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
Being deeply loved by someone
gives you strength
while loving someone deeply
gives you courage.
You left when I told you I was curious,
I never said that I was brave
So Long, Marianne, Leonard Cohen
Curving a slow corner
You pass through
your own
history
Your mirror image
Picking up speed
Speaking in code
Spirit animals
beneath the northern lights
drag what has fallen
Absorbed
and flung
simultaneously
A spherical puzzle
delivered you
Does the wind agree
***
I was reflecting on personal things with this post. Changes, new directions, letting the past go, that sort of thing. There was no poem to begin with simply ideas & words I’ve been thinking about.
***
My attraction to twinning these two images was in discovering similar design motifs. A centre circular repetition. The lines on the sides of the meter resembling folded wings. The art deco, industrial perfect for a prison design of the meter contrasted with the wild bird hemmed in by a border & religious orthodoxy.
Although I suspect the early illuminators of manuscripts had druidic sensibilities and conveyed within their images the beauty of pagan relationships with the earth I can’t find anything similar to say about the parking meter. Although it does have a certain Dracula’s Castle type charm.
The parking meter imposed order upon free space. We might even say ‘wild’ spaces occurring in a common setting if we want to draw an analogy with pagan spirituality being ‘tamed.’
***
The first parking meter in the United States was installed in 1935
(during the Great Depression & dust storms)
in Oklahoma City.
***
The Book of Dimma is an 8th century Irish illuminated manuscript now
housed in Trinity College, Dublin
featuring the symbol of an eagle
representing
John the Evangelist.
***
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…
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.
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)
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
poemimage 