Do I love you, Science

The Beginning of Science

 

 

Long before Saint Patrick,

leather-footed musicians

would keyhole dawn

to catch the sun in ice candles.

 

They played those flames on strings,

their spikes of sound,

for children’s whistling eyes and lunatics,

who, in their distance, danced.

 

Fire caged in ice, ice in their hand;

music lit from within;

ambition began;

separation became a beauty.

Ungar Died (a short play for lovers of film)

o   What?

·         Ungar died. Ungar………….Felix.

o   Tony Randall?

·         Jack Lemon.

o   Oh.

·         The only man in the world with clenched hair.

o   Put coasters under the coasters, checked for spiders’ muddy footprints on the bathroom floor………..

·         Yeah.

o   You’re like Ungar yourself, you know.

·         What?

o   Neurotic. Only person I’ve ever met who avoids sleeping  on his side so one kidney wouldn’t be over-worked.

·         That only happened once.

o   And you wash money.

·         Yeah, well a recent study concluded that there are 138 harmful bacteria on an average two cent coin.

o   Like I said.

·         By an odd coincidence, you’re not too far from Osca r either ………….. not exactly mouldy, but fermenting. That pair of trousers you took off last Friday is still standing outside your bedroom door; Cecily ran screaming out of the house when she came upon it yesterday. It took half an hour to settle her.

o   Cecily’s scared of her shadow.

·         Well they left together yesterday.

Jesus carries his cross through the Vatican

It's taken most of the day, but  I think this picture shows the inappropriateness of the Vatican as a centre for the promulgation of the Christian message. The Vatican Museum belongs to a time when we talked of  'princes of the church'; it's time for all Christian denominations to sell their jewels.

 

 

 

 

Cities

 

City Lives.

  

They shout into space,

answer each other like whales

across great haunted distances;

they never meet,

only sound waves ever meet.

 

 

Alone in their canyons,

hives,

shoals

they roar.

Rooms upon rooms

upon houses upon houses

upon streets upon streets:

roars spilling out,

spilling over,

spilling down.

 

A million sound waves,

a million discordancies

tumbling, surging, 

pouring out

onto the streets,

into the traffic,

wheels, cogs, pistons:

 

the cannibal jazz

of cities.

 

Where Are You

         Where Are You.

 

Where are you.

Where are you child.

Among the spring green leaves

Naked as a lizard;

I hear your airy lilt,

Why are you humming.

 

From what remote well

Do these grotesque sounds come;

Dispatched, bleak cirrus

In the high skies of a child's voice,

Freezing all the forest

Into fairy-tale stillness.

 

Where are you,

Where are you child.

In what empty paradise;

Where's the tower that emits your eccentric song;

Against the frozen wings of which birds of paradise

Do you rub.

 

Love

The idea, the word, the wish, the conjecture. High and low flying. The fog. Nothing easy or thought out but defeats you there, at the bottom of a series of rungs. Because nothing is so high-flying in our aspirations. Where dreams and bodies collide with such vehemence, a triumph is unlikely, only that fog. And the fog eats, or demolishes; because, somehow, that's what's chosen. Somehow demolition is easier in stress.

In My Mouth  

Love, the word: lush,

a summer night’s rain. 

Itself:

taut, brittle.

 

I had it on the end of a forceps;

bead of mercury, it escaped.

Love, the word:

I swallowed it. 

  

Art and poetry

                                               

                          Van Eyck: The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John

  El Greco: The Crucifixion

 

       

Mantegna: Women at the crucifixion

 

 

Both, like plasticine, can be so malleable or, at the other end of the scale, so nuanced.  Small suggestions take you somewhere else: a new direction, a new discovery. So much is so possible from the same root. A new colour, turn of a limb may bring a new, altogether different image, as the magnetic words on the fridge quite randomly scatter into unexpected meanings, fresh ideas.  


 

Bacon: Three |Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

 

 

      Three Monsters. 
 

Here are three monsters:

Agony, a greyhound skinned; howl.

Hollowness, a hen plucked;  peck.

Dementia, a bundle of hay;  scratch.
 

 

I have stood them on furniture

to pose.
 

They were in the entrails of spirit,

I picked them out with a forceps.

I thought they looked remarkable in the light.

I thought the viewing public

might want to scrape at them

with their spatulas.