Blessings

KIRA

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KIRA

Kingsbrae International Residence for the Arts has appointed five artists who will work in residence at Kingsbrae and Kingsbrae Gardens (St. Andrews, New Brunswick), from June 1 to June 28, 2017. The artists who will work in Kingsbrae in June are Carlos Carty (Lima, Peru, musician), Anne Wright (Ottawa, multi-media), and Elise Muller (Muskoka sculptor). They will be joined by two New Brunswick artists, Ruby Allan (Fredericton, painter), and Roger Moore (Island View, poet). Note that KIRA is making a special effort to encourage New Brunswick artists. Full details are in the link above.

The selected artists met face to face on a video conference call and discussed some of the work that they could do in common: more about this later. Suffice to say for now that joint workshops on different forms of creativity are being planned. While the residency will be an excellent time for individual work, each participant has a specific project to be undertaken during our time at St. Andrews, there will also be time for the interchange of creative ideas and for readings and workshops within the local artistic community.

My own project will be to establish a Bakhtinian poetic dialog with my time (June) and my place (Kingsbrae, St. Andrews).  This follows the ideal of the Bakhtinian chronotopos, as outlined in my earlier post Alebrijes or Inspiration, and I plan to use my time to reflect upon and write about both St. Andrews and the Kingsbrae Gardens. I intend blogging regularly throughout the month of June and I look forward to posting photos and cartoons to accompany my poems and the journal that I will maintain throughout my stay. My blog is located at rogermoorepoet.com.

Further to this project, I hope to establish a rapport, much along the lines of my poems on Monet at Giverny, between myself as poet and Kingsbrae Gardens as a subject for poetry. Giverny and Monet at Giverny 1-4/16, Monet at Giverny 5-8/16, Monet at Giverny 9-12/16, and Monet at Giverny 13-16/16 offer a model for some of the art work I would like to accomplish.

Each artist will have studio space. Should you visit St. Andrews in June, please consider not only visiting Kingsbrae and its beautiful gardens but also dropping by to meet us as we work to accomplish our artistic tasks. I, personally, will be very happy to meet and talk with visitors to the residency who are interested in the daily workings of my art.

 

Clare

 

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Clare

She moves more slowly
up the slope,
pushing against the hill’s
shallow grain.

I knew so well her
swaying grace,
but now she shuffles
with the drag-

foot limp of the aged,
and aged she has,
like a good wine in
an oaken cask.

Her beauty still stays
in my memory,
lodges in my mind and
I see her as

she was, beautiful
in body, slim,
graceful, a joy to hold
and behold.

Her eyes still sparkle
and she bubbles
still with a champagne
joy that draws

me to her, and still she
enhances each
room she enters, filling
it with light.

Le mot juste

 

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Le mot juste

Searching for what exactly?
For the exact word, le mot juste,
the word that sums it all up,
catches the essence of the thing
and holds it in the mind forever.

Le mot juste? Think color.
Think color blind. Think blind.
Think of the world we see
reduced to grey scale.
Think of the seven colors
that stripe the rainbow sky,
each with a unique name:
it seems so easy, so simple.

But the world has changed.
Think now of the computer,
its screen more accurate
than the human eye and color
coordinated by a million or more
tiny little pixels that multiply
the seven rainbow colors
by a million or two and every
color numbered beyond
the recognition point
of the human eye: le mot juste
reduced to precision of number.

Think flowers. Think scent.
Think of the limited ways
we describe the smell of things.

I look across the breakfast table
and see my wife of fifty years,
a teenager reborn, walking into
the café where we first met.
I search my memory and my mind
for the words to describe that beauty,
that surge of excitement,
but I cannot find les mots justes.

May Day

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May Day

March 1, St. David’s Day:
the daffodils grow free
around Cardiff Castle keep;
they cluster in Roath Park,
while Blackweir Gardens
flourish with their flowering.

