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Posts Tagged ‘art’

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ENCLOSURE OF CONFLUENCE

The dead roll and slip downhill
Chasing their bouncing heads,
Big as cheeses, down to the midstream island,
Fish-shaped and floundering in summer shallows
(it not having rained a whole day yet).

A hullaballoo choired
By the black flung jackdaws
Skimming the tiles, sound bouncing
Off the echoing bells.
Low droop the days.

How jolly the dreams
Of froth and fuschia bud
Dripping red from garden walls.

So quiet as to hear every noise,
Here in the round mouth of eternity:
The splitting rock, the lichen creep,
The self-taught letters silent mouthed
Born such and such, died such and such,
A good day ended, ne’er forgot,
Bearing many loving children.

Where now our utter quiet and wild-eyed saints?
Perched on their hills, blessing miraculous waters,
Passionate for the bigness of God,
Spread winged and leaping
Into skies of echoing praise.
Turn serpent-like to the steady pilgrimage,
Our certain roads,
These small piled eggs of pure white quartz,
The sign and signature for hard days
And steady hearts – an offered hope.

All here where two streams mingle,
The inner and the outer path.
A melancholy garden, neat kept and bordered.
Beyond the quiet lanes and clean swept steps
Another place altogether
Blowsy and careless with candles and dust,
An accumulated pigment, sun faded.

The glorious stars, an ocean
Upon which a silver bowl
Of tipping moon
Will late, near dawn, arise.

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Twilight now
no certain edge
no end nor beginning of it,
an inperceptible slide.

Colours smudge,
blood turns black
(its bitter colour)
lost in peeled shadow.

All ruins stir-
a swung memory,
tacit rhythm,
mumbled sight pitter-patters.

A moth wing trepidation
vibrating mica dust,
dew singed,
a collapse in certainty.

A heavenly moment
of relapse.
cascading inconsequence.
silent dice tumbled,
bounce and settle.

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This land,
The land of the dead,
A second skin, translucent,
Golden.

At the centre of each apple,
The sign of love:
The fivefold mutable, son and mother.

Over mountains a cream and violet fog,
Rolled, undulous, attentively folds.
A mysterious union,
Somewhat secret and holy.

The sky, a long vowel, holding its light.
A fluent time,
A tickled, breezeless sigh.
Not so still as to be nothing.

For the tiny roar
Of valley trees, a whispered thing
Measuring miles.

Vaporous drop,
Drip, congealed,
A reflected skin of nothing,
A silver round fruit,
Womb, belly, dream.

This skin
Is our beautiful horizon,
An inner organ.
Our own birdsong:
A poetic heart.

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GATHER YE

Stealthy as a cat
Night stalks a low moon.

A philosophy of cloud and rain,
A savoured language
Where trees and rocks
Become long, slow vowels.

The wet and fallen tongues
Of petalled roses
Cleaved to bough and path
Melting into something else.

Into the night,
Peeling words
From shape of vastness
And the thick, still silence,

While this world’s half
Dreams and settles down
In a bed of time and skittered light.

Cool along with the living
And the dead, all equal
In shadowed starlight

A tide of slight passions.
Rolling tongue, a roaring
Back and forth

But not so near
As to quell
The simple comfort
Of flecked
And flickered night.

Within its quiet purr
The padding cats
And careful mice
And white flow
Of owls

And the eternal rope river
Hurrying down the valley,
Tree-clothed and glorious.

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Swathed, mist cool
Tasting blue dawn
As still as an egg

Hushed as only August can be
Held in a lap of seasons
Replete, ripening,
Remembered now
The bite that is frost,
The gradual fall inwards.

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WESTER COAST

These hills, this silence-
Silent enough to hear each sound,
Its beginning, its flight, its echoed end.

Silence as balm,
As high tide harbour wave,
Silence that lifts up, that sustains.

Where weight becomes weightless,
Where distance has a taste.
Where rain curves in
And burnishes the light.
Where breath is more
Than breath, is food.

Where night clothes slow,
And owls name space
And the wind across the grasses,
Across the bracken,
Across the rock,
Across the years.

Named,
Whispered forever.
Whispered names rolled,
Remembered.
Stone,
The music of stone,
The certainty of it,
Of its voice
Across the waters.

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BHUH BHUVAH SVAH

the river of sleep:
not quite song
not quite words,
a murmur continuing.

i have climbed
from the river of sleep
to the river of dawn:
not quite song,
not quite a speaking,
a slow unfolding moment
tasting, somewhat, something.

the river of day:
a strong river is its dream,
a shout of song,
a babble, a chant.
the valley grows clear,
the mountains recede.

the river mind meanders,
silk in the valley of light
to the gayatri metre,
a blue rhythm ornamented
jewelled,
to one infinite presence.

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Under a silent sky
Stretched with cloud,
Grasses loll green and pink and grey.

A firmament of birdsong
Curled, woven to sift shading green.

Tractors sigh and roar down the lanes.
Fields turned now and mown.

Stay quiet, stay still a while,
Hear how the river mumbles.

Fed we are,
Appeased by the width of things:

The deep caverned wood,
The slow, fine rains,
Flowers, now, of cloud.

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THE VAPOURS OF HEAVEN

 

Shall they stray far,
These wandered thoughts,
Drenched with the vapours of heaven?
Shall they, distilled, sublimate,
Take new form, grow winged
Then smiling, dissolve?

