One very sunny day an egg shall envelop my shadow. An eagle shall be overhead, perhaps a bit to the east or west, lowering into the updraft, on the hunt & returning to the nest satisfied.
A robin swooping into shade swallows a delicately tangled necklace of humming insects. A heron drapes her wing upon a sloping stone & swallows magnetic frogs who prophesize.
A hen clucking like a sticky typewriter key repeats the sound of curvilinear incantations, unceasing, between echoes of breath, sleep & a sudden kerfuffle.
Photo S. McCabe
Egg, tell me how we shall begin.
Photo S. McCabe
Egg, tell me how we shall accomplish our mission.
Photo S. McCabe
One very sunny day an egg enveloped my shadow. I was minding my own business. I felt my blood in the sun-blood of my ancestors.
I felt them go ashore. I felt them carve and chisel enveloped by shadows. I felt them carry fire. I felt them carry a weighted promise.
Photo S. McCabe
Egg, tell me who & what, alchemically one very sunny day, you shall become in traveling a distant path to yourself: An eagle, a fluent ballerina, or a sun-flecked tidal wave. An astronaut, cosmonaut or vimani pilot. A Spanish painter rising like cream in early Modernism.
Or the hen caught up in a sudden kerfuffle. Or the heron draping elegant ink-like feathers. Or the barrel-chested north wind whiplashing trees. An opera singer who resounds triumphantly or a trumpeter swan harkening. A blue parakeet, nodding his fuzzy head, asleep & dreaming.
Or a sea turtle diving in the dark. The Ice Age thawing, a solar flare consuming or a fairy-tale princess personifying an archetype. A sphinx-like barn owl in the rafters, a barn swallow exiting a hole, or an amber bale of hay. A cosmic chant vibrating hearts. Fire-flame in a bowl. In a deep cauldron.
The language of trees. Dotted zigzags on grey stone carved with a chisel. A dotted triple spiral carved with a chisel. A feather wafting into a mist. A deer-god in a yoga position. The full moon fully incandescent. An escapee escaping hollow & corrupt civilizational madness. A druid-like hero, positioned in the now, opening portals to before. I promise I will tell nobody.
Photo S. McCabe
Egg, tell me where & when we shall meet again.
Photo S. McCabe
One very sunny day an egg enveloped my shadow & all shadows.
Photo S. McCabe
One very sunny day an egg enveloped salt & the volatile, shadows of the mighty & ancient world, honey & vinegar, shadows of this world in the light of this world, goats hanging in a market & geraniums in shade, clandestine meetings, the animated shadows we imagine spilling forward, the final page of a novel steeped in symbolism, shadows of a future dread we pledge to circumvent, sacrificing & shattering our personal selves to preserve, as guardians, the original innocent nourishment of joy & play, for all children & childhood, unfolding like the age-old unseen.
For the original brilliant sun. For the mechanics and gears of illumination, opposite to opaque – yet weighted with antiquity. Like an ancient accordion book, one very sunny day, unfolding & evolving.
Egg, show me those secret markings you made on the trees.
I don’t know how this egg came to be (unfortunately) on the sidewalk but the encounter stayed with me. This posting developed over a couple of weeks. First I put up ‘scene of the crime’ photographs along with the first draft of a poem. Then I edited the poem, with changes to the text visible in almost ‘real time.’ Then I created digital (Photoshop) manipulations of the photos using colour. Then it dawned on me to check a symbol dictionary for meanings associated with this entity and shape.
In The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images I read: ‘The egg is the mysterious ‘center’ around which unconscious energies move in spiral-like evolutions, gradually bringing the vital substance to light…’ If the egg had not been on the sidewalk (with yolk & egg white spilled out the cracked shell & spread across the concrete) I doubt I would have thought of an egg at that moment. Thus, my imagination turned synchronicity into images & text. One might also say sound. The egg, there and then in loss, became a poetic vessel for hope & empathy.
I told the painter, who had lived on a boat in England’s waterways, my idea for a poetry video about JFK’s widow in Dallas. I want to use a passage from my mother’s journal about tree shadows. She walked past a garage sale and picked up a book with pages blowing in the wind. It was Jacqueline Kennedy’s biography. She took it as a sign & told her ex-husband, a cinematographer, about my project. He traded time and expertise for my paintings & we worked on many projects, over many years.
