After Whistler

 Today I collaborated with Whistler. Combining our images. It was a quick study. I shall return and expand just as Whistler would do.

Grand themes

 The grand themes

Things such as

Hearts aflame

Stay stoked

 Stay stoked

Said the poets

They know it

They aren’t

Wrong fellows

Setting out

 Setting Out

Wendell Berry

Even love must pass through loneliness,

the husbandman become again

the Long Hunter , and set out

not to the familiar woods of home

but to the forest of the night,

the true wilderness, where renewal 

is found, the lay of the ground

a premonition of the unknown.

Blowing leaf and flying wren

lead him on. He can no longer be at home,

he cannot return, until he begin 

the circle that first will carry him away.

Love for Watts

 If, mounted on a morning ray,

I fly beyond the western sea;

Thy swifter hand would first arrive,

And there arrest thy fugitive.

Isaac Watts

Worm man

 This worm of a man

sat in contemplation

of being a worm 

now that’s a good thing

for that’s what sets 

him apart from a worm

the ability to squirm

before the hook has 

even been stuck in

Consciousness

Compensate quick

 O’er coming

It was the first exposure 

of the day

the heron coming my way

Quickly I said

move the compensation 

to plus one point three

for lately

Shadows have been

giving me fits

and then the heron

had flown 

and I went home

CAnoe theology

 The irresistible call

CANOE

John Clare Stokes

There are five points to the call of the canoe, can you name them? There is the dream of Chestnut Prospectors, then the Allusion of rapids roaring, then the Nocturnal moon dancing in flow, to the Outward bound voyage and finally the Eternity of journey.

The long way

 The long back way

John Clare Stokes

I take the long back way

Down the Cline Feagle lane 

in the lower part of the county

Pass where Cline burned to death

In his running truck

The brick chimney marking the spot

Up the road where I see

They tore down the tenants home

Wood stacked for another’s flooring

The blooming gardenia out of place

Without a front door for balance

The way is lined with gladiolus 

Red to orange variety

The old stock

At the intersection the implements sit

Rusting through yet another season 

I enter the section of lined pine

Thinking I’m on some Tour de European

Slow in case a fox squirrel is crossing over

The end is nearing when at the Tabor Cemetery

Crows scold and head off toward Aldine’s

His road with the split rail and cane mill

These Feagle’s mostly a peculiar people

I resume my journey through their 

Ghostly Territory.

Wondering how Shadrack ever wound up here.

Ghost gator

 Ghost Gator

Wraith of waders

he bides beside me

Through deepest glades guides

Abides in shadows

Where light slumbers

Slides to stir waters darkly

Then mysteriously departs

his blazes burning

where he lurked.

Starke raving

 Starke raving 

Her husband was a violinist

Not a fiddler

First chair

She had two dogs

Not big

The kind that told her

someone was knocking

With his motorcycle 

A grandson holed up

Somewhere in back

Sponging from the dry

On the mantle framed

A daughter long ago killed

In a senior car wreck

Forever smiling in the prom photo

Pill bottles filling the kitchen table

Couldn’t afford to take them

And food

They tell me she passed away

In her sleep

Jigsaw never complete 

Grandson in back room came 

Out to tell me.

Dogs didn’t warn me.

Decoration Day

 Why! Tell me why! 

 Do the boys in gray 

 March off to die?

 Why! Why! 

 This black array 

 Stay! Stay!

 Lay thy heavy arms 

 Must Cain always cry? 

 But go the gray

 from my arms 

 Into fields from home

 to die