193. Victoria Park, July

Darren P. (Oct 12, 2013)

https://es.foursquare.com/v/victoria-park/4bdda1c00ee3a593bafd2db0

your eyes

glow gold

in the summer

sunshine

your smile

as warm as

Canadian

midsummer

can be

by the river

watching

swans and

children

play

time so

slow

and the

air so

sweet

even then

I’m not sure

I realized the beauty of

such a moment

simple,

wondrous

as you are

as we are

gold glints

shining in summer

sunbeams,

beaming

brilliant

March 21, 2020

Montréal, QC

182. Squirrel Nest

Scurrying across the plushy cotton,
sole observer of the field:
tiny tracks the only small reminder,
almost undetectable -

Darting up the gnarly bark -
swift & sure &
quick as night though just as dark -
sylvan ninja

Up the lattice now -
Branches sway,
Fingers in the wind;
Ropes of wood

Little nest of rotting leaves and soot:
how imperfect!
Slip you in your qui-ver-ing burrow -
quick as ever!

You in yours and I in mine;
Shi-ver-ing despite your fur?
Nestled snug within your home -
all is just irrelevant!

177. Stubble on Adonis

The Magic of a
Body
is
self-made

lifting,
cardio,
jumping
rope;

so the stage is
also
craft:

sforzando,
cantabile,
da capo al
fine:

words and terms
and
counting
calories:

yet why is
magic
Magical?

174. A Shared Mile

The hills describe in pink,
of yawning suns descending:
it is an ode to love:
it is their adoration.

Our hands are interlaced;
our hearts are wrapped in silence;
it is the twilit dusk,
it is her mauve entreaty.

Paired in sylvan joy,
road the winding way
smiling to infinity
past the rose-gilt, silent trees;

My bliss swelled past our smiles
beyond the gold-drunk forests:
a love, that shared with them,
now separate, still remembers.

150. Com’è bello!

Unassuming,
silently presuming –
Two arachnids
tranquilly enslumbered:

Victim huntress,
paused the murderesses;
gentle yearning,
mute the Mother doting:

Golden doubles,
resting, still as marble:
Eight-fold digits
still and softly sun-gilt.

Se il destassi?

In the noontime daybeams
Venetian spun,
Gemini lay, Roman.

147. Little Litany

Little unborn
fetus,
peeking through the
window of a
burrowed
egg:

Sympathetic arteries
trail to and
from your
thumping
body

So exposed, so
fragile: your heart is
beating; it is
a tiny
miracle –
a strange thing
to see such
inner workings
crudely
revealed

We are
injecting you with
strange
fluids,
failing to
explant
you

We have
mangled the
yolk and
you are blurred
in
the aftermath;

Upon rediscovery
you are
hovering,
heartbeats
faltering

I am so
sorry

I say, over and
over as
you fade, as your
heart
stills

Poor little
chicken embryo,
I am so
sorry;

We are discarding you into
a plastic
bucket
used for
cherry
picking some
summers
ago

I would like to
say a
prayer for your
unborn
soul

But I am not
religious, and we
are surrounded by
uncommon
melancholy

Or I am,
as the others leave and
discuss their
weekend plans

I am left,
devastated – for
what?

The sacrilege of a
stifled life,
dissected and
discarded

I am haunted,
and I am
so,
so
sorry.

143. The Sublime

From: Jan Axel's Blog

swarm of vultures,
high in the afternoon
sun;
slow and circular,
like a baby’s
mobile, suspended in morbid
listlessness above the
Florida
flats:

restless,
tension hovers in the
unoccupied molecules
buzzing between the
unfashionably active
fat mosquitoes;

boxed-up fish suppliers and
phony Chinese restaurants;
ghetto Black-men at the
7-11:
tank-top children in the
avenues and
dried-up yellowed
grass
roasting in the
sunburnt air.

138. Coal Workers

Easy to
regard dirtied
blue-collar workers
with a wry
eye –
there is certainly
something
that makes us
special,
protected:

Clothed in warm
furs,
Tchaikovsky
flitting between our ears
via iPods,
iPads –

After a fall,
we pick ourselves
up late at night,
completely vulnerable;

we
realize:
this is life,
happy or
less so,
it carries on in its
drab
shades…

Forced to confront the
reality of our condition,
the frigid weather,
the boring country and its
resolute permanence

We look at ourselves
and the grey walls and
wonder, how much is
delusion?

How many escapist
stories have we told
ourselves to escape
these
cold winters,
dry summers?

The geese flee
and return
as we ponder these
Grecian thoughts,
not insensitive
nor enlightened;
but better off that
way,
perhaps.

137. Icarus

 

Curious,
the brown and grey
fruit fly
slips quickly
into view;

perched briefly
on the
tumbler’s
edge –

Plip!
Hops, indiscreetly
upon the
untouched
water:

Terror at being
trapped;
or to human
eyes
trying to remember
the breastroke,
quasi-comically:
limbs flailing as
wings begin to
sink;
milliseconds
before the struggle

ends.

An imperceptible
hush
and there is
Ophelia,
laid calmly to rest
in the still
liquid

Thomas did not need
write a mad
scene;
Shakespeare, a
play,
nor Berlioz, an
art song
or
Delaroche,
a painting;

In grim
fascination
have I surveyed
this picturesque
suicide,
having the power to
inform, yet
powerless
to save;
a strange sadism and an
equal
guilt:

133. Skins of our fathers

After the rain,
the frightened insects
emerge,
surveying the damage,
knowing this battered land
is what remains
and what must be
lived through.

How many tears have irrigated
this unruly soil in
vain?

Suns will one day emerge,
but how, but
when?

In such darkness and
uncertainty, how
strong must one be,
to trust,
to hope!

115. Strange leaves

Chapped lips and
home-made mitts;
youthful couples in the
crisper air:

Simple pleasures,
sights that cause a smile to
form –

Children gather treats
beneath
advancing winds;
cars lay rampant in
hazy, oil-soaked coffee
lines

To see as sights,
to smell as smells:
never to feel
the warm embrace of
commonality –

winter dawns, and
solitude
shows its weary
head too
prominently
to ignore.

114. Souvenirs

Lascivious poppies,
lusty in the sombre fields:
spill their irony in the
autumn frost,
shades of shameful
red –

Long have I envied their
reckless belligerence,
perching on some foreign shore,
immune to guilt, regret,
and melancholy:

No – guiltless in their wild
beauty,
trampled, laid to rest beside their
human brethren, forever bear the
burdens of their
art –

Fatal beauty
grows across the silenced fields;
echoes resonate between the
rustling stems,
silent in eternal
grief,
gazing on the frozen
graves:

Curious, unknowing,
woebegone:
cast in strange and
lasting
penance –

Generations strive to
recollect,
remember;
generations strive to
lose and
forget.

107. Temps pour rentrer

Like a Turner portrait,
wild trees cut the soft sky
in aggressive rebellion.
The fields are aglow in the
impossible, perfect sunlight
painters only hope for,
or plagiarize.

In the middle of all of this
a green and white farm sits,
cozy and quaint, unassuming
over the twilight
shadows.

Soybean plants stretch far,
some frenzy of
golden fire.
They are glowing bright now
in the setting sun.

It is almost too perfect for a
photograph, there is a
humid mist rising from the
torrid August rains.
Everywhere, there is this
impossible sparkle, gossamer,
and I think perhaps it is all
too lovely to be real.

104. Alcina’s picnic

Crows are eating in the backyard,
congregating under the shady
trees:

Dark and plotting, hunched over in the
shadows,
whispering…

Reflecting on a former mortal
existence,
bemoaning the trappings of
enchantment.

Chatter subsides to feeding,
mechanic bobs
puncture the sheltered
earth:

Noontime ends, and all the
inmates part,
save the stragglers, digging
past the noon.

Even these few gluttonous
ones depart,
and there are only worms
and yellow butterflies,
and all the other innumerable
insects, left climbing on
the windswept
grass.

96. Sketches of an Afternoon

It’s raining today;
it’s raining
quite a bit
today.

I get out my notebook;
I am lying on my bed,
and I scribble down his
name, millions of
times, millions.
The curlicues cross into one
another,
blurring into a haze of
black;
spider webs or
tangled
hair.