Yes, it seems I have interrupted doing my ‘to do’ list of what must be done. Yes, it seems I have started working on a new roll of Italian mid-weight paper using B&W media: both inks and gouache.
Fish-woman? Wise-woman? Shaman? Doesn’t feel like fibre-optics.
This new B&W work takes me full circle, in a way, to when I was a young, self-taught, beginning artist working with a 01 fine-tip, refillable, Rapidograph pen. I laboured over intricate, intuitive work, often overnight – stippling and scratching away at the tiniest details – dark and surreal, somewhat psychedelic. I have expanded on how I work with B&W since (of course – one does expand). As the Grateful Dead sang, What a long strange trip it’s been…I sold offset prints of my ink drawings door to door to students in university residences and the infamous Rochdale College in Toronto. I still remember encounters from those long-ago days and still have many of those drawings.
That may be Boudica in among natural forms and abstracted Celtic motifs.
It requires a bit of finesse to juggle ink & gouache side by side. You integrate two mediums, in one image, hoping the unique properties of each medium stand out. Each approaches the other: from here or there, keeping its own edge, and relationship with water.
A physician ‘nurses’ an anvil with a baby bottle – a deliberately absurd image.
Although I began (Whoosh!) without any plan, this work immediately communicated a specific theme. Two themes actually, I will play them off against each other, intertwining them. One is a ‘reverse metaphor’ of sorts – highlighting an impossiblity.
A wee seahorse appears in gouache.
And the other depicts a figure in mythical folklore (who existed historically). I will abridge her mission, into my overall theme of juxtaposing polarities within a dense, intricate ‘jungle of the psyche.’ I will reassign her, respectfully… Once again the ancient juxtaposes against the ‘now.’
I was surprised by the sense of ‘portent’ in the composition.
I have not corrected these iphone8 photos, taken under less than ideal conditions. I started to ‘adjust’ them in Photoshop and decided it was too time-consuming. Below we see an example of ‘drawing’ beside ‘painting.’
A ‘star’ within the breast of the bird breathing ‘fire.’
Just like with my ‘long blue painting’ I am working on the floor.
Green tape (not very sticky) helped me divide sections for photography.I must remember to get those soft knee-pads for gardening to help with working on the floor.
Often in my poemimage postings I post the first draft of a poem and spend days editing the material. However, what I am saying here is pretty much just ‘black and white’ facts (excuse the pun).
Face to face with a bird breathing fire…Abstracted face with emotion…I imagine a sound to go with this…I may have ‘adjusted’ or ‘corrected’ this image in Photoshop.
With ink I am both drawing and using a looser, painterly style, with wash, dripping, splattering, and expressiveness, which can be rather unforgiving. The gouache, although paint itself, is used more deliberately, adding depth, and solving problems.
A series of digital images reimagining the Celtic deer who appears near the end of my long painting ‘Druidica Blue: Deja Vu (Cave Art For the New Psyche).’ Here she is reimagined as a ‘double-deer on the river with a blue slash.’
Reimagining the imagined. The Celtic deer discovers herself in a geometric composition with a goddess manipulating a moon symbol, also from the original painting.
Reimagining the imagined. She is reimagined in two-dimensional profile where ‘dry sand is covering reeds and half-buried, disintegrated reed boats.’
Reimagining the imagined. I reimagine her being ofthe sun. In this composition two diagonal rods exit or enter a window in a dome. Diagonal lines connect her to the window.
Reimagining the imagined. She is reimagined here within a defined space. Perhaps an open air temple. I include a section of the original painting.
Reimagining the imagined. I remember painting the curvilinear antlers and feeling the texture of the paper on the floor. In Photoshop I (somehow) created a ‘brass brooch in refracted sunlight.’
Reimagining the imagined. The Celtic deer experiences a sudden buoyant springtime: surging youth & chlorophyll. Excuse the double watermarks. In doing so much layering and relayering I lose track of it.