March 17, St. Patrick’s Day:
it’s the traditional first practice,
out of doors, for the Toronto Irish
Rugby Club and the players stand
round and shiver in weak sunlight
as shadows lengthen over the grass.

April 23, St. George’s Day:
International Book Day
and we celebrate the lives
of earlier writers … Shakespeare,
Miguel de Cervantes, El Inca
Garcilaso de la Vega, great,
but so little known outside Peru.

May 1, May Day, May Day:
the Morse Code call goes out,
Save our Souls, for we have sinned.
We have left so many days and lives
behind us now, as we move into spring.

I recall so many familiar faces,
now gone for ever. Today, I’ll gift them
virtual flowers, a bouquet of May bought
from the wise old women who know its secret
hiding places in the wet spring woods
and bring its early sunny scents,
wrapped in foil, to my breakfast table.

Comment: Raw poem. I wrote it this morning with our winter geraniums sitting on the back porch, in the rain, glistening and damp. Every fall, we bring the best plants into the house and they survive the winter warmed by the fire. Then in the spring, we release them to the outdoors once again. So many things released this spring, friends departed over the winter, their exit so sudden. Wrapped in the scents of early May, I dream of salvation for them and for me and for all who survive.

Glass Man

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Glass Man

“I am made of glass,” I said.
“You can see right through me.”

But the harder you looked,
the less you saw.
You claimed
there was nothing there,
just empty air.

“Your glass is an illusion,” you said.
“It’s not half full
and it’s not half empty.”

“Glass is fragile,
I break easily.
Drop me, I shatter;
hot and cold will
make me crack.”

“Your fragility is in your mind,
not in the fact of your existence.”

“When light passes through me
I break into a million colors,”
I said.

“You are a prism,
the colors that you cast
change you and rain
rainbow  lights
that change others
too.”

 

Sous-Chef

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Sous-chef

“I’ll be your sous-chef,” she said,
with a twinkle in her eye,
and she was as good as her word.

She brought me all the ingredients,
laid them out in the right order,
peeled potatoes and carrots,
sliced onions under cold water
to ensure that neither of us cried.

She added crushed garlic into hot
oil, measuring spices and slicing
the chicken into chunks.

I extracted the cork so the wine
could breathe. We sipped sherry
and talked of wind and weather,
of our time together, and how
we would grieve when, early next
day life would force us to part.

Later that night, after dessert
and liqueurs, we climbed up
the stairs and she joined me
in bed, in a sur-chef adventure

that went to my head, with me
as the sous-chef, her as the head.

Comment: Very rare, raw, naughty poem. I wrote it in the garage this morning, waiting for my tires to be rotated. It was cold, I was bored, and I needed warming up. This is one of those poems that I might regret later. I certainly hope not. The rhythms aren’t quite what I wanted, so I may re-do it, and possibly sharpen up the recipe. Your comments and advice will be welcome.

Sinister

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Sinister

What the left hand does
when the right hand doesn’t
know what it’s doing
is an attempt to re-pattern
the brain, to slow it down,
as the pencil spider-walks
its wandering way over the page
like my father’s did when,
stroke-stricken in the right hand,
he transferred his pencil to the left
and sought to-re-establish control
over tiny, manageable things,
and yes, he often cut himself
shaving, but he didn’t like beards
so he never gave in and shaved
every day, died fighting,
and did not go gentle,
and neither will I.

Comment: This is a very raw poem, in more senses than one. I fell over on Tuesday, on the back porch. One of the porch nails, forced up by the winter ice, caught in my open-toed sandal and over I went. My head had hit the deck before I even knew I was falling. It wasn’t as bad as the tumble I had when chasing the black bear and trying to photograph it, but this fall left me quite stunned. You can read about the fall HERE. The actual bruising, not the fictional ones, can be found in #3 of that sequence. I wrote the above poem, on Thursday evening, with my left hand, while my right hand was being iced. Funny how we think of one thing while doing another: I had visions of my father, stroke-stricken as I say, trying to write with his left hand. He fought so hard to do just the smallest things. Oh yes, I have a nice bump on my head, too, and as I told the chiropractor when I visited her later that Tuesday afternoon: “I think I have already had my back adjusted once today.” The other thought that comes to me: how slow we are to heal, once we pass a certain age, or, as my good friend Jan the Stoneist says, “an uncertain age.” With that latest fall, I have indeed entered into The Age of Uncertainty.

