This is a series of experimental pen and ink drawings with accompanying poems (also experimental) that Ive work on over the last six months. While I was doing the drawings, I was often listening to music from Blonde on Blonde, and particularly "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," so I decided to use phrases from that song as titles for the poems, which each bear some oblique relation to the drawing or the thought processes that the drawings generated in my mind as I wrote.
Warehouse Eyes
One over here, one over there, not where
you might expect them to be, but then again
what reason do we have to expect the future
to unfold in congruence with the past? More
likely, as in the present case, it's just one thing
after another, the logic becoming clear only
in retrospect, if at all, and in any case subject
to revision. Leaves, legs, letters, jellyfish,
shovels, fins, wings: what you see is what you get:
individual parts blended into a whole that keeps
shifting around for as long as we keep looking.
The point being, there may not be any point.
But then then again there might. There's only
one way to find out: keep looking. So keep looking.
Arabian Drums
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I'm thinking
that's unlikely. One, because even I'm not entirely sure
what I'm thinking, or whether in fact I'm thinking at all.
And two, because thought, to the extent that it can be shared
at all, most often manifests itself as a series words
articulating quite possible arbitrary discriminations
—this and not that, this as opposed to that, this following
that—none of which seem likely to be able to capture
the experience of being present to the presentation
of an experience which is of its nature necessarily wholistic.
Yes, we have parts, no two the same, each making a claim
on our attention. But then, again no one stands alone.
Nor should they. There is no music in a single syllable.
Only in sequence are drumbeats able to conjure a dance.
Matchbook Songs
Beyond everything else, there's this to consider:
even though the world does not often conform
to our expectations of it, it does have a logic
of its own, which is not necessarily less satisfying
for being hard to predict or interpret. What we
might read as horizontality might just be verticality
of a less obvious nature. What we experience
as noise may likewise just be silence in disguise.
Illogic and incoherence may very well resolve
themselves, if we are willing to entertain even
a minor shift of point of view, into the epiphanic
apprehension of thusness and suchness. If there
is a lesson here somewhere, it will likely turn out
to be in the form of a question rather than an answer.
Midnight Rug
We sit in silence, watching the water for what
seems like hours, the ripples turning back
upon themselves again and again like snippets
of a song blown through the branches of the alders
and spruces until all semblance of coherence
has vanished, even as the notes continue to arrive
intermittently, carrying intimations, however indistinct,
of insight, of justification, of resolution. In this manner,
our time together passes by pleasantly enough.
After all, there is no where else we need to be.
The silence we share is clarifying, a relief from the rivers
of words we are in the habit of exchanging to make
sense of each other, and of the world in this moment.
The water speaks a wordless language that makes us whole?
Sheet Metal Memory
Every new beginning comes from some other
beginning's end. Once we start, there can be
no stopping, right? Whether we move forward,
or back, or stay right where we are, eventually
we wind up, well, right here where we are now.
We will not have changed, other than by having
become indistinguishably older by an hour
or a day or a week or a year. But our sense
of who we are now or who we might eventually
become will have been altered by the arrival
of today's new memories, as well as by the fading,
if not the disappearance, of older ones. All we have
left is the map of the path we have traveled,
or as much of it as we can still hold in our minds.
Ghostlike Soul
Who among you can say where the spirit resides?
In darkness or in light? In song or in silence?
In birds or boulders, in fish or flowers? In the body
or in the breath? Here, echoes suggest this is what
salvation must be like after a while. Elsewhere,
mouths open as if to speak, but do not close again.
Is it not more desirable to wander with no clear
destination in mind? To dance alone on the beach
at night, to bate your breath as waves break over
your body which is dissolved into... what exactly?
The appearance of intention? An aspiration toward
timeless resonance? Questions asked but unlikely
to be answered. Apparitions, as it were. So what?
Not to worry. Sit with me a while. I'll keep you safe.
Curfew Plugs
Room full of revelers, party going strong. In the all night
museum, the masked avenger addresses the renegades
in hopes of deliverance, absolution or at least sympathetic
understanding. Meanwhile, on the back porch, black cats
yowl under the light of a thousand stars to the accompaniment
of slide trombones and flamenco guitars. There's hardly room
to think, much less to breathe, but that's not necessarily
a bad thing. Isn't that why we came, to be present at the creation,
to celebrate the lunar conjugation, lending our individual
voices to the folding and unfolding of the origami chorus?
Whatever happens, don't lose heart. We're all in this
together. So just keep dancing for as long as the lights
continue to blink on and off and on again. You'll know when
it's time to go. In the meantime, keep sporting those smiles.
Childhood Flames
Can you recall what it was like in the garden?
The warmth of the sun on your face, the soft breezes
in your hair as you wander across the green grass
and stand in the shade of the blue spruce watching
as the cars glide by, each one carrying the mystery
of lives and stories other than your own but still
somehow the same? Or fishing with your father
at Croton Lake, standing by the water, casting
your line in hopes of feeling the tug of a sunfish
or perch? Each moment an expanse continuous
with all the others, until the skies begin slowly
to darken and it's time to go home, take a bath,
climb into bed, drift off to sleep, and wake up
all these years later in another world entirely.