I become nearly
cross-eyed and I
have to pause for
breath

it’s hard to imagine that my
curly, swirly cursive
resembles
my love at all,
that this obscure,
dull word signifies his
being, his form at
all –

I take this criss-crossed page
onto the deck, into the yard.
I am soaked, bone-
deep, feet in the
unseemly
mud

and I tear the page to
shreds with the sharp end of my
black pen,
digging irregular
holes into its
dissolving
flesh,
watching as scraps
litter the eroding
earth

ink melts, draining like
waterproof mascara,
which, after too long,
runs too –

my own words
trail strange greenish
paths into the damned
soil
until I
can’t read anything,
I can’t even read
anything;

suddenly: it dawns on me that
I am wet and
cold, and that
the grass is getting long

but, no one cuts it:
and flowers lay, wilted and
forlorn;
trampled worms lay forgotten,
blood soaked into the
unforgiving patio
stones.

94. Playing Tricks

Upon a warm and breezy afternoon,
the maidens in their sylvan silks
exhibit yet a wilder shade of green:

The impish breezes, by their own accord
(or else commanded by some sprite)
play naughty games of chase amongst their skirts;

And nestled in such trim and tidy dress,
hide dainty, little twiggy legs,
unmasked unto the lurid light of day!

87. Striped in Sunlight

Striped in sunlight,
half-awakened from a dreamless sleep,
I have entered another world:
sun feels warm on my naked
legs,
oxygen soft and
still.
Birds are tittering lazily;
I don’t know what they’re saying
either:
children are playing in the park near-
by;

and I am here,
listening to the cars go
by.
There is such a sense of
“now”,
but it is sad also,
knowing such instances
will be remembered forever,
though never occur the same way
twice –

74. Blandine Verlet,

When your Chromatic Fantasy and
Fugue
spun its sinewy lines around
the tickled folds of my
enamoured brain, I –
bliss tangled its webs around
my mind.

Bach never seemed so fresh, alive!
You inhabit and characterize
each prelude,
fugue,
toccata, partita, sinfonia
with such a kaleidoscope of
brilliance & beauty;
my synesthesia eye danced
to your metallic
gigue.

Never has an outmoded
instrument, a vestigial of the
past
seemed so present, so
full of “joie de vivre”.
Indeed, the clavier
smiles, “Well-Tempered”
once more:
what need have we for
pianistic ruminations
when such subtlety, illusion
of dynamic contrast,
coy rubato enchant our
modern ear?

Take us back, illusioniste,
to the time when
meadows sang
in rapt, enchanted
silence…

Blandine Verlet performs Bach's Partitas:



Buy on Amazon (Canada)

Buy on Amazon (US)

72. Early bird

Photons underwhelm me;
I am inundated
and wake silently.
It is a slow, effortful awakening,
as if it will be my last.

It is quiet in the house;
the babies are still asleep.
I did not dream last night;
my head is wrung dry of
thought.

Sounds materialize from beyond my
window –
I have risen with the birds.
I do not believe I have ever
waken early enough,
while an adolescent sun is still
starting to dawn
and the robins are courting
in the dewy
trees.

The blinds draw sleepy stripes
across my back as I
turn;
I would like to listen to these
creatures for a while.

There is such a primal
sense of nostalgia,
of melancholy,
as their songs fade away
and morning begins.

Why do the birds stop singing?
A few precious notes are caught
by the scant
daylight and left to glitter on the buttercups
as the prima donnas’
exclusive contract ends and all the little
divas shoo their divos
back into nests and become once again
ordinary little songbirds;

until the next day, and day
after,
when I will no longer hear them,
until their voices one day
shut up in their throats
and not even the early
riser
can ever hear them sing
again.

71. Postmodern Playmates

A beached boat,
a bronze huntress
in the middle of the park:
welcome to the actualization of our
contemporary world.

At least the sunshine is
still the same as it was for
centuries:
illuminating the pair of playmates
in the same coy and dappled way
it has for millennia:

it could be a lord & lady like any
other,
leaping over a resurrected
metal dinosaur
in a game of catch.

Not until the wind slaps me into
sense
that I realize that they are in
T-shirts and tank tops,
in jeans,
playing Frisbee
in a world of endless
possibilities,
where bears beg and
rows of heads spin,
dismantled,
on discs of sun-baked
clay.

Brian Scott: Stray Plow (1993)

Cynthia Short: Lightmare (1989)

Scrap Art

Carl Skelton: Canadiana/Begging Bear (1989)

Evan Penny: Monad (1990)

Donald Forster Sculpture Park
Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Photographed by Hanneorla: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanneorla/