musique…
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.
The Lover Compareth His State to a Shippe
in Perilous Storme Tossed on the Sea
The Lover Sheweth How He Is Forsaken of Such
as He Sometime Enjoyed
Ys Yt Possible
What shulde I saye
The Lover Complayneth the Unkindness of His Love
Biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wyatt_(poet)
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.
The beasts of the forest
Wishing us well
In poemimage May 2012 a Rilke poem using the image below. I happened upon it today & considered: Is this figure dancing or dowsing. The title came to me while manipulating layers in Photoshop. A wee ditty followed soon after.
Additional image:
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?
poemimage 