Poetry: Season of Stealth

Any wonder this man was king of the world...

2012-01-21T15:20:00.001-05:00

“I say everything in life is like a Beatles song or a Bob Dylan song."
Steve Jobs

The Central Pillar

2012-01-15T13:56:00.007-05:00

The central pillar distributes critical mass,
Sends gravitational force outward from its core,
Carved to carry its role as much as perfect the sanctuary.
The learning necessary to execute the design,
The expression to choose, place and program it so;
A noble artisan with the structural clarity of any master mason
Would apply all his art and conviction to the onerous task.
After all, everything rides on it from top to bottom,
From side to side, around and about, back to front.
Yet a nimble-minded youth with light-hearted temper
Saw a spiral form from the mouths of dragons,
The garden of paradise buzzing overhead in a marble sky,
Sacrifice that raised the tree of life,
While his elder searched an ever-darkening wood.

The "Apprentice Pillar"(aka "Princess Pillar") in Rosslyn Chapel in Roslin, Midlothian, Scotland gets its name from a legend dating from the 18th century involving the mason in charge of the stonework in the chapel and his young apprentice. The apprentice is said to have carved the pillar, inspired by a dream, while his master left to consult the pillar which was to form his model for the design. According to the legend, the mason did not believe that the apprentice could perform the complicated task of carving the central column without knowledge of the original. On seeing the magnificent achievement on his return, the master mason flew into a jealous rage and struck the apprentice, killing him outright. The legend concludes that as punishment for his crime, the master mason's face was carved into the opposite corner to forever gaze upon his apprentice's pillar.

Trackless Souls

2011-12-21T19:53:00.003-05:00

Trackless souls contained in such circumstances.
Empty dwellings at dusk fall,
Multitudes search the riches of the senses.
Broken fates slump against the tracks
That lead nowhere or forever,
Depending on the Pentecostal weather.

Hawksmoore's Mausoleum at Castle Howard

2011-12-20T21:25:00.000-05:00

The Battle of Culloden

2011-12-19T22:58:00.000-05:00

Lorca

2011-12-17T00:59:00.000-05:00

Goya's Ghosts

2011-12-17T00:42:00.000-05:00

I

Country lads at country trades,
Working ways help enlarge;
Arms through baskets of loving maids,
Fleece or flirt or fight to remain in charge.
A narrative gathers up their woven days,
Death drifts above a circular stage,
Frustrated hopes burst into murderous flames.
The domed sky speaks eloquently of love,
Saints confirm their role in perpetual space,
All eyes fall on the descending dove:
Aligned and mute, an all powerful, alabaster race.
Below domesticated, dagger-eyed felines abound,
Children at miniature games in gold-threaded evening gowns,
While the masters run their lean-limbed hounds.

II

The Emperor’s clothes might be invisible;
What these inhabit has timeless clarity,
A means to bask in opulent advantage,
Their souls so extravagantly visible.
Decorative charm, a craftsman’s work buffers
Poverty that forever dwells within:
A portentous gathering of blood-webbed kin
Transfigured into a portrait of unvarnished sin.
The whole uneasy playground of golden tapestried delight
Burns then flowers in the onlooker’s sight.
Can I fathom a love of man?
Like molten ash easing forward in a hellish course,
The artist forms the scene at its unseen source:
Suddenly a lone pilgrim restores the quest to its force.

III

Love cannot be contained it is said,
Unless a painter can make you believe.
The majesty of the physical world,
The unreality of fashion veils the human sex,
Undulated movement of the breath:
A splendid willow displays its lashing teeth.
Breasts aimed at the sky,
Bare of emblematic, symbolic need,
Raw as any form of sexual greed.
His maja, dressed undressed just like make believe.
Someone draws her bath, she’s more than pleased.
Her lover frets with a golden pocket watch,
Possession is something he staunchly defends.
His lady beckons the world in a most sumptuous bed.

IV

Differentiated power squares off,
Impersonal figures hidden with indivisibility
Directed to a single satisfying end,
Death by assassination.
The machinery of overextended rule
Focused in one flaming spirit rising,
Sundered figures strew the battleground.
Mounted men pry loose the golden crown,
While mercenaries prowl ancestral ground.
A whirl of violence, driven lust;
Imbalance charges first through the mind,
A white-faced river frothing at the mouth:
Severed heads mounted on upright lances,
Another killer will await his chances.

V

Wretched terror flocks under drooling skies,
A roving parade of hammer-headed fools:
Drink, make mirth, inside-out beneath a phantom sun;
A knot of men contorted in the absence of a dream,
Eyes pressed up against an invisible screen:
A circle of sorcerers levitate in the inky light,
Swelling cries throb in a penitent’s sight.
Melancholy devours his offspring’s head,
His golden mane stained with his dread.
Cripples race to dominate the realm;
Hatred flows like blood beneath their feet,
Bodies drained of any corporal heat.
Against the walls of his final ramshackle lair,
A crazed spirit is yanking out Medusa’s hair.

A Single I

2011-12-03T10:36:00.005-05:00

I caught the darkness baby,
from your little ruby cup.
Leonard Cohen

A single I atop the pyramid far above the sand,
One point blazed into itself at the fleshless start.
Time folds into the quenched flames of possession:
Four surnames like foundation markers raised,
Squared as if to complete the golden mean,
First defence against the quadrants of the Cross.
That central self starts to manipulate the empty walls,
Shifting like a stage design into a child’s dream
As if you were hit by the tail of the dragon,
And woke inside a vast, star-filled pentagram.
Each side a receding, glowing, shifting decade,
Rippling with scenes, fading and intensifying,
Waving figures in a circular, bleeding world.
No form intact, no shade indelible, the stage darkening,
The spotlight held on an amorphic mask.
That seraphim dance through multiplying stances,
Forbidden rest, the flame burning down in the ruby glass
Blown by those who adore your flooding energy at its core;
Firing the desert pyramid of five thousand years;
Five simple decades stitched together, polished, cut.
That wild raven spies your gingerbread heart,
That ravenous wolf sniffs the staunching of the blood.

To mark Jolen Whitworth’s half century on the planet.

My Esteemed Countryman, Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Darkness

2011-11-24T20:22:00.000-05:00

Canada is good for Cirque du Soleil, Leonard and winter. Nevertheless, the Swedes beat us on the suicide count every time.

http://1heckofaguy.com/2010/10/03/new-lyrics-mp3-downloads-of-the-darkness-by-leonard-cohen/

Daniel Edwards: The Porn King of Pakistan

2011-11-09T20:05:00.000-05:00

Signed, Sealed and Delivered:
http://www.cacanet.com/signed-sealed-and-delivered-the-porn-king-of-pakistan.html

Rosslyn Chapel: The Green Man

2011-11-03T10:32:00.000-04:00

The National Guitar

2011-10-28T19:15:00.000-04:00

Take Shelter

2011-10-24T11:18:00.001-04:00

Some things we can see, some we can't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc

Dulwich Picture Gallery: Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven

2011-10-19T23:22:00.000-04:00

http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/1221258968/ID=2156417404

Nineteen Eighty-Four

2011-10-19T22:38:00.003-04:00

The year that came the leaders deserved,
The breaking of the balance kept,
Gone are the serving of bons mots.
The rushing winds mounted again,
Mining the vision of the oppressed.
Unravished bridge from the past
Exploded with the meaning it brings.
The stature of meetings flowered,
Inverted with a mad stare at nothing,
The toothless mouth open on her way,
Disproportion that sets aside the equity
Born of torture and ragged whims.
Spin, spin, spin the world and its sins,
A dice with more than what begins.

Amelia Curran: The Dozens

2011-10-11T19:16:00.001-04:00

A Stone's Poem - Margie Gillis

2011-10-04T21:45:00.004-04:00

The great interpretive dancer.

By Tall Ship

2011-09-17T21:02:00.000-04:00

Great enterprise some common flaws disguise,
Tall-masted schooners parade the waterways,
Represent merchant interests on the rise.
Sea urchins inhale the salty breeze,
Fixed on the rotation of working parts,
Vertical movements obey surface laws.
The captain gazes into the heart,
Swaying the hull holding her gin,
About the deck the darting song of larks.
The clouding over of foreign skies,
Tightening heads with darkening eyes,
Deepening terror of opposing thoughts
Turns the ship into a battle cry:
Names left in bronze, faces lost.

Figure: Forrest Lunn

2011-09-12T21:21:00.000-04:00

She's Alive

2011-09-12T20:05:00.002-04:00

The "Swiss cuckoo clock" speech

2011-09-04T13:09:00.000-04:00

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Orson Welles in The Third Man

Cymbeline - Loreena McKennitt

2011-09-03T12:52:00.000-04:00

Fear no more the heat o' the sun
Nor the furious winters' rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' th' great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak.
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust.

All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor th' all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee and come to dust.

The Witch's Sabbat - Samhain

2011-09-03T12:01:00.000-04:00

Charles Baudelaire-The Death of Lovers(French&English)

2011-09-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

Loreena McKennitt - The Old Ways

2011-09-03T11:46:00.000-04:00

Loreena McKennitt - Prospero's speech (lyrics)

2011-09-03T11:38:00.002-04:00

Lucifer in Starlight (Audio)

2011-09-03T11:01:00.002-04:00

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

George Meredith

Rufus Wainwright -- Sonnet 29 (Audio)

2011-09-03T10:55:00.001-04:00

1 When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
2 I all alone beweep my out-cast state
3 And trouble deaf heav'n with my bootless cries,
4 And look upon my self and curse my fate,
5 Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
6 Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess't,
7 Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
8 With what I most enjoy contented least;
9 Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
10 Haply I think on thee, and then my state
11(Like to the lark at break of day arising)
12 From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate,
13 For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings,
14 That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir

2011-09-02T14:11:00.001-04:00

RHS: There Is A Light

2011-08-28T22:13:00.007-04:00

The darkness must go down the river of night's dreaming.

