Art

Carnival

Carnival:

Bakhtin’s Carnival – the world turned upside down and inside out. And here it is. Moo has painted an upside down world. From the above angle, the world is full of birds and is “as crazy as the birds“. Lovely image. There they go, birds of a feather, flocking together, soaring, sinking, doing what birds do when they are as crazy as bat shit – and Moo told me, he nearly gave his painting that name – Crazy as Bat Shit.

But hang on a moment – if the world is upside down, what happens when you turn Moo’s painting upside down? Let’s try it and see.

Would you believe it – the birds are no longer birds, they have turned into animals. From this point of view, we have Animal Farm. Moo thinks he can sell this painting for double the price now he has discovered it means something different the other way up. Now – what if …. Nope. Let’s leave it there. We are not going to turn it sideways, nor inside out. That’s asking too much of Moo and his painting skills.

But we have a tiny little lesson, and with no poem attached to it. Perspectivism – the same object seen from two different points of view by two different people can elicit different functions and different interpretations.

Think of the Barber’s Basin in Don Quixote. One group of people see it as a barber’s basin. A second group see it as Mambrino’s Helmet, missing a visor. Cervantes resolves the problem by adding yelmo to bacía to give a new word – a baciyelmo. A helmet that serves as a basin and vice-versa. Does such a combination exist in English? Whyever not! We can call it a bassinet, as in a pig-faced bassinet. That is to say, a helmet with a snout that ends in a bassin – well, we can forgive the -ss- if we are generous.

And now we come to the important part of our lesson. Most things can be changed from one meaning to another, if we change our position and our point of view. Birds can become animals. Animals can turn into birds. A good mood can be turned into a bad mood. A bad mood can be turned into a good one.

There is so much depression around us at the current time. “Turn that frown upside down” – and turn the world on its head and inside out. I bet you can do it if you really try. After all, Moo has shown you how and I assure you that Moo – and I know him well – is no genius. However, in spite of that, every so often he stumbles on a tiny truth, just like he has in this painting.

So – don’t get frightened and depressed by the black dog when he leaps out at you from the grandmother clock. Turn him from a dog into a bird and let him fly away into the blue, taking the black dog’s blues along with him. And remember – if Moo can do it, so can you. So “turn that frown upside down” and remake your world in the shape you would like it to be. And remember – if Moo can do it, so can you.

Blood from Stones

Car tire over a pothole containing small monster figurines with aggressive faces
A car tire hovers above a pothole filled with snarling monster sculptures.
Image AI generated.

Blood from Stones

The road ahead a bandage
leaking grey blood from stones.
The snow plow brutal,
carelessly lifting scabbed edges
until the gore overflows.

Spring always promises renewal,
but freeze and thaw also open
old wounds making them bleed.

A merry, mazy life we lead,
threading the car’s needle through
holes torn in the asphalt’s fabric.

Some holes are so large they have
lives of their own, and names –
Grand Canyon, Yawning Gap,
Patty’s Peril, Big Bertha, each one
well-known to neighbors.

Others are pornographic,
their open orifices painted,
laughing in scorn, dentated
vaginas ready for anything.

Such decorated potholes
 are soon filled, their crude
messages swiftly erased.

Comment:

Three flat tires in the last month and spring’s potholes still out there, waiting to trap me. Apparently, one neighborhood on the North Side of the river decided to decorate their potholes with pornographic drawings. These were swiftly filled and their messages totally erased. Alas, we on the South Side are not so daring. We don’t go out and paint our potholes. Personally, I wish we did. July – and many potholes are still there.

Not only that, the road into town is being repaired. Hooray! However, the tarmac was stripped off two weeks ago and has yet to be replaced. Boo! More than that, at the end of our street, just before the highway, one or two enormous potholes still gape. They lead directly to a dip that rises abruptly when it meets with the now stripped highway. A champion clunker that – a genuine tank-trap. I think at least two of my flat tires occurred after going over that one.

It reminds me of my grandfather’s stories about WWI and ‘going over the top’. Now, each time I approach it in the car, I call out loudly, “Look out, grandpa, here I come.” I call that particular pothole Grandpa’s Revenge. My own personal name. I don’t know what the neighbors call it. And I don’t know why grandpa is seeking revenge! But below the tires, the pothole awaits, gnashing its teeth.

