poemimage

Where text meets image. Where the visual intersects the literary. Often posting 1st drafts and editing in (almost) real time.

Tag: love

Beneath the Gaze of Spiritual Machinery

History will not tell you this but I was there

a gnarly oak branch growing out my back 

animals conceal buried acorns

Julius Caesar ignites his clothing

Jesus Christ recites the Brehon Laws of ancient Ireland

Mary Magdalene instructs me to bring my own basket

typewriters made of ice float in the sea

poets climb staircases carved into ice mountains

your neighbour conceals snakeskin sheathing his heart

the guardians of upper eternity affix their shadows

maps made of powdered sugar swirl into the wind

I forget the knotted scarf

I forget to die

I wash lead cisterns

my eyelids purple with prophetic script

beneath the gaze of spiritual machinery

I said take me with you.

Spiritual Machinery, digital drawing, S. McCabe

Ovid

I  gaze upon her at the walk-in clinic

only the two of us

she carries a brilliant white bowl made of clay

her name scratched into the white glaze

I said haven’t I met you before

she said a long time ago

in the library at Alexandria

I said why are you here

she said the people who started the fire

arrested me for reading Ovid

they sentenced me to life without honey

I said what is the bowl for she didn’t speak

I thought my conversation bothersome

& fell quiet

she said I read Ovid at the speed of light

I said like a honeybee

she said honeybees are slower than the speed of light

I snap my fingers like a jazz musician 

You got it!

Honeybees are slower than the speed of light!

She said it might be the title of a brilliant love poem

about snails

I said two snails conceptually in love

she said you have to become healthy

I said what’s wrong with me

she said consider velocity

consider clay pots breathing in a cave

unfurling billowing sail-skins of air

unfurling billowing sail-skins of sunshine

the Dead Sea Scrolls

rolled and telepathic

secretly rescued in the fire 

she winks one eye

I snap my fingers

she said Im not saying anything

a voice calls her number

two snails conceptually move about in the sunshine

wrapped in honey-coloured sail-skins billowing

unfurling honey-coloured sail-skins often

I am healthy often

the people who start the fire sentence her to honey found secretly on cliff-sides

I walk in circles upon the rounded peak of a vertical mound 

chosen because it has no shade trees

I am healthy often eating honey

the brilliant afternoon drenched in honey-coloured telepathic heat

swirling like butter from the ancient cows

a deer pushes his nose into the brilliant white pages 

I read Ovid listening to a brilliant buzzing sound.

It is Not a Willow Green but Empty

It is not a willow green but empty cascading

the lady

pausing to catch her breath

pulls aside her buggy bulging with groceries

so I can pass chest deep in freezing waters

wearing a necklace of antelope teeth.

photo S. Mccabe, Toronto

It is not a willow green but empty crouched like guardian stalactites

the lady said we all make one big mistake

look at me now

I cannot walk to the store

mountains of ice destroy the great cities.

Willow beside the Ashbridge Estate

It is not a willow green but empty burning like a sacred candle nine minutes north

I brush my hand against green leaves

on the less-dignified bush mere shrubbery

encroaching upon the sidewalk & bleeding on strangers

I said green arrives each spring

in oceans of hope

the heart balances the head

one wonders why.

It is not a willow green but empty shimmering like a waterfall

aiming directed breath like a mastodon

she inhales tottering

she said the shadow words green but empty

I reach my hand into the city bush green but empty…

stretch my fingers into spaces large enough to fill a universe

stems, twisted branches and shadows

impersonate an atom

a pearl in deep space.

It is not a willow green but empty looking straight ahead like a god

we dance at each other stomping

I cast shadows over the sidewalk

my heart balancing my head

are you a poet

in cave language her shadow replies

I say only it is the truth

pulling her buggy into a mist made of pearls

pulling

one big mistake.

You Told Me You’d Be Home By Ten

Original

Neolithic

Watching you in the shadows rip your poems into pieces, tossing them like blossoms cascading into a bucket of glowing coals.

The shadows of your hands flutter perfectly against the wall, the shadow of your fingers tearing shapes into pieces, tossed up & falling down, the sun at two o’clock highlighting shadows like birds sliding down the wall.

Nobody imagined your face streaked or the palms of your hands covered in coal dust.

One torn fragment flies through smoke and sticks to your streaked face in the shadow of a cherry tree, the bucket heavy as an anchor, the last of your words going up in smoke.

I fell in love with the maps of distant time, unexplained distant time & the Neolithic, I fell in love with the Neolithic – your dark hair,

Dark as some mystery strain of ancient wheat shimmering in the coolness of twilight, pressing your toes and fingers into the clay floor, stretching your body from horizon to horizon

Balancing a voluminous golden disc upon your delicate, curving spine. I’ve learned the language of discs and cherry blossoms, your fingers and smoke. I bury my animal cry.

Your shadows are hunger.

The eye blinks once in the gloomy shadow of the soul’s laboratory. A shattered disc showers fragments. Clay – no, not clay – gold. Hollow doors open and close, concealing this world. You seize the universal remote. Your fingertips press TV channels bright as a sun. The Clay Channel. The Gold Channel.

