WET PAINT
Your lies still chum
around the house--
Impasto thugs
now discard past as toy
Bored with walls graffitoed Goya
black: lights flick out
the fuse tags morph--
glass spice-vials
chromatophores
of curry/ cumin/ turmeric
Horse aim orange
hazard warning--
synaptic zags
trace increasingly false
narratives down the Roman blinds
Unbaked bread will spore,
sad ends will blotch
books unwritten:
artistes dunk pencilpeel teabags,
free-hand future
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
God you're good, Julie. There's a couple lines I don't understand -- the fuse tags morph, and Horse aim orange / hazard warning: but the desolation of living among the relics of someone who has vanished is so vivid, in this.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite stanza is the penultimate:
Unbaked bread will spore,
sad ends will blotch
books unwritten . . .
Again the trademark Martin alliteration, the wonderful attention to sound. One reason I don't mind wrestling the meaning out of your poems is that the phrases then echo slowly in my mind, for days after, kicking off all manner of synaptic zigs.
(Looking back, I find I lied: my really really favorite stanza is:
synaptic zags
trace increasingly false
narratives down the Roman blinds)
Had just decided to delete as unready for prime-time when I read your comment. The basement fusebox and streetside construction horses are indeed obscure, and you are entirely too generous (here and chez Mole) re the counterbalance of sound.
ReplyDeleteHey: if echoes linger during your morning coffee, will I someday receive a napkin drawing in the mail? Off to work out rhymes for shameless!
Ask and ye shall receive. Send me your snail address!
ReplyDelete