Star Field & Brush Fire

Star Field
&
Brush Fire

The evening and my mind
both slipping away
into the grey mesh of twilight
that bids farewell to day
and brings on night

Words no longer link
solitary stars they blink
and I no longer think
the way I used to
logic buried deep
no longer rules

Who am I who writes
these words each letter
a shooting star
trailing bright light
across night’s page

I hesitate confused
and know not what I write
what I want to write
hides out of sight
will not soar upwards
into starry fields of light

Commentary:

Brush Fire – that’s what Moo calls this painting. It wasn’t his idea to call it that. He didn’t have a clue what to call it. However, he explained to KTJ that the reason why he didn’t know what he had painted was because he had finished painting what he had wanted to paint but had some paint left on the paper saucer he uses for a palette, and he didn’t want to waste it. So, he pepper sprayed what you see above. “You mean you were just cleaning your brushes,” KTJ asked. “Yes, ” he replied. “I thought I might call it Sky Fire or Fire Storm or something like that.” “Brush Fire,” said KTJ. “You just burnt your brushes.”

Well, you don’t argue with someone who makes the world’s best peanut butter balls, not to mention superb devilled eggs. So Brush Fire it is. I think Moo is a bit ashamed of himself because he hid his signature on this painting, and you have to look really, really hard if you want to find it. In fact, you might have to borrow my new glasses and use a magnifying glass to spot those three tiny letters among all those sparks and flames – Brush Fire, indeed!!!!

Starry Night

450px-Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Starry Night
(1889 & 2019 & 2026)

last night I saw stars
never thought to see them again
first time in years
a riot of bright lights
no dark spots floating
no black holes barring
vision’s edge

just layer upon layer
star fields like buttercups
littering the sky
I had forgotten their names
forgotten how many existed
smiling frowning down
immortalized in myth
celebrated in song

daylight broke waves
an ocean of sunshine
untying dreams’ night-knots
sharp black and white memories
shifting to corkscrews of color

two refreshing rain drops
four times a day
a never-to-be-forgotten face
seen once again in close up

Fundy fogs clearing
mist un-threading between
salt-laden pine roots gripping
splitting fragile rocks

complicated emotions
woven into a simple
carpet bag of words

Commentary:

I wrote this some time ago, after a simple eye operation that scraped clean the new lenses that the doctor had placed in my eyes. Distorted vision – it happens in so many ways. Kennel blindness – at the doggy shows, the owners and breeders blind to the faults of their own dogs while eagle-eyed for the slightest fault in another owner’s woof! Cat shows the same. Incidentally, tell me if you can, why a cat show has a catalog, as does a dog show. But why shouldn’t a dog show have a dog-a-log? I wanted to print one foe them when I was working with the kennel club, but their own kennel blindness made them insist on a catalog for dogs.

Think of the joy and beauty of sight. Sunrise. A thunder storm, dark clouds building. The slash of rain. Those first flakes of winter snow. That snow snake hissing down the road before you whipped by the wind.

Now I am back with new glasses and new eye drops and the world has come back into focus yet again. My beloved is, as she always was, and as I will always remember her. Yet, with my new glasses, I see and sense the subtle changes that have taken place.

And words. That magic carpet of letters that turn an army of ants into a Jackpine sonnet or a song about the sixpence that vanished so long ago. Oral poetry, yes. You can listen to it. But the written word, going letter by letter onto the page – you need vision to see that.

Vision and Revision – we are not writers, we are re-writers. Indeed we are, but without vision, without sight, we would be lost, so lost. Unthinkable a world without words. Unthinkable that night sky without its stars. Ah, to feel the warmth of the sun – but alas not to be able to see sun and shadow, the butterfly upon the flower, the stork returning to its nest.

Sight, touch, taste, sound, smell – deprived of one sense, we are left with four – but oh what a chunk of world goes missing when we lose just one sense.

Alebrijes

alebrije2

     Alebrijes step out from dried wood and stand in the shower of paint that falls from the brush’s tip. Yellow flash of lightning, pointillistic rain, garish colors that mirror those of the códices. The carvings take the form of fantasy figures, anthropomorphic animals,
 and mythological creatures.

