I worked on the back porch early
drinking black coffee
like in a trance
creating expressive black & white works on paper
I thought of as ‘cave art.’
As the rising sun created light and heat
Denisovans climbed the back stairs
to the porch.
Denisovans stood watching me
in a dark and cool room.
I pointed outside the window
they touched their skin.
Across the years I return again and again to hear The Small Faces sing Itchykoo Park. It all seems such a dream. Steve Marriott’s pleasure and Ronnie Laine’s pleasure and their back and forth expressions. Their Carnaby Street fashions.
I argue with myself and contrast realities. The rebellious joy in Itchykoo Park juxtaposed with Joos de Momper the Younger documenting great Babel. Soon to crumble. Soon to fall.
The laboratories & the madness of Babel. Soon to crumble. Soon to fall.
First I called it Love in a Time of Anchors then took out Love. Ink, gouache, watercolour on paper softly textured 11″ X 16″ curving at the edges maybe it’s drawing paper
A sleeping moon a sleeping resting or ill or exhausted a dreaming lion
A princess or insect an angel or song within the egg or idea of the egg
Flight illumination distance
First this fellow was hyena-like advancing as I focused with my brush on where his feet met the ground he transformed into more of a quizzical assured creature
Reaching into it all with a long arm balancing a queen and her child is who do you know I wonder who
Child reaches curiously exploring as portions of a Giotto sky flow into him she is like a medieval monument
An anchor in the title studied by a rabbit itself medieval manuscript illumination-like
More of a psychic landscape than realistic depiction of the external world reconfigured in perhaps symbolic relationships an interlocking dream-like puzzle
There was an emotional component to this I know where that came from in
Flight illumination distance
Finished this last summer and spent the last two days ‘touching it up.’ More like completely reworking it. It’s part of a ‘blue-ish’ series called Welcome to The Ice Age.
I needed to do something tactile after an overwhelming slew of ‘conceptual’ stuff generated piles of paper (& text) over a month or more. And then the GIF experiments.
What’s strange about Photoshop is how it reveals something when you manipulate the image. Now I see a Druidic figure in the upper right observing the central image in the painting.
It seems he was there all along. And horned no less. I didn’t notice. Cernunnos? Celtic shaman?
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If we cannot love everything and everyone,
can we, truly, love anything or anyone?
In choosing whom or what we love (if such choice were possible),
do we not proclaim that our judgment is larger than life itself?
Is not that choice an illusion?
If we love only what we think we love, are we not, then,
defining love and placing on it certain limitations?
Would it not be better to be defined by love,
than to try to define it?
Are we so small in our uncertainty and fear that we must love
only that which pleases us, or which we think reflects well on us,
or which loves us in return? If so, how can we call that love?
It is a grave error we make in thinking that anything exists
outside of love.
Can you, in your deepest thought and contemplation,
say which part of you loves and which does not?
If you say the mind loves, or the heart loves,
or that love is harbored in various glands and organs,
what, then, of the rest of you? Are parts of you worthy
or unworthy of love? Is love necessary to one part,
but not to another?
Is love a condition that changes with history,
time, and weather?
And what of the insane?
Are we love’s orphans, love’s abandoned step-children?
William Michaelian is an American writer, artist, and poet. His newest book is the Tenth Anniversary Authorized Print Edition of his first novel, A Listening Thing. His Author’s Press Series now contains three volumes: The Painting of You, No Time to Cut My Hair, and One Hand Clapping. Two poetry collections, Winter Poems and Another Song I Know, were published in 2007 by Cosmopsis Books. He lives in Salem, Oregon.
http://recently-banned-literature.blogspot.com/
I thought my most recent painting, Royal Song (the first image), might work with the pulsing ebb and flow of William Michaelian’s poem. Love and gold work together on some mysterious level. There is a lot of air (and thought) in this poem and the painting depicts a scroll and throne (in the open air) beneath a sun. The idea of light informing the conscious mind influenced my variations on the original image.
Drop by drop
The habit of loving
The sap of fatigue
The torrents of sleep
In the pit of nefarious plans
If I had to give over the secret of the past
I would no longer fear the heaviness of blood
Being alone
Sharpens revelations on the edges of the wind
Weak and ugly
I sleep in gutters
Doubled, exposed to the weather
To the barbs of fate
To the blows of fortune
The bubbles of dark days burst in my hands
Life trembles irresolute on the edge of each sheet
Along the borders of the morning
I no longer take a turn
The forms of hatred
Cheeks bulging with fire
These starving ovens
When love enlightened breathes on bitterness
And dances on the dream-rope of nothingness
Pierre L’Abbé is a translator, a publisher, and the author of poetry and short story collections. He lives in Toronto.
When I began generating images for this Reverdy poem my focus was ‘self’ seeing ‘self.’ I wondered also if the poem was historical. I pictured incidents from World War Two. Or maybe psychological? The poem seemed to present an existentialism assuaged with the balm of cathartic love. And then because, coincidentally, I assembled this page on Easter Sunday, I considered (perhaps outlandishly) this being a dialogue between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. In two voices. An end to their metaphysical, sexual, emotional love. Hmm…perhaps too literal. I wasn’t sure where metaphor began and personal voice ended. This began a chain of associations concerning language, representation, authenticity, double-identity, etc… and I was back at the idea of ‘self’ (whatever that is) seeing ‘self.’ You know that feeling you have when you look in a mirror? You know it’s you but you’re not quite sure who ‘you’ is. You see yourself experiencing an image of your self. So, as you can see, the poem presented a host of interpretive challenges. Pierre L’Abbe would know far more than me about this poem’s purpose. As always, I went with my intuitive response in creating images. In this case a face and a figure interact while constantly transforming.
Seeing the unseen between my eyes and outer space
I was a boy painting my sparkling new bicycle
With house paint
Squinting in the shade of a sunflower
Wiping soil and lumps of melted star off the brush
Aiming for that white-as-a-skeleton-invisible-sky-hourglass
Concept of two gods becoming one
Me and my bicycle at the intersection –
Red lights fading my pupils dilated
from Jawbone – Ekstasis Editions – 2005
When I was a boy in Kansas City, one summer, I studied the sky. It was a dull white far off in the distance, and yet up close ‘it’ was invisible. So it dawned on me to paint my new bicycle white; up close the bicycle would be invisible, at a distance everything would seem normal. My mother was more than happy to keep me busy and found the paint and a couple of large brushes. I threw myself into the task, painting the seat, the chain, the handlebars…everything! Sadly the next day the paint flaked off and my experiment failed. Several decades later I was reading a creation myth about two gods battling in the sky. One god lost a foot to a sharp knife and black ‘blood’ (night of course) filled the sky. I remembered painting the bicycle, and decided to harmonize both ‘sky’ narratives, intertwining them in a poem. My editor reviewed my work and, being a minimalist, took out her pen; underlining, crossing out, and circling lines. In the end I had a nine line poem.
I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief
I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger
I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya
O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky – like nails
I am Goya
Translated by Stanley Kunitz
poemimage 