Shall they, folded,
Nest upon timeless light.
Sleep, and wake golden,
Luminous, singing?
Shall they, without surcease,
Dance eternal energies,
Still named, at home
On vast, breathing cascades
Of space?

Shall they, (these thoughts),
Turn swallows, spin as swifts,
Light as thistledown, rise
Like willowherb, weightless,
A drift in summer,
A slow gentle breeze
Bird-filled?

Shall they stretch, sprout nerves,
Become sensible, grow good souls
With new names, find mouths
And lips and tongue
And sing their own song?

The vapours of heaven:
A saffron casket, rainbow-locked.
Small whispered bells,
Honey-lipped bees.

A sky stretched
To blue transparency.
A tent with purpose,
An unseen sea,
Scaled skin of cloud.

In amongst and between,
Within cloud and moving mists,
Droplets suspended awaiting surface:
To acquire direction, to know gravity,
To locate tidal choirs.

It is all music, all music,
Nothing but song.

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These images are taken from a series of ink drawings, scanned and photographically enlarged to reveal strange details. The revealing of other structures formed a parallel word stream imagining thought/word becoming sentient of themselves, hence the text, as one possible accompaniment to the images. (Other possibilities included star names or quotes from the works of John Dee). Some of the images are pixelating because of extreme enlargement, so these I may remake as pencil drawings…

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SCRY

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1
Small things
From deep pools
We rise.
Vaporous things lifting,
Turning,
Weightless drifting.
A lick and dissolve,
Ice smoke, sighing, aimless
Rise, spin, twist and dissolve,
A white fade lift,
A tongue, forgetful, vague.
Without a mirror, you see,
We scatter.

2
The falling down of words
Like honey bees or like rain.
They shall patter and gather together.
They shall wash away all dust of death.
They shall be as mirrors
And as suns.

3
Johannes, named from a river
Forever flowing east,
Named from the delta of Aphrodite
And the Aegyptians,
Of perfect memory and skill mathematic.
A subtle blade, enough to wriggle between worlds,
Searching the point between brightness and darkness.

4
All the cities are dying.
Accursed, they spread limp
And rot from centre outwards.
We have purchased all, yet still hunger, empty.

5
The view mists, fogs over.
A spray of rain and rose petal.
Summon the spirits again, Edward.
Summon again the blast of visions.
I have learned the language of angels
And now they pester me
As flies in summer meadows.
The kings and queens of England
Process in elegant spite, shifty-eyed,
Blaming cousins and the fickleness of peasants.

6
Around the garden walls,
Drab sparrows squabbling,
Happy as morning.
In the hills again,
Lost in mists,
Tight-lipped hunters.

7
Those accustomed to gaze and gaze
Letting in the world unmasked, unaltered,
Though they disappear, remain behind each edge
Every line of silver,
Seared into time’s retina.
Like Padmasambhava’s cave,
Taking up his body’s shape,
A perfect void forever sitting,
Open mind, open heart, unclassified,
Uncategorised, a species beyond light,
A ripple cascading throne,
A point through stillness, through reflection,
Through mirrored glare.
The eyes that look back
At all eyes,
Time collapsed to a breath,
Space folded
To a golden nest,
A beer relished at evening.

8
The sacred,
Always a little smutty,
To these men of science.
A vermilion stone smeared with faith.

9
So slight is the edge that shines,
The mirror’s reflectant skin.
So small a thing to throw back vision,
To show what is and is not there.
Such a line between, ( if line there is),
Seen and unseen.
So fragile a mechanism
To construct comprehension.
We settle to a silver lie,
Satisfied with thin smiles.

10
The eyes may tear something new from light.
New stranger seeds, planted in sight,
Doubts of how deep and shallow
All this reflected life might be.
God buried deep in the liver of a fool.
The Devil buried deeper in his reason.
Rise and fall, a history of empires
In this one small breath.
The same elements congeal
In madmen and in stars.
Somewhere a sun shall rise
And we shall be young
And beautiful again.

11
They push through our bitter fictions,
A stain within vast humid dream.
Spirit filled are the worlds elsewhere
Engraving slowly, they take form line by line.
Removed are the curls of nascence
A ticking clock, a creak, a shadow.

12
It is not malevolent to desire survival,
To thrust through to bigger life.
We are pushed and torn apart
As natural as morning, an evolution of sorts.
Best not, then, weigh nor judge,
(All, after all, the mockery of self
And self-existence).
A fly lands and takes off,
A pest, a nuisance, slow in slow air,
But what if, what if.

13
Our prevalence, our striding
Incessant self-portraiture:
A mistake, a neurosis, surely.
A better view must prevail,
A breaking through of stronger stories,
Radiant gods with heads of eagles,
Sky gods with lightning hair.
Beyond a mirror’s glass
That thin veil allowing silvered vision,
Presumes a surface woven illusion.
So many haunted eyes,

14
The utter strangeness of it.
A timed lapse, a void, a flicker.
Dark matter, the deep fog,
A sunless pressure, trenched, ocean deep.
Black smokers blistering more strange life.
We become utterly replaced again.

15
A charming magus chants destruction
And parturition in one caught breath.
The wonder is we do not see
How small and fast, how struggled and unfree,
How lost and how imprecise,
How glorious and how wrong.

16
The wise remain silent,
Watching skies unutterably changed.
I cannot say with whose voice for sure,
Or whence or from when.
A slight recorder.
A wave front.
A gravity well.
A spinning top
Each second more slowly.
The grate of opening
And closing doors.

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