Reimagining the imagined. Three primary influences (Matisse, Cubism, cartoons) create the sensation of a distant seashore I will only visit in my imagination.
Reimagining the imagined. In this Cubistic image the Celtic deer seems to enter the edges of a reverberaton.
I said frequencies come into view roaring like a whip-poor-will.
To within hearing range.
Within broadcasting range.
Within a marvelous & manifesting zone.
Except I didn’t say tone. I said zone.
Investigate the marvelous:
Track back to
a pulsing frequency
imagined as gossamer,
like that clear syrup you poured on pancakes,
in the air & not even sticky.
Except I didn’t say ode. I said code.
Remember that old song about a tomato,
You say: toe-MAH-toe
I say: toe-MAY-toe…
Except I didn’t say tomato at all.
I said alchemical frequencies.
Dialing landlines into clay.
Calibrate a fine-tuning.
I heard the eyelid open.
How does one hear from such a distance
if there is such a distance.
Track vibrations to their source
to evolving devolution
to devolving evolution.
Morphing into law or code.
Law or code tracked to a source
follow a firefly spiraling.
The source of the code fomenting sound.
A whip-poor-will swooping in a gyre, invisible to the bird of prey.
Remember that old song about a tomato,
You say: toe-MAH-toe
I say: toe-MAY-toe...
Except I didn’t say tomato at all.
I said thrum:
Amber-golden honeybees
pollinate the sun.
I said hum:
Rapid eye-movement beep.
Divining rod-flicker beep.
Levitating hypnopompic sun-stone beep.
Translucent wing-sheath
humming.
I bought a boomerang.
Silence! Hush!
Let you and me (one of us the fool) embroider a spoon large as a tapestry.
To spoof high officials with mock Greek Tragedy: How to SpoonfeedHoney.
To perform the pagaentry with sardonic flourish and redeeming severity.
Except I didn’t say money. I said honey.
I practice hooking my wrist.
At the market, behind seven hanging skins, I bought a boomerang inscribed with carving.
Expect
OM.
Beep
OM.
Amber-golden sun-stream OM
beeping hum, beeping thrum...
I purchase drops of oil annointing the boomerang.
A tacked up handbill publicizes theatrical spectacle of the highest form.
To sound
OM
spanning divinity to infinity.
Eyelid ascending…
A whip-poor-will descending
glides into the window light,
scratches at the stone of night.
OM sounding gyres, OM sounding omphalos
infinitely divine.
Infinity sounding
OM,
One eyelid open,
fingertip
shiatsu beneath the soil.
A silence of soil
in divine science, divine omen
infinitely OM.
A thrumming bluebird, thrumming gnat, thrumming comet,
(infinitely divine)
thrumming the speed of sound tearing a hole in shrouded time.
I conceal the boomerang within the folds of my Turin robe: echo of the divine.
Echo of the divine – tear a hole in time,
hurling, aimed into the mission,
sailing to omniscient vision
& to return
& to return.
In Turin return to shrouded silence,
raise the eyelid,
visualize OM.
In absent space, in disintegration
visualize OM.
OM onward OM in hallucinations of the heart.
Investigate the manifesting:
Track back to
a pulsing frequency
imagined as gossamer,
like that clear syrup you poured on pancakes,
in the air & not even sticky.
Remember that old song about a tomato,
You say:toe-MAH-toe
I say: toe-MAY-toe…
Except I didn’t say tomato at all.
Beneath the eyelid all is silent.
Silent night.
Tomato, summer 2022Photograph in Wikipedia I digitally rendered for purposes of non-commercial commentary.
Philip S. Callahan, Ph.D, influenced this poem, if I may call it a poem, with his unique research, discoveries, and ideas about sound & transmission related to the Irish round towers.
Nearer the end than the beginning in my ‘wordless poem’ book Nevermore Together, the protagonist (who is nameless, well because…) escapes from a prison. The floor cracks – opening to a tunnel. A tunnel that whooshes him a very long and winding distance, sort of a ‘birth canal’ or portal. But he doesn’t reappear as a newborn. Perhaps, though, he engages the world in a ‘newly born’ fashion.
Linocut print in my wordless book Nevermore Together (2014) The Porcupine’s Quill Press
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