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Posts Tagged ‘photography’

Here are the next few sections of what has been written so far…..

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Spera mercurii, mercurius

Quick as murder,
Bursting breeches, this lad
Gobby, too smart
Full of street tricks,
Alley cat, sly and sleek.
He will flicker in the shadows,
Stealing pennies, stealing favours,
Stealing wisdom from the faded.
An eye for the back door, pimp of lawyers
And all knot makers. A shiny solution,
A quicksilver poison.

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Spera veneris, venus

Mother of all beauty
(Some will say all sin)
Herself herself washed ashore.
What can we say?
She is the summit of air,
The hills of love,
The valleys of lust,
The sign before day
And the star before darkness.
Her form is whatever you desire.
Her desire is to be encompassed.
All fruit she offers, never ceasing.
As the sea’s waves
She laps and drowns,
Roars and lulls.
We are swept sway
On honey breath,
A five-fold star,
A pulse.

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POETS OF THE GREYING VOID ( BOOK OF VOICES)

Only by these words
Only by those your demons allow
By those airs and sorrows,
Those scars,
That keep them so contentedly anaesthetised.
A mirrored spirit in mirrored halls.

Teeth and lips, tongue and breath
A landscape dreaming life
Into itself.
A moon, a lost planet,
A drift of photons.
Sparked, struck flint,
A blink or such
In darkness
Illuminating nothing
Momentarily searing
Momentarily serene.

We cannot question the beauty
Of these voices, beautiful as they are,
So like our own, so like oceans,
So like sighs.
The meaning comes and goes,
A flock fierce and pierced.
The quivering salt
That falls, drying hard,
A new skin.

Maintenance of edges
Honed, traced upon, mapped,
The armies of the Lord,
A sway jut-chinned, belligerence.
The same countries, the same roads
Renamed, mispronounced.
Recidivists redacted,
All is sweetly perfumed,
Sweetly ended.
This my demons demand:
A better, bitter truth.

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INSTANT IN SILENCE

How many this night
Will not see the dawn?
Will turn away
And in an instant, forget?
In silence, or with a sigh
One by one release the senses,
Taste the fragrance
Of every memory
Then let them scatter.

We are a drift, a chord,
Bound and loosed,
Spun strong and thin,
Too thin for even strong words
To hold for long.

Release this dream
To find another.

Solace and grace,
The scent of pine needles,
Birdsong in the morning,
A familiar voice
Calling from nearby.

Turn away,
Turn away.
Dawn can come at
Any time.

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a figure of Death happily dancing in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

PAYBACK (Dance of Death, part 1)

How the bearded ones
Disdain our life world,
Shudder at this percussion of coupling,
Grimace at this copulating dance.
How they scurry
Into their sanctuary of hate.

The last oasis will not, ever, bloom
Over these rank wells of bitterness.
The virgins will never suffer your touch:
Buttocks will breed fattened worms,
Breasts exude rot,
Lips will fall apart at a touch,
Repaying your delight in death.

—-

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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….

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ARCHED (Part 7)

Stone
Cast in,
Rippling
Time’s pool.

Outwards
And inwards,
A settled pattern
Of comings and goings.

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And the weight
Of the stone:
An anchor, a haven.
Small, still island
In a restless sea.

alder creatures boss

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.

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Artificer’s jewel:
A design
Of forever.

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ARCHED (part 6)

Footfalls,
Echoed whispers.

Slow light
Pools.

Names
Fading slowly.

—-

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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.

—-
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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.

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west rose

3
Machine.

A metaphysical machine,
A gravity well compacting creation
Into one stone shell.
Languages gathered ( towering to heaven)
Light, memory, word, life.
A clustering, intergalactic map,
Star chart, journey of the soul
Through all the spheres:
Thrones, Dominions, Seraphim.
The dangerous beauty, the thin line.
Transubstantiation – stone to forest,
Light to liquid, tears to glass,
Memory to porphyry, the world
Shadowed, brilliant boat of heaven,
Ark beached, upturned, inhabited.
Dust motes dancing –
The souls delighted, the souls
Distraught.
Coming to the Mother Ocean,
Blanketed in soil.

—–
woemwood spirits boss

4
Hell Harrowed

Souls soiled sold solid some soft some scattered bitter bitter better to wake with wormwood wake to winter watch wanting play pray ring sing bright light.

a tree of three blessed branch cut curtailed cast down descending halls fallings hallowed allowed three keys harrow plough and sow bonds broken lost loosed let fly rising praising winged trumped welcomed home.

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ARCHED (part3)

The bardo of entrances.
Intermediate transitions,
One spliced into the other,
Time and space elapsing.

A slow cool outbreath of stone.
It requires a recalibration,
A rearrangement of the senses.

Slowing,
Time is tamped down
In dusty layers,
Glistening.

An inhalation
Of fractured light,
Absorbed, solidified.

Entering the cave of God:
His ribs, grey skin tight,
Desiccated, stretched out.
Pinned, hammered, sheltered.

We are slowly digested,
( the enzymes of faith),
Becoming less, and more,
Of ourselves-
Becoming one of the waiting.

Slow and turning
From cave
To cave,
( the frozen forests whispering
Chiseled curve and keel ),
A reconstruction of gravity.

Tree roots sky conjoined,
Arched, steepled.
Leaves, gold,
Fruits rotten,
Drift weightless, upwards,
Food for avaricious
Angels.

An embroidery of whispers
An evolution of sorrow,
A still heaven
Waiting for a new
Eternity.

looking west

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I do not know exactly when I took these photographs, certainly a few years ago now. It is not so easy to capture low light distant images without a tripod. Many were so underexposed so as to be completely black. Quite an interesting process to reveal the hidden images, grainy and so resembling the garish contrast of night-vision goggles. The revealing of distant mysteries. Creatures of the Abyss. Phosphorescent trails. The cave, plant sight lit. Eyes open or shut?

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THE STONE’S TALE

1
First Commandments.

The first descent
From Sinai
Tutmoses made,
(said these tongues of stone,
Buried in the vaults of space,
Uprised, upraised, given voice
By faith and silent yearning),
He turned Lord Asar, Green Osiris,
Bursting green fire, plant enthused,
Vegetal, spilt his seed,
Red pomegranate lips,
Entwined his heart and loins
With lust of God,
Forgot himself,
Became unmanageable –
Lightning and cloud –
Unintelligible, a roaring message
No one dared listen to,
So they laughed and kept dancing,
Keeping warm by firesides,
The complaints of camels
And obedient women.
—-

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