Flow morphia slow, let the sun and light come streaming

Into my life. Into my life...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxxQVcQwc4c

Dr. X will build a creature

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHWBGlDMkTg&feature=related

Blackie and the Rodeo Kings with Lucinda Williams: If I Can't Have You

2011-08-24T10:25:00.003-04:00

In The Cradle

2011-08-22T20:22:00.000-04:00

(The Brickworks of the Don Valley)

In a cradle of fire
When their object changed state,
For replicated, endless urban fates.
Rails then moved all human freight.
Linear steps as even as time,
Concentrated repetition of an industrial state.
A flash of fingers dipped in paint
Serviced correspondence, precise contract dates.
Cupped in a valley older than fate,
Dividing the world into directions;
Intimacy with what most learned to hate.
Yet those tree tops, higher than any had been,
Swayed the radiant cradle until very late,
And whispers still haunt midsummer winds.

In The House

2011-08-19T22:11:00.003-04:00

In the house of the moon,
A narcissist finds its nourishment,
A feast never to be consumed.
Starved in the strangest contentment,
Satiated pride leads its skeletal parade,
Instruments not quite in tune.
Eyes that clarify the smallest aspects,
Transfer so much of so little
Till half the matter is truly invisible.
A soul-dragging wait for it to pass
If only through the latest preoccupation.
The lurking meaning in this day,
A hidden monster of the self,
Crying out from moonlit,
Or is it womb-like darkness?

Hendrix: All Along The Watchtower

2011-08-09T10:49:00.000-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMJNKOOVqc0

Loaded Freight

2011-08-07T00:32:00.004-04:00

Loaded freight carries the spirit down,
Deciding on circumstances since
Flushed up on a primordial shelf;
Eyes blinking in the sun,
Nothing slept in peace again.
Through the spirit mystery runs,
Stirs the terrors of wanton dreams.
Predator and prey frame the scene,
Force the relations of the world
Through a nightmare, into the self.
To awake is to decide the matter
Organized in another convergent pattern.
Other births will drive the issue,
Deep time drapes a flickering state.

Call Me Rose

2011-07-24T22:02:00.002-04:00

Love is a Losing Game

2011-07-24T22:01:00.000-04:00

U2 - The Wanderer

2011-06-25T13:50:00.000-04:00

Society

2011-06-18T22:58:00.002-04:00

Unloved is what it is,
Fire set to labour and labour’s ends.
Little tribe inside their tents.
A fire burns out in the night,
Glowing faces surround the light.
Holding hands as night descends,
Innocent children beg amends;
Hounds forsake the manor houses,
While genius evacuates its tower.

Philip Larkin Reading Toads

2011-06-18T10:15:00.002-04:00

Dead Social Lion by Mark Stock

2011-06-06T18:43:00.001-04:00

A renewed Portrait of Emily Dickinson

2011-05-31T14:38:00.000-04:00

http://www.moleskinerie.com/images/various/ed.jpg

A lock of Emily Dickinson's hair

2011-05-31T14:31:00.000-04:00

The Simplest Toils

2011-05-17T12:29:00.002-04:00

The simplest toils that bind the day
Sequester seething disquiet away.
Hope’s shore flagged along the pier,
Traffic docks as suits the trade.
Such stock as deemed unaccountable,
Unheralded where legions parade;
Mulled over in lamplit rooms above,
Eyes unblinded to the inestimable.
Storms unfit for humankind
Uproot all phantom love,
Prejudice which camps beneath its underbrush,
Rattles the trophies hung through the mind.
The tales which fail to end
Enfold the woven strands of unshadowed time.

Emily Dickinson: The Poet In Her Bedroom

2011-05-06T22:27:00.002-04:00

Red Cloth Series: Ross McCague Poetry Reading

2011-05-05T23:10:00.003-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu28Qqma0pY

Dylan's Fender Stratocaster

2011-05-04T10:49:00.000-04:00

http://www.abalonevintage.com/Rock_Star_Guitars_Bob_Dylan_Stratocaster.htm

My Watch

2011-04-24T10:55:00.005-04:00

My watch is too much to bear,

It coils like other committed things.

Trades of all kinds are set apart:

Drivers of nails and grinders of lenses

Have never been less in demand,

The world is no longer at our command.

Scenes are full of light and shadow,

Vanishing nimbly into the night;

The crews that ply the perfect sea

Tossed up on the tiniest screens.

The plausible union of the world

Sealed in the iris of the common man.

Something else marches across the tattered land,

Void of pain and pain’s inheritance.

