The Harp In The Circle

Medusa's Kitchen published this very recent poem today

THE HARP IN THE CIRCLE

The hard songs come through

Holes in the night sky,

An impending electricity of purpose

Gathers into patterns, constellations

Remembered from dares we took

As children, stories around

The night time fires,

The stars, reminders of our bone

Dust congealed within our sorry bodies.

Touched with grace for a moment,

they are able to form a mouth,

then a music, then a welter of instruments.

We hear them as animal voices,

Frogs and loons, crow talk,

The coughing of a cat,

Slap of fish on quiet water.

Oh let us sing the hard songs.

Songs of goodbye and of parting,

Of winds on the moors and

Mists moving across bogs

where plants eat meat,

Dreaming they are gods,

Where love flees a room

Dense with violins and clarinet

Laments. Pieces of loves across

Ages of time, dead ancestors

And friends turn from our embrace

To ride the night sky forever,

To pour through shining holes in the night sky.

A couple of images by Henry Justice Ford, one of my favorite illustrators

Medusa published this rock picture on Saturday.

Here is another of Stephanie's pieces.

How can you not love fashion and furniture?

Stephanie Liner's "Gibbosity".

medusa's kitchen .com

published a photo of mine and a poem on Sunday. I'll post the poem here but the blog itself is most excellent.

This poem was published as a small, but lovely broadside booklet containing only this poem by 12 Gauge Press in 2003 as 12 Gauge Press Flyer #17

WATER TALK

We could never understand

The meaning of the sounds

We heard when the ice broke

Up on the lake. Groans and squeaks,

Great moaning and screeching, deep

Rumbles and a gnashing that bled

Into our nerves, lighting up synapses.

Recently, we have come to believe

That water carries the voices of all things.

Those who have no body or are unwilling

To find one, those who are changing from

One place or manifestation to another.

We are mostly water. All of life is

Mostly water. It occurs to us that

Ice may contain as many voices as

The crashing of waves or the falling

Rain, great waterfalls, hail, sleet, soft

Snow and the breaking up of winter

Beneath our feet as we walk the woods.

Certainly there is language in pools,

Fountains with their entertainment,

A rushing of rapids, the sounds of newborns

In rivulets, brooks and vernal streams

Down hillsides. Secret drippings in caves

Have much to disclose as does window

Glass, stopping all kinds of water against

Its water-like self, amplifying and making

Rhythmic so much of water. The freshlet,

The rumblings of arroyos deep in desert,

The calving of icebergs, the melt before

Volcanoes, even burst pipes spraying

The air with water. All these things

May be voices, trying to convey to us,

The living, what it is to be such a great

Part of water as we are conscious beings.

Still we never could understand any

Such activity as having meaning. We

Must change it in some way. We press

To explain things to one another as if we

May know. Language is as liquid to us all.

___________________

Robin Williamson's new album Skirting The River Road is spectacular