A priority of needs,
a hanging garden,
weed words, never planned, disgracing the symmetry, a scurried rush for sunlight before seed fall, a flap of wingtips, the world delighting improvisation.
Failure as a new song,
simmer, ferment, brew.
Rime, surf, time and space foam.
Somehow we know too fast, act too slow. The heart can hold almost everything when it lets go. I, or this voice of I, have breath,
have oracular,
ocular, awkward,
backward walking.
Weed words,
green and flourishing,
through cracks and voids,
softening lines, wishing well, careless though careful. I grope, so to say, a tease of groundsel, a sturdy vowel of plantain. Self-heal and teasel, both mop purple from blue sky ( now the knapweed is hard and dry, a shell bone scatter). Us poets, us weed dreamers, taken up (now the swallows shake apart the dream summer) ripening appled,
though bitter
still delightful
with the turn of things,
the edge of autumn, a juggle of suns, a whisper of moons, a world re-webbed for dew of fallen stars, a cascade of frost. To keep the hearth, to gather in. See breath, turquoise, misted. As long as there is laughter, all is not lost.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Autumn, juggling, Orientation, Poetry, priorities, readjustment, roots, scattered, season's end, seedfall, support structures | 9 Comments »
Located during long overdue clearing out, this work from 1998, that I knew was lying around somewhere. Esoteric, but to those who chew.
Forbidden fruits,
says Miss Eve, ( missive),
forbidden by whom?
She says. Foolishness and Wisdom? To risk what for a world? To lose a world what would you not risk? Elastic minds dance. The rigidity of denied souls, the refusal to blur lines. Common sense, a weedkiller on the path to the orchard (where she waits, ready to offer more than everything). Nonsense, nonsense. Defining madness by your turgid, proscribing fears a little unwise, do you not think? Somnambulism, catatonia, walking backwards towards the abyss. Some things are too simple for words. Some words are too short, some too long. Orchestrate, sound values. Tongue shaped like a leaf. Leaf, a light-savouring tongue. Tuned. Resonance. Morphic. Shapely. What a nerve. ” I praise the many-functioned plants, Mothers of Mankind.”
The First and Last is a seed.
Mind, the compost.
Shimmer, cascade,
the arrows of light.
Our Lord is a tree.
Our Lady, an orchard,
a forest.
Our blanket is green.
Our air, our breath, a benison from roots…..
WAY OF SALT
Salvia Vocabulary.
Vocabulary
Vocabulaire
Words in air
The word is, was, is
Salvia
The Way of Salt,
The Room of Life,
Our Lady of Origami,
Queen of Convolution.
Man eats plant,
Plant eats man.
Slain by a salad –
Seen, sane, slowed,
Honey-slurried, shifted,
Slid, shaped and stopped.
The word is: listen.
A steady wave of silence
Approaching the ear
From both sides. I do
Not, never, merely object
To subjective. What else
Is there? Me and my leaves:
A thousand shivering whispers,
Divine veins, snakes, circles, whisps,
Whispers: from behind the curtain
A prompt, a curtain-raiser, or
The diva Herself. A scurry
Of scivvies.
Human to humus, plant to
Planet, words to worms. Slapped
Sharp against that bitter green wall.
The fizz – utter excitation of electrons,
The physical forgets form, form turns
Flow, flow turns vast;
Vortex: ex thought, ex libris,
Ex calibre. The Way that can
Be named is not the true Way.
Awareness: a well. Whither
Whatever whispers? Upon
What input, impulse, can
Thought flap like a fish,
Beached, lipped?
Stranded upon silence,
Salvia space, zephyrs
Sough the room, see
Sound, seed significance.
So, She says: ” Either
Servants of the planet
Or Masters of nothing”.
No choice. Plant voice,
Rooted human. Who?
Who cares? Who cares?
Homo viridis.
Homo vegetalis.
Homo salviensis.
Plant people,
One and all.
People plants, percept of
Perfection, confection of
Creation. Extraction of
Ex-stasis; bodiless buddies;
Hand in leaf with Lady of Life.
The word is, was, is
Salvia,
Saviour and salve.
Words in air
Vocabulaire
Vocabulary?
I wouldn’t like to say.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged a concept, a new evolution, a percept, a prayer, a sane madness, art, deep ecology, eaten by plants, expansion, green finger, green minds, perception, Plant consciousness, plant people, plant spirit, plant spirit keys, plant talking, plant wisdom, Poetry, power plants, print, shamanic worldview, world consciousness | Leave a Comment »
They do not die,
these poets,
they are absorbed,
slowly by the year,
feeding the tongue’s root,
weighing the worth of hearts,
swinging from page to page,
a rustle of birdsong in the morning,
a glimmer of twilit truth,
always gold,
not tarnished,
never fading.
Gone
In days
Muttering of war.
The postures
Of the scrubbed,
Dead eyed ones,
Once more decrying
Alternatives to destruction.
Their squealing slavering
Shall be spittle
In the breeze
On sea cliffs
Where your
Insistent gentle roar
Will bring wheels
Of gulls
And bees to drift
On warming slopes,
The sound of waves,
God breathing
As He too,
Rolls those lines
To and fro.
Once carved
And carried,
A pomander
Of sweet eyed
Clarity, a sword,
A vinegar, to cut
The fickle fat
Of lazy habit.
A new recognition,
A reconstruction
Of heaven
Where we stand.
Perfect
As it is,
Sweet sufferer,
But not of fools.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged death, memory, Poetry, poets, Seamus Heaney | 10 Comments »
The last week or so I have found time and space to push on with a few art-book projects I have been wanting to complete. One is a printed paper copy of “The House of Trees”. It is quite a long poem, but even so a little short for a stand-alone book – at least one that feels like a real book rather than a parish church guidebook! So I have been working out how to interleaf the text pages with image pages. Originally I was thinking of one image page facing each new section of the poem, but practically, because of the varying lengths of the sections, this did not work so well. So I have decided to greatly increase the number of images so that each spread has one image page facing the text page. This has the advantage of consistency, and also of increasing the number of pages to about eighty or ninety – quite a nice thickness! Luckily, I had taken quite a few photographs on the Isle of Skye, upon which the poem is based. On of the most interesting things on Skye was the number of high quality artist’s galleries. I was particularly attracted by several woodcut artists. Woodcut and print are a match made in heaven, so I tried to see if I could get that jewel-like light and dark richness by working with my images.
I have used quite simple techniques (complexity is beyond my computer skills), mainly playing around with contrast and gradients. The end result depends quite a lot on the original colour photos, but I have managed to get some rich, deep tones that remind me of wood engravings, and others that more resemble aquatint etchings. Here are a few that I like. Most of the images I am happy to present as near abstracts, suggestions of landscapes, textures and grains of wood and stone. As they are complementing, rather than illustrating, the text, I want them to set an atmosphere as much as anything else.
You may remember some of the photographs that I used to accompany “The House Of Trees” as I was writing it and posting it here earlier in the year. I have used some of the same images but made many of them more graphic.
I expect I will try printing some of these out for myself on etching -type archive paper, to see haow they fare as objects in their own right.
I hope the juxtaposition of panoramic spaces with close up textural detail will keep the interest of the eye as it moves from page to page.
Somehow the tonal reversals suit the nostalgic, Otherworldly flavour, where mirroring and transformations are a common motif. Also somehow fits in with the eye of memory and metaphysical meditations also….
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged animate eye, animate object, aquatint etchings, arts, atmospheres, black and white, book projects, illustration, Isle of Skye, land and sea, landscape, match made in heaven, memory, metaphysics, moods, photography, Poetry, printmaking, rocks, Scotland, seeing, skyscapes, tree forms, work in progress | 6 Comments »
BLINK
(for Nathan)
How is it some patterning of the familiar, some phrase turned this way, that way turns more than echo, enlarges, exponents, fractures into its own chaos pattern?
We blink and the world disappears. We sleep and the universe unravels. We talk to the distance, converse with the invisible, as if our thoughts had pulses. And then there is that silence, in that forest, where that tree falls, unhindered, unremarked, unwitnessed. And the question marks the doubt.
What will be missed?
Slowly turning, slow breezes of distant breath,
We are enwebbed,
Weightless, waiting our turn.
A sweep, a cascade,
A clamour, a whisper,
A yes, an and but,
A slight widening of eye,
A lick of tongue to lip,
A spark, a cinder reseeded.
Upon an ash of dull vocabulary, a sudden dust devil dancing, acrobatic heretic, acrostic cross-stitch. And there it is, temporal flux. Gravity well. A siphon, a vortex, a cascade of neurons inventing new species. A bloom of bacteria basking in the bright futures of near-death.
