This is the Scene
This is the scene
where I follow the animal
into the forest.
This could be a bird.
A Cubist experiments
with wind
and Morse Code.
poemimage
The visual & the poetic.
Tag: wind
February 22, 2016
How We Listened
Have you forgotten how we listened
to what was not being said.
The sun and the night both shining in Autumn.
Shining upon what is concealed
& beneath the crossroads,
a deeply buried wind
streaming through the empty house.
Dedicated to my (late) brother Larry, whose birthday is 2/22, who cried over his black fish floating belly up, who slipped climbing the crabapple tree & gashed his belly open with a nail. We passed through the cage of black & white TV broadcasting one Friday late into the night and throughout the weekend until a funeral on Monday.
My video poem concerning this event: https://vimeo.com/11304739
I think I found the spiral Xray online a couple of years ago. Of course , neither am I claiming any copyright credit for the photographs of J.F.K.’s funeral. A detail from a still photo of a performer riding a horse in my video poem is also in the mix. I will take some credit for that.
December 15, 2013
Laundromat: July 10, 9:47 AM
I’m in the
laundromat
because my dryer broke
and this radio is too loud
and every song sounds insincere –
finally Annie Lennox and
the Eurythmics are singing
Talk to Me.
I wonder when I’ll ever
get around to reading
Ulysses.
The radiator is painted
an almost indescribable
shade of turquoise.
Lively but dead serious –
mechanical.
The top of each rib protrudes
thin, flat and sharp.
I can imagine these edges
pressing into my face
after they arrest me in the
grand sweep.
Harnesses and 19th century
contraptions hoisting the radiator
above prisoners strapped to beds.
Thirty full seconds for each
inmate.
What if they decide to heat them?
Loud sirens nearby.
A city wind blowing
through the open door.
A guy reading a
book asks me
if I smell
cigarette smoke.
“No.”
June 29, 2013
The World Screened by John Oughton
The world through your window
is screened into rows of tiny cubes
that means we can remake
the world by shifting them
a pure pane of sky shines
from the pine’s arthritic roots
the library is strewn along the walk
which itself winds over
branches, bedrooms. Shadows of things start
elsewhere and cross where they might be cloud
the pedestrian’s two left eyes
regard the sun strolling on her leash
as they move cube by cube over the clear blue lawn
her heart is (not is like) a bird
The World Screened was previously published in Time Slip (Guernica Editions, 2010). John Oughton is a Toronto poet with five books published, and a professor at Centennial College.
I wanted to capture the sense of real/unreal within this poem’s surrealism. The piano motif relates to background music, or a composition, in which the poem seems to move… I juxtaposed pictorial elements playing off the poem’s (in part) bright, Miro-like mood as well as the more subtly expressed romantic, melancholy yearnings.
May 3, 2013
O Christ Cedar by Susan McCaslin
You among emerald drapery
from your wind-
stormed outpost
plank and plane
vertical-horizontal world pivot
sprung from coastal seed
humming core
flaking bark
woodpecker’s grail
growing a wilder carpentry
taller masonry
more commodious poem
Be in us the world’s resinous heart
hung in a spackled sky—
forest green
hoist and balance
equipoise and reach
sylvan singer song
Susan McCaslin, author of Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011), initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project in November of 2013, a union of the arts and activism to save an ancient rainforest in Langley, British Columbia. http://www.susanmccaslin.ca
Artist Stasja Voluti generously allowed me to reconfigure and manipulate her photographs of cedar trees and ‘things cedar’ including crows visiting cedars. To learn more about her work visit: http://talonbooks.com/meta-talon/surrealism-in-text-and-image-a-conversation
Nest and Three Eggs of Cardinal in Cedar Tree photographed by W. L. McAtee in 1905 as part of the series Birds of the Vicinity of the University of Indiana.
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