2011-04-20T22:38:00.000-04:00

Beauteous Being

2011-04-20T22:15:00.003-04:00

Against the snow a Being of high-statured beauty. Whistlings of death and circles of secret music make the adored body, like a specter, rise, expand, and quiver; wounds of black and scarlet burst in the superb flesh.--Life's own colors darken, dance, and drift around the Vision in the making.--Shudders rise and rumble, and the delirious savor of these effects clashing with the deadly hissing and the hoarse music that the world, far behind us, hurls at our mother of beauty,--she recoils, she rears up. Oh, our bones are clothed with an amorous new body.

O the ashy face, the crined escutcheon, the crystal arms! the cannon on which I am to fall in the melee of trees and of light air!

Arthur Rimbaud translated by Louise Varèse

Mr. Dylan: Sara

2011-04-19T23:31:00.000-04:00

http://www.mojvideo.com/video-bob-dylan-sara/9ada7ef3f5f2793aa60c

From Hell: Soundtrack by Mr. Trevor Jones

2011-04-17T19:05:00.000-04:00

The Whitechapel murders:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheMyrmecoleon#p/u/4/XFpIHu0iAW0

A flash of the 19th century incarnate

2011-04-09T11:20:00.004-04:00

Geoffrey Hill: Professor of Poetry, Oxford

http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/kebl/general/2010-11-30-hill-poetry-keble.mp3

http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/kebl/general/2011-hill-poetry-2.mp3

http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/kebl/general/2011-05-10-hill_03-keble.mp3

http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/kebl/general/2011-11-30_geoffrey_hill_poetry.mp3

The Singularity Is Near

2011-03-29T20:40:00.000-04:00

(for Raymond Kurzweil)

Robots will soon run the human mind,

Ironed out in thoughtless times;

Merger with the past far, far behind,

Softly folded in such silent skies.

The Real Eden: Chauvet Cave

2011-03-26T19:26:00.004-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kULwsoCEd3g

The Man: The Mindscape of Allan Moore

2011-03-13T11:41:00.002-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPnvAxBHRUY&feature=fvst

The Comedian's Funeral

2011-03-12T21:11:00.002-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXNc53rIFe8

Heath Ledger's Joker: The End Game

2011-02-27T21:23:00.010-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z1pwY3tomg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wQXSd1Jbqc

Slavery (Audio Link)

2011-02-27T10:33:00.002-05:00

The slavery to time of kings
Will dispose the mind to wren-like vigilance,
To neglect the seven acts of mercy
As surely as the setting sun
Vanquishes any hope of resistance.
Lit by seven candles of compassion
Hidden beneath vaulting ambition
Like intact Romans buried in the yard,
Great gladiators gathered from across the Empire;
Honoured guests atop a hillside flowering,
Northern Britain rising humbly to their shackled feet:
Clouds cast off in legions hourly
Indifferent to love or pity or what they meet.

Evidence from tests on 80 skeletons of young men found in Yorkshire gardens points to world's best-preserved Roman gladiator graveyard.
The Guardian

Caravaggio: The Seven Acts of Mercy

2011-02-26T00:18:00.001-05:00

Shelley's body burning on a pyre by L.E. Fournier

2011-02-21T16:26:00.002-05:00

John Keats at Guy's Hospital, London.

2011-02-21T15:59:00.000-05:00

Shelley Statue in Elan Valley, Wales.

2011-02-21T15:42:00.008-05:00

Statue of Phillip Larkin at Hull Train Station

2011-02-20T22:39:00.003-05:00

Hawksmoor

2011-02-06T13:35:00.001-05:00

''no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe…''
Peter Ackroyd

Cold heart of shadowed love,
Flushed with hope’s limitless scope.
Dark words cut from time,
Ground rules obeying lines.
Smoking strains of pyramidal desire,
Love throbs while shadows throng.
Naked purpose takes aim,
Hand-built crafts circle the globe.
Form reigns from dripping sands,
Time grants a transparent dome.
Threadbare streets in shallow disguise,
Youth breaks out on evening’s porch.
Killers surround the vaulted town,
Tailored lives fitted with top hats and evening gowns.
Forces light cannot fight,
Darkness folded in hope’s feeble sight.

Eye of Horus

2011-02-05T22:04:00.006-05:00

Iain Sinclair has suggested that, when connected up on a map of London, Hawksmoor's churches produce an Eye of Horus, and that this configuration has some ritual significance.

Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders

2011-02-05T15:17:00.001-05:00

Forty-Eight Shots: Winter Solstice at Stonehenge (Audio Link)

2011-01-05T22:51:00.004-05:00

The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
At the garden end, in blustery twilight
His fulgent cloak stark as a warlock's cape,
The maharajah-bird that scavenges
Close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.
Geoffrey Hill

One day we walk out of the machinery
Watched by empty silhouettes of glacial reminders
On Salisbury Plain, from Wiltshire to Prescelly’s peaks
The Bluestone a starry messenger that levitates,
Dolerite that will outlast all white lines of banality,
And other phantoms of heaven along a knife’s edge,
Where soul-numbing decades submit to a wild deer,
The palest rose bears thorns and morning tears.
Cold floor of ancient Briton,
Foundation for steam and turbine,
Hunting ground for the Baronial,
Dancing myriads in succession.
The written language so lately formed
Between determination and desire.
Singers at each corner of the Anglo-Saxon Isle:
Four numinous scribes continuously grip its surface.
Could language ever be superfluous?
The winter light convenes at Stonehenge,
Ten squared in every century since inception.
Voyaging to it once a Witch’s Hajj, a Bronze Age Mecca;
Illiteracy never an obstacle, obfuscation, nor defence.
The drama of being alive here torches angelism,
Rends the quotidian in its corporal dimension,
Three score and ten divides at this occasion:
Footholds of birth, death, love in recession.
Most strange addition to the human sphere,
Two times revisited, three times renewed,
Equal to the Creator this once and once only,
Aligned like the cleaving of hydrogen and oxygen,
Subatomic worlds no more specific, no more precise;
Clearly demarcated human approximations
Lathed into a meaning they scarcely contain.
Nameless creatures gather without a tongue,
Dew-strung moments before frost has begun,
Sweeping outward in grey hills to other configurations,
Shielding the poor from this astral outcome:
Dismal stars blanch crinkling folds of night,
Shrugging off two millennium of belief,
Thought and being suddenly ignite;
Moulding a fully warranted assembly in the night
Where language does not greet, nor any human speech,
A vanquished pallor, the piercing light you forever meet.

(On the occasion of Ms. Whitworth's birthday to commemorate the winter solstice and to mark her forty-eighth year on the planet)

Chasing Venus: Jeremiah Horrocks

2011-01-05T13:48:00.002-05:00

Norma Jeane Baker

2010-12-18T01:09:00.002-05:00

Seeing in your death a tragic portent
for all of us who crawl and die
under the wheeling disappearing stars.

Irving Layton

I Knew

2010-12-18T00:58:00.005-05:00

I once knew a very old vaudevillian.
Stranded in a provincial, colonial town,
He turned to drawing wonderful emblems of life:
Flowers, butterflies, astounding joyful forms.
He was still daunted by Chaplin’s star
Over the deserted Edwardian Music Halls.
One was raised onto the giant, silver screen,
The other traced the outline of a clown.

The Location

2010-12-18T00:57:00.004-05:00

The location of an emotional grave
Is the starting point for renewal.
Yet veiled in fossil-lined drapery,
Identity settled in a time-driven, harried state,
Failing to budge on any ground,
His likeness cut in stone.

Red Cloth Series: Ross McCague

2010-04-22T22:09:00.000-04:00

A Numbing Array

2010-02-28T22:55:00.004-05:00

(Portrait of a Mental Prison)

With a numbing array of exacting figures,
Chasing thought and act:
What little room expression has,
Inspection finds vacancy on the door.
The solace inside regression
As profound as solipsistic wandering,
Stealthily moving past high-statured inclinations.
A thoroughly grand display of vast controlling numbers,
Handled with such a commanding stance:
Remember the towering sign that dominated the Jazz Age,
The omniscient eyes directed above the common man.
Gatsby’s razzmatazz, sleight of hand,
All that leaves once the imperial guards disband,
And the party slyly moves on.

Afoot the Sea

2010-02-18T22:35:00.010-05:00

(In memory of Captain James Cook)

Afoot the sea bound by duties,
Focusing the role of open water
In precise mappings of coastal shorelines,
The rim of Empire ever-expanding
Beneath the feet of indigenous peoples
Wherever minerals glint and fragrant roots descend.
Captain Cook sought such forces
Along society’s ladder of command:
He chose the freedom of the sea,
The last vestiges of hope
Circled by stars and a quadrant’s ranking.
The heavens differentiated themselves
As readily as minute, English class gradations.
Reason alone will not satisfy
The original awe of First Cause.
Its embodiments guide this species,
Not one outside the supernatural tides
That brought you in
And sent you out:
A god without a crown,
Disemboweled, skinless, heartless now--
His dutiful wife awaits,
And to a land-locked gentry bows--
Your onboard naturalist steadfastly recommends
Unchained convicts fan out, descend
Across the crystal, coral shores,
And all the lands of all your unsuspecting kin.

Captain James Cook FRS RN (27 October 1728 – 14 February 1779) was an English explorer, navigator and cartographer. Cook made three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. Some scholars suggest that Cook's return to Hawaii outside the season of worship for Lono, which was synonymous with 'peace', and thus in the season of 'war' (being dedicated to Kū, god of war) may have upset the equilibrium and fostered an atmosphere of resentment and aggression from the local population. The esteem in which he was nevertheless held by the Hawaiians resulted in his body being retained by their chiefs and elders. Following the practice of the time, Cook's body underwent funerary rituals similar to those reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. The body was disemboweled, baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the treatment of European saints in the Middle Ages.