You gave me an indelible precision I mistook for esoteric ambiguity. Shadows conceal and reveal. I gave you tools for repairing machinery. You asked where this machinery might be found.

In the Legion parking lot snakes fall from the sky. You sing them down into the branches, how you sang! They wound themselves down, sliding and wet, their hearts tinted with gold, zigzagging into liquid angles and spitting hieroglyphics, falling upon your shoulders like rain loosening your hair.

Cauldrons along your spine bubbled over spilling gold. I was drawn as if by a magnet to your magical hysteria on the night you promised you would never shatter again.

You raved about a coastline where we might find ourselves half-buried.

You ridiculed mannerism in cinema but never did you ridicule Suprematism. In the shadow of a tower you open a drawer filled with soft gloves and the sounds of night. You pull charcoal up to your elbow. The Suprematism of your eyes lined with kohl.

A movement crosses the palm of your hand dividing stone from water. Your breath fills your spine with heat, a motionless reflection shimmers, spreading to the edge of a stone radius.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Your blood has not forgotten this stone.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        I read Neolithic in full in February and it took me ten minutes to read with a fairly brisk delivery. I have edited it substantially (and spontaneously) for this posting. I hope I have conveyed the essence of the poem even knowing how much is missing…

 

Tilting at Windmills

Lyrics by Bob Dylan from I Want You & Don Quixote by Pablo Picasso

Happy Mirror Day

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Alternative ending:

10

Or:

911

You Send Me by Sam Cooke (& the Hamangian Cubists)

APabloPicasso-Girl-with-Mandolin-Fanny-Tellier-1910PabloPicasso-Girl-with-Mandolin-Fanny-Tellier-1910X FINALPabloPicasso-Girl-with-Mandolin-Fanny-Tellier-1910

Although cubistic, these artworks pre-date Cubism (and Sam Cooke) by roughly 7,000 years. Hamangia culture is a Late Neolithic archaeological culture of Dobruja (Romania and Bulgaria) between the Danube and the Black Sea and Muntenia in the south.

With Sam CookePabloPicasso-Girl-with-Mandolin-Fanny-Tellier-1910

Cubist image: Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), late Spring, 1910

red

You Send Me by Sam Cooke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNco-e2CXuo

mic check
 I do not claim credit or copyright for original source material in this post.
sitting he

If You Decide

a

We need to learn an almost extinct language I will study with you.

e

We need to live among the people whose language is almost lost I will join you and also learn traditional survival skills.

c

To leave me for the shaman I will drive a stake through his medicine box, realize my grave error instantly, and escape, although barely.

d

To beckon and summon, seducing me with whispers that reach into my blood, I will return.

b

I must stand trial for my crimes against love and magic, I will escape, again.

fadeout

If you decide to hypnotize me while I sleep I will seal my heart against your vibrations and embrace the crazed dream of modernity. Because I am a fool. Weary of surviving on roots. Even the root of you. Even the root of me.

fadeout

If you decide I must seal my heart against the sounds you once made I will throw the window open a final time, upon your murmur coursing & drenched in starlight, intersected by a highway carrying the disappeared.

fadeout

If you decide to remain quiet I will train my ear to hear the sunlight falling.

fadeout

If you decide it is my duty to dig out the wooden stake I will return in the dead of night speaking an extinct language.

fadeout

Photo credit: Renee Perle, a Romanian Jewish girl who moved to Paris, is famous as the first muse of the famous French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), who is considered one of the leading photographers of the 20th century.

http://www.romanianculture.org/personalities/Renee_Perle.htm

shadowssoftly 3violet detail 1

Elevator

a

I read a quote by art critic Robert Hughes comparing painters: There is more death in a Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion…

detail d

Then I heard a song by an artist we saw in concert. Who spun magic, jewelled webs we fell into after chasing each other through twilight circumstance. Twilight and traffic.

detail d fade

 The labyrinth ruled by Janus one level below.

bb

The shadows jousting on the street didn’t remind me of your fingertips, or your January dancing, or your honeyed cake.

detail b

I didn’t make that joke in the elevator.

aa

Carried, like some tragic Pieta, into the stream. The playing of a wooden flute sounding in the reeds. My hands flat against your skin. The temperature slipping.

dfaded

Forbidden music within your temple as quiet and still as polished stones. Awash in the fragrance of whispered moments. As shiny as a silver bracelet, a tunnel, a hook.

detail d

I’m not even sure I heard anything.

detail c

Did such music ever exist.

c

I’ve never wondered how my fine shoes, sewn of ancient parchment & soft as a silk purse, got so wet.

detail a

Nor have I contemplated Gustave Courbet’s

detail d

Trout.

detail d fade

Or the absence of all that is not

detail d faded twice

Trout.

detail fade

While gazing into the eye of the fish,

future detail four

A future sun.

future detail threejanus fish

Credits for original images: The Trout by Gustave Courbet, 1873. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958, based on the play by Tennessee Williams starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. Skyscraper and Tunnels by Italian Futurist painter Fortunato Depero, 1930. Pieta by Michelangelo.

a

I do not own the original images or claim copyright. I have created new images for non-commercial purposes of commentary under Fair Use provisions of copyright law.

aa