Lizards

 Posted by at 10:53 am  Atelier  Comments Off
Oct 262008
 

Where is the point of interception?

Where does the wild locate?

Is there a crossing point?

Like the message from underground

Vandalisme e verite

Our fellow vertebrates

Alive alert hungry angry

Leave pustules of graffiti

 

And what if I think about ‘the Major’

Back home in Totnes

Bearing the wounds of his beating

At the hands of, I imagine, a group of drunk young men

At Euston Station

Perhaps he attempted to remonstrate with them

They left him for dead

But he survived

Nearly blind

His flesh healed

His bones healed

Straightened by medics (at UCH I assume)

Straightened as best they could

Good enough for him to make the pilgrimage

To Santiago de Compestella

A well-known figure in Totnes with his white staff

And his eye-patch

 

Creatures of the night

When the rules are different

Madness closer to the surface

The wounds of our past and future battles surface at 2 a.m.

Pounding the corridors

Scratching at the door to be let in

 

Ah a lizard has come to join me

I’ll continue to sit here in the shade

While it enjoys the sun

Two lizards, then three

They scatter under the rosemary bush

As I turn my head

They’re quick

And when I rise and walk back

I glimpse the scatterings of maybe ten others.

Patacara Sequence: GUITTARA MIA

 Posted by at 10:24 pm  Atelier, IN Conversation  Comments Off
Oct 132008
 

It was still that Sunday several months ago at the Harnham monastery in the north of England, and because of the noise from the washing machine upstairs it was almost impossible for someone outside in the corridor to hear anything that was being said in the main reception room at the front of the house:

This once, I walked across
the corner of the room

with her, my right hand
around her waist,

gently open, her right hand
inviting, cupping mine,

a tango, and more than one

  – Ecce

As a mother holds her
child,

whispering what he cannot
hear,

asleep, nor she tell what
it is he dreams

  //

If I had been able to
reconstruct the diagonal, it would have been like this; four or five cords made
of metal or gut, fanning out like rays and strung taut from wall to wall, the
ends bolted into the masonry; and a bridge between, two or three curved
rectangular metal sheets, or wood, with one a sounding board, or whatever it
was conceived to be, with a large circle cut out close to its centre.

   - Ecce

Her eyes almost closed,

the shadow of her arms

falls over her womb, and
the

long folds of her deep red

dress over the rise

of her hidden body

  //

One way of reading the
fragment by Simonides of Keos 598 (PMG) – IT IS A FACT THAT AMONG THE WAITING
WORLD OF THINGS THE VISIBLE CONSTANTLY CONSTRAINS; in the State Hermitage on
the 15th of June 1985, the entire central area of a major painting by Rembrandt
began to slide towards the floor, the layers of paint liquefying and piling
themselves up in what were later called ‘vertical crustations’, some large
spots and splashes being left almost entirely without colour.

“It works”, he said from
the front room
where the people were sat
listening to him,
the words rising up to meet
the lip
like a gleaming shower of
gold,
above the
ruined buildings,
and the still waters of the mill pond below.

And the sounds were having to bounce accross the threshold of the room.

mmj

Casting Off

 Posted by at 2:57 pm  Atelier, ON the STREET  Comments Off
Oct 032008
 

To wake into a night of heavy trucks roaring
Beneath the window
Beneath the trees
So intent
Through the narrows
Perhaps hell is this close
Let’s call it hell
A scattering of confusions

Questions proliferate
The leaves rustle
Branches toss

And I’m being tempted to abandon
The fight to breathe
To keep a toe-hold on reality
This is my life and death struggle
To not drown in mucous thick waters
To not drown in a past from which the life has fled
To not drown in your power

I’d like to remember those dreams from last night
I sense they were full of life

Looking at your passing faces
Wondering at the tears that come
Keeping you in view
Not letting too much water flow between us
Enjoying you dancing over there
Hearing you laugh with such vitality

The engines rattle and fire
There’s a shout from one of the upper decks
Cast off!

The moon’s riding high and proud.

Sunday Morning at Harnham

 Posted by at 6:44 pm  Atelier, ON the STREET  Comments Off
Oct 012008
 

Some months ago I was staying with friends in the north of England at
Harnham, a short line of cottages leading up to an ancient manor
farmhouse on a sandstone hill one hour outside Newcastle. ON the STREET there are all kinds of conventions, rules if you like, for how we go about our business, walking the pavement, crossing the road, even lying in the gutter if that is where we want to be, and in houses too, and my friends with whom I was staying are a Buddhist community, monks, and as you would expect they have their rules too. Waiting is one of the things that happens frequently with my friends and has its rules, and one ordinary Sunday morning  –

I wanted to describe this,
the doorway

and everyone who had gone
in before,

stepping over the threshold
and entering

a
solidity through the very thick of the angle,


And I wanted to describe
the whole house,

but from an empty corridor
running along

outside the white wall, and
inside the people

sat on the floor, some on
their knees, hands

In prayer, not that, still
faces lifted towards the real
because all roads lead
there, and I was too,
my dishonest memory sat
back against the stairs
drumming,
the spinning drum of the machine upstairs.

- ‘entering a solidity’, in other words I was aware of what felt like an impossible weight of facts, and yet I was also being given something, something very precious, and from the puzzle of my particular position an opportunity to actually see how the rules worked.

mmj