Sometimes one individual selects the wood, carves it, then covers it in paint. Occasionally an entire family takes part in the work of making the alebrije. One person collects the wood and prepares it for carving. Another carves and sands it. A third works on the undercoat, and a fourth applies the final patterns of paint.

The great debate: does the form in the wood 
reveal itself to the carver
 or do the carvers impose their own visions on the wood? In the case of the team, do the family members debate and come to a joint conclusion?

These thoughts, exchanged with wood-carvers in Oaxaca, all with different opinions, have led to a series of interesting conversations. What exactly is creativity? Where does it come from? Do we, as artists, impose it upon our creations? Or do we merely observe and watch as new ideas float to the surface of our minds? How does the creative mind really function? And, by extension, how much of the sub-conscious creative sequence can be placed into words?

Alebrijes

 Are they half-grasped dreams
that wake, wide eyed, to a new day’s sun?

Or are they alive and thriving
when they fall from the tree?

Does the carver fish their color and shape
from his own interior sea,
or does he watch and wait for the spirit
to emerge from its wooden cocoon
to be reborn in a fiery block of color?

Daybreak:
in a secluded corner of my waking mind,
my neighbor’s dog greets the dawn with sparks
of bright colors born from his bark.

My waking dream: dark angels with butterfly bodies,
their inverted wings spread over my head to keep me warm.
In the town square, the local artist plucks dreams
from my head and paints them on carved wood.

Or is this the true source of inspiration?

Waist Land

Wind-sculpted tree on rocky coastline with turbulent ocean and cloudy sky
A lone, wind-shaped tree stands on rugged coastal rocks under a cloudy sky

Image generated
not by Big Brother
but by Little Brother
who left the Frying Squad
to become a painter
and mind-reader

Waist Land

Jack Pine Sonnet

living in a waste land
surrounded by books
he writes in his journal
things false and true
in memory of the old days
when the world seemed so new

a life built on sand
slips through his fingers
wouldn’t it be grand
if the sand stays and lingers
refusing to pass through
the hour glass’ waist
so time stops to flow

then he could say no
leave me alone
there’s more sand to fall
I don’t want to go

Comment:

It’s a bit like a cliff-hanger, isn’t it? Hanging on by our fingertips and not daring to look at the depths down below. We know they are there, but look, there’s a tiny fossil in the fissure in the rock, so much older than us, we’ve got a long time to go to catch that up. And remember – 80 is not old, if you are a stone!

Treading air – great fun. Not as good as treading warm water in the local YMCA. Just a lovely sense of balance, floating there in the warmth, no weight on arthritic joints, and the world around us amniotic, as it was in the beginning. Ah, those original waters, we have all swum in them, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, and all shades in between. Even King Charles and the late Queen. And remember, they may speak of blue bloods, but all blood is red -and, if you cut us, do we not bleed.

Speaking of bleeding – blood-thinners – my favorite doctor’s latest joke. I cut my arm the other night, getting into bed. Didn’t even notice. Pillows and sheets soaked in blood when I woke up and my scalloped arm, stuck to the sheet, opened itself up and started to bleed again. Feels like seventeenth century Spain, the wounds of the dead man re-open and start to bleed when the assassin appears before him. Certain truth. Obviously 100% guilty.

And they tell me that in South Wales people are adding cooking oil to gasoline to make the petrol go further. Scotland Yard sent the Flying Squad to South Wales to sniff people’s exhaust pipes to see if they were cheating the tax man. I asked my friend – “Is this true?” “Ah, yes,” he said in his lovely Welsh lilt, “and we call them the Frying Squad!”

May Day

May Day

Trees in bud
sudden their break out
fresh today
a red fuzz here
catkins over there

Fairy lights
in the Mountain Ash
goldfinches
a mountaineer
this downy woodpecker
scaling the heights
a star
on top of the tree

Green the grass
in places
brown in others
from last year’s drought

New Brunswick violets
our provincial flowers
a patchwork of blue

Dark green
the early hollyhock leaves
pushing stubbornly
up and through
to greet the sky

Commentary:

Mysterious indeed it is – to plant a clepsydra and watch it grow. Will it, won’t it? Does it suit the climate zone? Will it flower? Have you ever seen a flowering Clepsydra? Moo has. He draws and paints them all the time. But can he make them grow in my garden? We’ll have to wait to find out. He can certainly paint them.