On the set of Frankenstein

2009-09-02T19:19:00.000-04:00

North Gate: Angkor Thom

2009-07-31T19:27:00.002-04:00

Angkor Thom: Bayon Temple

2009-07-31T13:48:00.005-04:00

To Walt

2009-06-12T21:06:00.007-04:00

The Castle

The place where they all could gather,
Live forever among us somehow.
Some will go, some will not.
Dreams are shaped by dreams;
Some things never quite wear out.
Walt, don’t leave, don’t doubt,
You have to finish your paper route.
Main Street has demands,
The suburbs have spread way out.
Not all Cinderellas find their way
Behind lace curtains or sunlit waterfalls.

Mickey

The first fully animated character
Part luck, part comic, part radiant birth.
Silly as a rambunctious uncle dipped in paint,
Disney’s voice filling him
With joy, with fear, with adolescent mayhem.
The wall against the adult world
Not yet crumbled, not yet tunneled.
You spawned a world-wide club
Who donned such ears to play a part:
A defiant, ever optimistic little mouse
Up against all odds, in the face of gravest doubt
Outsmarts the spriest, most lethal feline
Through the miniature door at the end of dreams
Past hope, past guarantees, past art:
He endlessly leads to his crayoned land
By his tiny, eager, miraculously human hand.

Snow White

She inhabits a symbolic land,
Men are dwarfed by her beauty,
Mirrors never lie they come to understand.
Chaste loveliness of the virgin wood,
Chivalrous gnomes bask in her womanhood.
Each a different phase of love’s moon
Tumbling in the tide’s seven seas;
No suggestion it might all be different,
So far removed from the planet of comparisons.
Evil lurks where it is least understood,
Its poison sinks furthest in maidenhood.
Rebirth is the spirit’s second home
As a fever, no more, a spell breaks
Out falls the forbidden fruit in love’s wake.
All the diminutive roles then conflate:
One hope, one dream, twin aristocratic fates.

Donald Duck

With all that conspires against belief,
No one, for a moment, would dare suggest
You were ever especially blessed.
Donald frantically compensates
For what he daily fails to express.
It’s great fun to abruptly interrupt your flight,
He takes such grievous insult in his stride,
We take your unflappable energy as a guide;
Concentrated activity is what most do best.
A little cheating, inconspicuous fraud, dainty lies,
Never quite the demarcated reprobate.
In fact, a true gentleman in the final frame
Best remembered as a blithe, oft-cornered, fun-loving sort
Who gave as good as he got:
He inhabited quite a different age
When they drew him so rudely out.

Bambi

More pure than any, than all,
No one sides, at least, undivided with you.
Some part, some dark inkling in the fairest heart
Preys alongside the wolf,
Curls even a tender upper lip just above a grin,
Sinks into what very little there ever really is.
What is noticed least, makes least difference,
Has most to do with you,
And the beginning of the highest truths
Starting in humblest circumstance:
Spindly Bambi could not quite understand,
Helpless, hopeless, unheeded little fawn
Defined best by evil, all that’s gone terribly wrong.
The ending now I can’t quite recall…
Something to do with rescue, trust,
And everlasting peace for one and all.

Thanks for sharing, Ross, very nice! I particularly like "Snow White."
Michael Barrier, author of The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney

To Fix

2009-05-06T13:11:00.003-04:00

To fix a memory
A myth is most propitious,
To share a dream
A compatible mercantile economy,
To experience love
A reckless abandon need awaken.
No beguiling muse,
No hemp-braided sear
Steers the utility of the world.
If man had never existed,
Would it truly matter?
The Theban throne of the family,
An invisible circle writ large
Across nameless, empty seas.

Oedipus mistakenly killed his father and married his mother in Thebes.

Panther

2009-04-03T21:53:00.002-04:00

A panther in the jungle rests;
The hips spread wide, her jaw aligned,
Musculature of Adam’s mythic kind.
Water winds through her dreams,
Childhood spirits along twilit streams.
Hunger sets the tone, the vessels flow,
A haunted past flits above the crooked creek.
What isn’t had, just done without.
The fiery heart draws this beast through the dark,
Lean and hard and without blame;
She strikes as a princess in a shimmering coat,
Beauty leads her forces out.
I don’t believe she knows or cares:
Her prey’s stricken, savage, sightless stare.

Colour with Force

2009-02-20T17:51:00.012-05:00

(for J.M.W. Turner)

Colour with force erupts into the world.
Forms emerge from the unnatural surge,
Wrack of pleas drawn far past appeal;
No wind to keep the soul above torrential seas:
These are slaves worth more in death;
Turgid mockery of dreams in flaming bronze.
Slave ships will always sail the unlit seas,
Find safe harbour in the human brain.
Their agony more real, blazing in fiery dread,
Than the skeletal captain and lean, hand-picked crew.
Their chains never drop below the liquid floor;
They rattle in remorse, constrain memory, contract love.
Fate prefigures what is to be done; imagine if you dare
Sea monsters devouring headfirst
Refuse of guiltless propositions.