Nothing is further from the truth, it never crossed my mind, a creature of habit, transfixed in the headlamps. A tumble of the banal: our raw matter to tease out, to squeeze.
I am winged yet
And spinning,
Woven somewhere,
Laced, enbroidered,
Pricked out,
Sketched.
Not quite becoming,
Hesitant.
You were and are a mirror of sorts, silvered, distant. A moon sailing through cloud. There, intimated, expressed, uncovered. A lapse in time. Time-lapse. Shutter speed. Blink. Blink. Forgetting,
Remembering,
Forgetting.
To whom belongs the face in the mirror?( Always looking a little surprised, a little disappointed). Of all the voices in my head, strange rainforest bouquet, there was, is, will be, one more calm, one more complex, a careful equation. News from Nowhere.
” Matter
is merely
mind
deadened
by the development of habit
to the point
where the breaking up
of these habits
is very difficult.”
Stubborn, fixed. It is alchemical. I, alembic, a host of raven wings and a lost crown of kings.
Here, it grows late. There: later or earlier. Those who watch, watch over the sleepers. Those who sleep, dream the waking world. Blink. It begins. Blink. It ends. The mirror remains a mirror reflecting upon what it is not. Blink. Turn away, it ceases. Turn back, it re-appears.
As if never gone away. As if never gone by. As if never gone.
Even, even, they say,
In a complete vacuum,
In a complete darkness,
No matter how dark,
No matter how hard they try,
They say,
There always, always, seems to be
Half a photon
Somehow
Remaining.
Light
Persisting.
(Just
A
Thought.)
—–
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged a mused, absence, art, black and white, consciousness, continuity, dream stream, ink, Inspired, mind, not there, Poetry, presence, print, shared awarenesses, space, there, time, white noise | 4 Comments »
WORD OF EARTH ( “geo- logos”) – a dream stream.
(from “RECITATION” (3)
Measureless are the layering of voices stratifying the night. A geology of language. A wisdom of the earth. A voice of weight. A voice of remembering. Mutterings over herbs and hunted, mutterings around campfires, incoherant weepings in empty spaces, rocking, rocking inconsolable.
The few
who have pushed through,
who have passed to the other side of the sky,
where the stars walk
on two legs, like people,
in brightnesss,
in brightness.
They find the rhythmic chants spinning out of the web along its thin, strong lines, its reliable patterns, its junctures. They weave and weave in and out of song, free to find and to lose form, to remember and to forget, but always to return to the axis, climbing their own spine-tree just for the view, just for the view.
In the dark,
snakes and daggers.
The hungry fingers, the hungry eyes.
To be sent out
and not to return home
empty-handed.
To never be bereft again, never that spun hollowness where power pulls to the edges and breathes itself away in a silence more devastating than sobs.
Click, clack,
the needles go.
Snip, snap
the shears.
She gathers up,
she gathers in,
she counts the knots,
she raises the winds.
She claps her hands and waves boil. The black cat weaves between her calves, purring. Patter, patter on the wet sand. The strings move deft between cold fingertips. A catching of moments. They are so intrigued, so curious like cats, like moths, these spirits clamber and elbow in to see more. Sticky wisdom traps them as flies. Their syllables mirrored and pronounced, taken from thin lips, pointed tongues, and turned, turned and shaped, malleable soul breath mingled to free the dreaming souls of drowned sailors anchored in the black, black starless deep.
They float and turn slowly.
Increments of light
bounce around empty eye sockets.
Teeth shed like wheat,
like barley, nicotine-stained.
Worn thin
and grazed by little fishes,
little fishes,
scoured by starfish,
bored by worms.
They rise and feel the release of water’s weight. They rise and rise, blow and shatter to powder, diatom dust. Turned song for whales, cathedrals of breathing space.
Oceans : just unfamiliar skies.
Skies : just uncharted oceans.
Skiff and wherry,
stars tacking dimensional tides,
solar winds,
trawling the chants,
the glimmer scale words,
the protection mantras, the seeds, the forms, the road home.
——
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ancestral voices, art, cosmology, deep, dream stream, geology, mahavidyas, night, oceans, other places, Poetry, recitation, souls, space, stars, time, trandscendence, words of earth | 8 Comments »
I have just recently turned my attention back to a project called (at the moment) “Recitation of the Names of Night ( or Darkness)”, pulling together black and white graphics and words to create an art book project. How far it will get, who knows…..