But why does he call them mysterious? When I printed Clepsydra in my chapbook series, I mis-counted the pages and ended up with one blank page. “Mine!” said Moo. And he grabbed his colored pens and pencils and set to work drawing Clepsydras. That was his Mysterious Clepsydra Plant. Down below he has painted a Lady Clepsydra in Flower. Will the ones he says he planted in my garden be yellow, red, or multi-colored? Who knows? I most certainly don’t. And I am pretty sure Moo doesn’t have a clue about the plant life he uses to brighten my pages and plant in my flower beds.

Do you know what a Clepsydra is? Let’s ask Big Brother to draw us one. Hey, Big Bro – paint us a Clepsydra. A voice emerges from nowhere – “Say pretty please and I’ll think about it.” “Pretty please.” The metalic voice vanishes and a sign appears – Thinking!

Replica of a Roman water clock with ornate brass components and a glass water container
A functioning replica of a Roman water clock circa 50 AD / CE – a clepsydra – displayed in a museum

CE – Common Error – well I never. I guess poor Mistaken Moo made a common error and thought a Clepsydra was a flower. Time flows like a flowers, but it never flows back. If you see Moo, don’t tell him about this. He won’t be happy to know he can’t tell a flower from a set of flower pots. And what the heck would he paint if he went to Flower Pot Rocks? Oh no!!!! Well I never did. I blame Moo entirely. Shame on Moo! He’s fooled me again!

Monet at Giverny

Monet at Giverny

1

his lily pond
a mirror shattering
shards of clouds
flames beneath the lilies
fractured fish

2
the executioner stripes evening
a cross the sacrificed horizon
in blood we were born
in earth will we rest
our flesh turned to bread
empurpled this imperial wine
streaming with day’s death
these troubled waters

3
green footprints the lily pads
a halo
this drowned man’s beard
liquescent
like the gods
he dreamed
he walked dry over water
flowering goldfish
this thin line of cloud

4
maples flash ruby thoughts
ripples flowing outwards
as heavy as a stone at Stonehenge
this altar tumbling downwards
through a liquid sky

5
wisteria and his curly blue locks
Narcissus clad in an abyss of lilies
imperial his reflection and perilous
slowly he slides to sleep
merging into his imaged dream
a vaulted cathedral
his earthbound ribs
the blood space immaculate

6
night and day and sun and clouds
leapfrogging over water
something survives
sepia tints
dreaming on and on
exotic this sudden movement
Carassius auratus flowering

7
Clos Normand and the Grande Allée
closed to him now
folded his flowers
their petals tight at his nightfall
dark their colours
mourning for his mornings of light
fled far from him now

8
can we soften this sunstroke of brightness
le roi soleil threatening to blind us?
rey de oros
the sun glow braiding itself
an aureate palette
a susurration of leaves

9
the lady of the lake
holding out her hand
handing him an apple
l’offrande du coeur
a scarlet heart of flame
monochromatic this island
brown earth in a crimson lake
the world reborn in tulips

10
especially
when the dying sun
molten fire spreading
a limpid light
sky brimming over into pond
trapped in low clouds
a slash of colour here
and there a tree
a fountain of gold
the sun an apple
blushing
on a setting branch

11
silver-white the money plant
moonlight between fine-tuned fingers
its rattle of seeds
blunt the moon’s bite
raked from water
gaunt its gesture
matched ripples
face to face
with the moon

12
upside down these clouds
bright in their winter boats
the night wind blows
clean dry bones
across the sky

13
fish aloft like birds
skimming wet sunshine
spring’s first swallow
rising from the depths
to snatch a golden note
quivering in the air

14
thunder raises dark ripples
lightning a forked tongue
insinuated into paradise
an apple tossed away
caution thrown over the shoulder
as sharp as salt

15
winds of change
that first bite
too bitter to remember

16
timeless this tide
this ebb and flow
oh great pond-serpent
biting your own tail
forever

Comment:

A real Golden Oldie and going back a long way. I just re-discovered it. Funny how these things become lost and abandoned. Then they resurface. This is from Though Lovers Be Lost, available online should you wish to continue with its poetry!

Click on the link below to purchase the book

Though Lovers Be Lost
Print Edition

Rage, Rage 44 & 45

Rage, Rage
44

But all is not lost.
Highlights of the day:
waking to birdsong,
making it safely to the bathroom,
shaving without cutting my face.