"The Slave Ship" or "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on" is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. The subject of the painting is the practice of 18th century slave traders who would throw the dead and dying human 'cargo' overboard during the middle passage in the Atlantic Ocean in order that they might claim the insurance for 'drowning'.

The Gift of Age

2009-01-13T11:21:00.000-05:00

The judge and lawyers stood round in a row,
Polly Vaughn in the middle like a fountain of snow.
Traditional ballad

The gift of age is strangerhood:
Less known, less related, less able.
At the knees of a higher force,
The clarifying faces of want and ignorance;
Children of the Industrial Revolution
Who have aged but still remain,
Wizened urchins of a digital age,
More like giant rodents than wasted spawn.
Warned long ago in the Enlightenment:
The dysfunctional, hopeless retreat from love.
Hooked to elaborate registering systems,
A robust gift of theoretical physics.
Reductionism bereft of bliss,
Forms judgements to finalize these faces.

Luck

2008-08-28T11:03:00.002-04:00

The luck that accompanies you here,
The spellbinding spin of experience.
Time might empty itself
If modals gained traction.
Across those tiny moments where a court alights,
When drums of youth abound:
An open terrain for one
Ruffled in laughter and keen sounds.
I have now no faith in luck’s golden galleon,
Its sails blown by some windy phantom;
We are more likely speared with purpose
Dense enough to lance the odds.
What brought me through
Is what charges me anew.

I Wanted

2008-06-10T23:13:00.009-04:00

I'll be marching through the morning,
Marching through the night,
Moving cross the borders
Of my secret life.
Leonard Cohen

I wanted to say what words I may
To elucidate the placid doldrums of my ways.
The territory that I have to till
Is untouched by human hand or will.
So much crystallized in a heart exposed,
What I could preserve I garner for a role.
The space we have to be, with or without a name
Orbits in a planetary system of blame.
I identify with one or another in its course.
Many are trained, groomed and fed, pick a thoroughbred.
I never nourished a single seed from inception,
Held it to the sun in its head-turning days.
My secret life never manifold, glimpsed not ever told.
I know one radiant song, how its peerless melody unfolds.

Might I merge with the heedless world,
Love a woman till our twinning takes flight.
Separated from the core, set free somehow,
I could float toward an acrobatic hand no doubt:
It is not the miss I fear, no not a perpetual freefall.
The fear is in the true success of the enterprise,
A world with permanent boundaries to legitimize
Who I am, how I live, the tenets of the limitless.
I perpetuated a guise framed by my own thoughts,
Inclinations, predispositions and dreams.
The first act shapes the last it seems.
I am assured the world fathomless is mapped in love,
A river runs below a treacherous governance.
Such rules I learned flow to an ever-approaching abyss.

The deathbed and birthing room appear in my dreams.
I know expectations are not what they seem.
Daily messages passed from a secret inner room.
I turn back in dread, look ahead in fear.
Childhood is on fire, who can locate the negative?
A one dimensional reel with a worn-out soundtrack.
Let it run once more, observe the burning play.
It will disprove the claims of the Roman calendar
As just another mode of the infinitely tabular.
I feel my throat scorched from the conflagration.
If only I could run out, escape a foul-smelling tale,
Enter the field where the impulse to live takes root,
Where ancestors dance above their pitiful graves,
A life force erupts from a few flowering days.

Cancer

2008-03-28T23:02:00.005-04:00

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
W.H. Auden

The river bed is dry, the channel seasonal,
Along the banks the buzzing of flies.
The dryness of the season bodes no portent,
Nor the hum of machinery within lofty spires.
Torrential rains have come, tornados spun
Destruction in the seeded, fertile lands.
The high priestess who administers
Will allow the strictly appointed to pass.
Rivers overflow, sweeping markers;
Boundaries lost in the breaking of levies,
While winds roar down the skulls of hatchlings.
The remainder flee the scene, lacking documentation:
Their passports show tiny, uncomprehending faces.

(Tarot Series)

The Muse

2007-11-21T10:27:00.000-05:00

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Ezra Pound

The muse picked clean by wanton thieves;
Novelists, songwriters, filmmakers creep.
They have denuded you of all you were
When the word broke open all one was worth.
No means to be staggered now;
No sudden sliver in the cosmic egg.
A contract underwrites every human vow.
Those still scratching on the spindrift pages
Have applied for more profitable occupations.
Smoke no longer even curls over what was,
Tears are measured, dreams strictly conveyed.
At death’s door, at the closing bell,
Beauty lowers her ephemeral gaze:
Sterility swallows whole, vomiting hell.

Just Eight Lines...

2007-11-12T21:12:00.000-05:00

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay…
W.B. Yeats

Just eight lines to draw a bull,
Measure out a life when done perfectly.
A few clean strokes that divulge
Most of what we know,
Something like an epitaph that stands
Representing knowledge.
Picasso’s stature rests on it:
A century’s torment balances on the pen,
But it is woven deeper still in memory,
Gradually eased by time.
A curious procession winds through
All the proliferating acts of mankind,
Vulgar in a certain measure, decorous for the most part,
And utterly barren of redemption,
Except in an extravagant, ill-fitting frame
Signed below with no discernible name.

I Must Protest

2007-11-01T22:09:00.000-04:00

Ding dong the witch is dead.
The Wizard of Oz

I must protest beloved friend
Though all my worldly goods are wearing thin;
Much of what you think and beatifically envision
Is not in keeping with the season.
These times are rich and full of witty guile
For a very small percentage of a very self-appointed few.
Only atheism has any real vigour left,
Admirable flexibility in its outer extremities.
The rest has taken a depreciating turn
For garter belt-loving priests, market-savvy rabbis,
And other growths that cataract the inner eye.
Not much more need be said:
Art and Science will always clothe this year’s man,
Robes and shawls encased in storm-proof mothballs.

A Man Needs

2007-09-28T15:59:00.002-04:00

The founder of Blackwater USA parried charges that his private security contractors are acting as cowboys in Iraq...
Toronto Star, October 3, 2007.

A man needs a gun, a horse and a love,
Substitutes are the priority of a newer government.
Belonging to a tribe inked across the breast,
Striped ties strung around narrower necks.
The sun still rustles through the grass,
The passing out of love toward its sunset.
Prince sings No one Compares To You,
Young gazelles break free over the savannah.
They say He collects our tears in timeless vaults,
Someone is enforcing the law, revealing yet another flaw.
The short endings of our instinctive nature,
Evolutionary psychology and the double helix mark the way:
The door still closes on yet another measured day,
The hinges fit like sex, like power, like death.

Caravaggio

2007-07-23T23:19:00.000-04:00

Echoin' down from God's distant shore
I can hear 'em callin' for my soul…
Roger McGuinn

I can hear the brush
Whispering to the canvas:
This is life as it is lived.
The waves of colour form
As a whore lies drowned;
It’s Mary that he’s made, arms askew,
Out of that wench’s ragged, shapely bones.
It’s happenstance and misguided rule
Driven headfirst to this demise.
Why not crown her in heaven?
You have the tools
To build out of deprivation
The glory of the soul.
Your haunted eyes are cast aside,
The canvas comes gradually into view:
Everything restored, as if new.

His Death of the Virgin, commissioned in 1601 for a private chapel in the new Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, was rejected by the Carmelites in 1606. Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini records that it was rejected because Caravaggio had used a drowned prostitute as his model for the Virgin.

The Keeper of Stones

2007-05-30T09:11:00.000-04:00

(at the site of ancient Paleros)

I count the years and I shed no tears,
I'm blinded to what might have been.
Robert Zimmerman

An accident of fate left this cold ruin,
The damage that was done.
Everyone keeps patterns in place.
Strange healing winds release themselves somewhere.
Can you find yourself this hour?
An unbidden understanding comes
even in skies with little visibility.
If there is a world complete,
Is it encircled in every soul?
Kingdom follows kingdom endlessly:
The parent of your parent of your child.
Webs of circumstance revolve.
One glistening opportunity to be whole,
What need now for silvered filigree or hammered gold?

Little Girl Lost

2006-12-07T19:02:00.002-05:00

(A Sketch from Memory)

Sheaves of corn under an infinite sky:
Desire forms that endless way for you.
The isolated circumstance of dating and dance
seems so simple and so perfect too,
Not everything can be singled out.
You wear a gold earring as a reminder
what it is to be a startling woman
in a plain-spoken world.
Up late, past the bedtime of the eastern kings:
The stability of a rectangular parlor,
Marriage should hold, sanity, and even love
like a quaint painting in a dusted frame.
What reminder there is of love is found in spring
then birth and rebirth runs the farm as much as men.
The county fair out on a squared field
designated for pies, pigs, pigtails and the arcing of the sun.
The engines throttle so but not those of state:
Did you ever swing out beneath the trees,
Lifting your spirit high and higher?
Apron tossed aside, dress askew,
Mimicking the motion of the overruling sun.
You must have seen children,
A man dreaming in a cocoon,
The future about to spread its overarching wings.
We still need to swing, lie out under those unfenced skies
to know what is, what isn’t, and what just might be.
Far above the rectangular states drawing out time
and lengthening the neatly polished graves,
I see an urban girl, head turned to one side,
A single earring pierced,
The chiaroscuro of a Vermeer:
The light from the window is such,
She might well be reading the finished script.