These received texts will be interspersed amongst images, some as staightforward text, some as worked and layered artworks. ( “received” as in: come out of the blue, unbidden, uncensored, unformed, a fleeting landscape of idea cuaght from a speeding moment)…
RECITATION (1)
The Topography of Night
The topography of Night
The slopes of darkness
Its pools, its shadows,
Its steep contours, its melodies,
Its mists and clouds.
To map its creatures
To collate its vocabulary
To define with certainty
Its presence and its absence.
To narrate its brilliance,
Its luminous resonant self,
Its fear-filled halls,
Its echoing steps, its
Vague promises, its
Certain threats,
Its embraces, its charms,
Its crevices, its lascivious
Gestures, its names,
Its names,
Its names.
—-
Epidermis
She moves,
Ligament and skin
Extending, taughtening,
Flex, reflex, a brushing
Of skin on skin.
Dark matter, dark mother,
Between all things,
Behind and within,
Void and immanent,
An unexpected punchline
Ghosting us,
Rapidly, inevitably,
Collapsing neat equations,
Smug cosmologies.
The sound of silk sliding
On silk, tongue across lips.
—-
Vessel
A bowl, a cup. A simple thing echoing the two hands together. A nutritious function. The hands, the skull, the sky. Clay pressed to hold emptiness and fullness. Progenitor, act of creation. Made of clay, pinches of dust kissed, mated, caressed, formed. Fingertips pressing warm cavities, pliant, obedient, holding still, spun, stroked, admitted, allowed. The scent of iron and sweat and earth.
—–
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cosmology, darkness, goddess, mahavidyas, night, Poetry, project, The Recitation of the Names of Night, transcendence, vessels | 4 Comments »
ARCHED (Part 7)
Stone
Cast in,
Rippling
Time’s pool.
Outwards
And inwards,
A settled pattern
Of comings and goings.
And the weight
Of the stone:
An anchor, a haven.
Small, still island
In a restless sea.
A forest for song.
A forest for silence.
A carpenter’s house,
A house of edge and curve.
A mother’s house,
A house of succour,
Of promises kept,
Of warm dark.
Artificer’s jewel:
A design
Of forever.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged architecture, art, belief, buildings, cathedrals, Exeter Cathedral, faith, history, internal space, light, medieval thought, metaphysics, photography, Poetry, shadows, skill, space, stonework, time | 2 Comments »
ARCHED (part 6)
Footfalls,
Echoed whispers.
Slow light
Pools.
Names
Fading slowly.
—-
A thin, cool shell.
A golden cup
For space.
Earth wells up,
Slow bubbled bliss
Under flags and brass.
Carapace,
Remnant, skull.
Outline echoing
Slain god outstretched
(still dreaming),
Vines growing
Through splayed fingers,
Fingers growing into mountains.
Eyes full of light
Coruscating, kaleidoscoping,
A replaying of memory
And sound.
Illumination of dark corners,
Interface and intersection,
Cavity.
Heart
Evaporated:
Chambers
Of song.
—-
Stone’s song:
We, eloquent in edge,
Tumbling meaning,
Disguised as the living,
Guiding, naming,
Numbering the dead.
A condensation of merit
And tears, and beating blood.
A lithophone, an organ
For reverberation.
A song for endless sleep,
A cradle for dream.
An approximate eternity,
Outwearing centuries.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ambience, atmosphere, Devon, England, Exeter Cathedral, Haiku-ish, interior spaces, metaphysics, photography, Poetry, stone, stone carving, time | 11 Comments »
simonhlilly 
Conversing with Invisible Friends (5)
August 17, 2013 by simonhlilly
Conversing with Invisible Friends (5)
SLEEVES ROLLED, WRITER
Grit and bones
and sharp eyes
poking holes
in the sly fabric
of things.
A thankless task,
but it must be done
and continued to be done…..
—-
WOODLAND SIMULACRUM
A rustle of hymnals
A breeze of sighs
A birdsong of childen’s whispers
A sly, sharp toothed smile:
Reynard’s rising cassock…..
—-
MOTIF MOTIVE
A translation
Of passion
Across centuries.
Careless subtitles,
Redacted, rebranded,
Pre-ordered, double wrapped,
Only
In the deepest bones
Of nightmares
Far from any lights’ switch,
The rumble
Of Doom, a certainty,
So necessitates this frenzied
Juggling of human
And divine,
Wriggling
From flesh
To light.
——
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cathedrals, commentary, comments, iconography, Poetry, stone, writing | 2 Comments »