I step high to get into the shower
and wash my body
without dropping the soap.

I emerge
without slipping or falling
thanks to the safety rails
Extra-Mural
inserted in the walls.

I stand on the bath mat
and dry with my towel
those parts of the body
that are now
so difficult to reach,
especially between
my far-off toes.

45

I pull my shirt over
still-wet, sticky patches,
damp from the shower,
and negotiate each trouser leg
without catching
my toe nails in a fold.

I tug at the pulleys
of the machine
that helps my socks
to glide onto my feet.

I force those swollen feet
into undersize shoes
and hobble
to the top of the stairs.

Banister in one hand,
cane in the other,
I lurch down them,
descending with caution
one step at a time.

Comment:

I lurch down the stairs, descending with caution, one step at a time. Indeed I do. That whole process of getting up, washing, dressing, going down stairs, takes me a good half hour, sometimes more. I do things in order, one after another, each step the same every day. That way, I remember everything and forget nothing. Easier said than done! I often forget something, or do something out of order, and then I get muddled and I stand there befuddled. Muddled and befuddled. Not a good way to start the day.

Moo sometimes visits and watches me as I struggle with my clothes. He has been known to help, especially when my back is still wet and my shirt won’t go on, or my feet get stuck in my pants or my socks. Usually, though, he’s very good. He sits or stands there quietly, just watching. I think some of his paintings come from some of my struggles. I know the titles do. When I am muddled and befuddled he says I am all shook up. he says that’s where the painting comes from. I’m not so sure about that. I think he has a secret liking for Elvis Presley.

Funny going back over those old songs from the fifties and sixties. Long gone are the days when boarding school boys stuck their chewing gum on their bedposts overnight. I remember when we used to dare each other to sing ‘does your chewing gum lose its flavor’ in the school chapel during the morning service. I remember once having a bet with a friend how many Hallelujahs there were in the Hallelujah chorus. We dared each other to sing the number we chose. His number was higher than mine, and I remember his voice, singing out a lone solo Hallelujah and shattering the deafening silence of the packed school chapel.

And those limericks – “There was a young boy in the choir, whose voice rose up higher and higher. One Saturday night it rose right out of sight and we found it next day on the spire.” And that might be the only non-filthy Limerick that this old man can remember. Oh dear – all those songs we sang on the school bus!

Rage, Rage 38

Rage, Rage
38

Now, my heart is once more
a time-bomb ticking
beneath her fingers.

I dream of walking tall,
with her by my side,
in the youthful paradise
of a distant,
long-promised land.

My tom-tom heart,
softening clay,
putty beneath her fingers,
thumps out a hoodoo
voodoo beat on its drum.

Victor Sylvester,
and his orchestra,
Sundays on BBC radio,
announces his signature rhythm –
slow, slow, quick, quick, slow –
my mind waltzes to the music
plucked from my heart strings.

Wild winds blow in from the shore
buffeting my heart, breaking it apart.
Blown open, in spite of my dreams,
my secret is not a secret anymore.

Comment:

Absent without leave, I have chased the dreams of rugby and cricket and abandoned my poetry until another today. And here I am, a week after St. David’s Day, still dreaming, still raging, still recalling so many things.

Wild winds blow in from the shore buffeting my heart, breaking it apart. You can see, in the photo above, the wind tugging at the waves. A lurid sky fills with heavy clouds and oncoming rain. My heart is out there somewhere, wave-washed, blown open by the simple beauty of wind and sea.

How many now recall Victor Sylvester on BBC Radio on a Sunday afternoon? Or the Billy Cotton Band Show? That was our Sunday afternoon entertainment long before we had TV. You can’t imagine it, can you? A world without TV. So many things fade away from far too many people.

Who now will talk of my Voce and my Larwood, long ago? How many saw Hammond at his best, with his imperial cover drive? Ken Jones? Cliff Jones? JJ and JPR? Lloyd and Bleddyn? Old visions, buffet my heart, breaking it apart. Frank Worrall in Swansea at St. Helen’s. Everton De Courcy Weekes at Bristol, in the County Ground. I have the photos. I have the memories. And I have a broken heart when I remember things, some personal, some not, that so few people do.