Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Wednesday 21 April 2010

Open


.






To start with
the orange joys
toes tanned begging
Koran flay kegs
jet from the measuring jug
of yellowed coffee

The windows are open
dirty open but in summer
open to the stones
really open to them








from Stones (1969)


Lightning and lava flows over Eyjafjallajokull: photos by Olivier Vandeginste, Sunday 18 April 2010

6 comments:

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

Tom,

colors IN words, light IN sky . . . .

4.21

light coming into sky above still black
of ridge, first bird's chirps on branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

such as to make them appear,
being without shadows

so the picture, consistency
of surface, exception

grey-white sky on horizon next to point,
whiteness of gull perched on GROIN sign

TC said...

The volcano images stirred an imagination of the superabundant energies of the physical universe, to which the poem refers only in the trivial accidental analogy of an uncontained energy. The common reader has complained with wrinkled brow as to the unintelligibility of the opening lines. I suppose it had never occurred to me they are crabbed to the point of sheer opacity for anyone (i.e. everyone) who has not the memory of a certain moment in early comic cinema in which a breakfast order is being given at a diner: To start with the orange juice, toast and bacon, cornflake, eggs... we see weak coffee being then poured & c.

Oh, well.

. said...

This is great Tom,

I love the sounds and the juxtaposition of sharp images.

And that top photograph! Nature at its expressionist best - there's adrenaline coarsing under that there earth.

TC said...

Yes Leigh, I hear you re. the figurative "adrenaline" -- I anthropomorphized those images too, instantly upon seeing them, the top one a stick man fleeing (or blown away by?) the high voltage blast, the lower one an electrified dancer seizing up in cartoon anger... but against such superior elemental rage, what use attempting to strike back?

~otto~ said...

This is music and I want to listen to it again and again and, man, how do you do that thing at the end. What a soft touch.

TC said...

Otto,

Many thanks.

As to how that ending happened -- I don't know, I guess I'd have to have been there.

(What was it, 1966, 1967, the exploding morning of the world...?)