Love Poem @ 70

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Love Poem @ 70

1
We walk on tiptoe round the garden,
peeling free the sunlight cloud by cloud.

Sometimes, the heart is a sacrifice of feathers,
bound with blood to an ornate altar.

Petrus:
this rock cold against my chest.
Piedra:
centuries of stone carvings
come alive in your face.

If our arms were to meet
around these columns
of sun-warmed flesh and stone,
what would become of us?

2
Beneath my skin, the woad
flows as blue as this evening sky.
Your skin is bronzed
in the warmth of my gaze.

Yellow light bends
low in the fields below us,
each darkening pool
a warrior fallen
beneath time’s scythe.

The moon paints a delicate circle.
Its great round eye opens out
above the rooftops,
a cathedral window
opening on the sky.

Tonight it bears
the wisp of an eye lid
carved from  cloud.

Your teeth are diadems of whiteness
aglow in your face.

We tie shadows to our heels
and dance in triumph
to the village music
sounding in street and square.

3
Daylight bends itself round rock
and turns into shadow.
We flourish in blocks of flickering flames.

Dreaming new selves from roots and branches,
we clasp each creation with greedy fingers.

Dark angel bodies with butterfly wings,
our shadows have eloped together.
They sit side by side holding hands
at a table in the central square.

4
Church bells gild the barrio’s rooftops.
Our fingers reach to the skies and hold back light.
We draw shadow blinds to shut out the sun.
Night fills us with stars and a sudden sadness.

We dream ourselves together in a silent movie,
closed flesh woven from cobwebs
lies open to a tongue-slash of madness.

The neighbor’s dog wakes up on the azotea.
He barks bright colors as dawn declares day
and windows and balconies welcome the sun.

Can anyone see the dew-fresh flowers
growing from our tangled limbs?

Your fingers sew a padlock on my lips:
We listen to the crackle of the rising sun.

Yellow

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Yellow

Sunshine and daffodils
and my grand-daughter
paddling in the kitchen sink
as her mother washes
the breakfast dishes.

“Sit,” the child says and “stand,”
following the words with actions.

Yellow, she says, yellow,
as daffodils fill the screen
to shine in that far-off kitchen
a thousand clicks away by road
but instantaneous as the child
reaches out to hug the I-Pad.

Yellow, she repeats, yellow.

Soon she will see the daffodils
dancing their spring dance,
snow gone,
beside the lake,
beneath the trees,
yellow, yes, yellow,
tossing their heads
dancing
yellow in the yellow
breeze.

Comment: Another raw poem, straight from the journal, with only minor revisions. We Skyped yesterday and discovered that our grand-daughter had added another word to her vocabulary: yellow. She repeated it again and again, with great joy and energy, as she paddled in the kitchen sink.

Frog Lake

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FROG LAKE
THE OPERA

Frogs chant spring love song from pond to ditch.
Their tunes are one note symphonies,
croaks of joy that move other frogs to ecstasy.

Boy frogs seek girl frogs, encouraging them to share
the splendours of ditch life, pond life,
in a pairing whose springtime union will employ
frog song to spawn still more singers.

There’s joy in this calling, croaking, creating;
and where there’s joy, there’s laughter, love,
happiness, light, sun, brightness, flowing water:
everything frogs associate with spring.

Every night the frowning silence of frozen stars
wings deeper into memory. Spring moonlight
swings its cheerful love lamp. Earth also sings.