Icarus skywriting # 13

Books and bookish thoughts lead me down so many dusty tracks of thought that sometimes I feel the need to kick out the light and say, that's it. I'm off! But still we continue to look for new projects to occupy the hours we don't have to finish the ones we are doing now. Time and ideas are a problem because we have to make choices. I have chosen my June/ July/ August project and only time will tell if it can be achieved. But there is always other quests going on. Like who painted this? 

I took this picture (I think) but can't figure out where or who painted it (note to self - keep notes). But I do like it very much indeed. All answers on a postcard to the usual address. I was reading Douglas Dunn last night and came across the line, 'Her pleasure whispered through a much kissed smile...' and I rather like that expression. So I steal it, and the unknown painting, for here, in the hope that no one minds. These days in an open book... missing pages I cannot seem to find..

Icarus skywriting # 12

Well I will never win the Orange Prize now! But of course I couldn't have won it anyway. Isn't it a strange thing in this wide world of ours that there are still things we cannot do. Well of course some of those things are necessary in the world of gender divisions, but book prizes? Summer has arrived at long last - and long may it continue. Old Brighton always looks its best in the sunshine. It always polishes itself up and then says, 'take me, take me' - old tart that it is. And how would Rilke describe it?

Wait..., that tastes good... But already its gone.

... A few notes of music, a tapping, faint

hum - : you girls, so warm and so silent,

dance the taste of the fruit you have known!

The world is NOT orange! How can a poor man stand such times and live, I ask you! I remember a time when everything was cheap - including me.

Icarus skywriting # 11

Flowers for my baby...

A celebratory blog for my baby who came home yesterday and made lots and lots of lovely noise and talked about tennis and America and boys and the whole day like this note went without punctuation as we ate fish and chips in front of the football because nothing had changed at all except we were just a year older though no wiser for all that ooh its so good to have her here in her bed upstairs sleeping. Jet lag has been described to me as the body arrived and waiting for the soul to catch up. If she has more soul to catch up goodness knows what she will be like, for she is already blessed with rude health and happiness - yay! I saw the crescent, but she saw the whole of the moon:

Icarus skywriting # 10

Anticipation

Tomorrow I drive to the airport to collect my baby girl. Oh yay, I say, for I cannot wait. And I have discovered that absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder it just means you get to see less of those you are fondest of - and she is very high on my list. This week I have been reading The Essential Poems by Pablo Neruda, and random lines pull at my memory tags, 'The night wind spins in the sky and sings.' or 'Little by little, and also in great leaps, life happened to me,' or 'Perhaps it was my punishment/ Perhaps I was condemned to be happy...' (that line tickles me greatly). And also this week I have been pulling the bones of a new project together, new writing, new ideas, new things to say (and I wonder if they will ever be said or if they will stay put, haunting my inner self, taunting my well being. Perhaps I am condemned to be happy and its hard to write when contentment lurks in your guilty conscience.). Here's another story song from the fine Karine P. again. I find myself drawn to the pathos but also the lines: 

Caught between the air and the windless deep 

You float like a lily flower
And you look just like you fell to earth to sleep
And you’re waiting for your waking hour 
Followed by
And I swear to God I saw an angel hand attend you.

But that was just the dancing of the light...' 

because it resonates with the writing I am doing. And I am now looking for a copy of Cold Night Lullaby.

Icarus skywriting # 9

Walter Benjamin wrote, 'To thinking belongs not only the movement of thoughts, but likewise their standstill. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives the constellation a shock, through which thinking crystallises itself as a monad.' Oh! That moment of seeing and meaning, but can it ever be monadic? This makes me think of poetry, not reading and trying to understand what the poet has written, but understanding that the poet has written something he or she meant to write but which will never be read in the way he or she intended because the slippage between the writer and the reader always renders meaning slippery. 'Every angel is terrifying...' as Rilke says. And now I am wondering to myself why I wrote this. Does it make sense, what sense am I trying to reach? Reading Judy Horacek http://horacek.com.au/makes me feel like this  because she has so many answers and I hope she wont mind me borrowing this pictures (but oh so many to choose from) - I'll buy her a drink next time I am in Melbourne. Here's a Steve Earle song sung by Joan B. 'We can all learn to sing the songs the angels sing.'

Icarus skywriting # 8

Spring

I was sitting in the kitchen, wearing my new haircut, thinking about dinner (baked cod with a pesto crust, served with sweet potato and salad) while listening to some music on 'shuffle' and this song came on and I just had to blog it because it is just the bees knees. I used to sing this live in an Edinburgh pub and since I am interested in Icarian things, I forgot these lines - But the sea is wide and I can't swim over and neither have I wings to fly - and then we find we are back to this idea of escape and return to and from an island, and sea and boats and flying: