Hummingbird sends me his latest:

"408

green stone shimmer wind betrayal

greenstone chrome rain spetsnaz

trumpets chrome wet crunch

pong greenstone tapewarm rain"

And i may have finished one of my own:

"Life of e"

His geostrategic ictus rancid ichthys
Deal complete, Heat love Shaq
It don't come easy
You know it don't come easy

Batman or Spiderman

07 31 04

At least a pancake tells you when it's done; & at some point the canvas gets filled...

K. S.

Our veteran artists are extreme.

"Escape

Against deep seas blue-black like mussel-shells
The island arched its bluffs and stony scarps,
Which, wave-rocked, tolled in winter time like bells,
Or chimed to spring as sweet as Irish harps.

Above, a fool's crown of canary cloud,
Moulded by mighty winds to dizzy height,
Leaned to the isle like press of sail o'erbowed,
And sunshine pierced the eyes with swords of light.

This have we chosen, far from friends and home,
This space of barren rock and crimson heath,
With cliffs of quaking honey-comb
And the tides of death in the galleries beneath."

Charles Spear

"From a Book of Hours

Bearing white myrrh and incense, autumn melts
Through flower and fruit and combed blonde straw;
Thunder looms on the mountain forest-belt;
The winter firewood purrs beneath the saw.

Our garden scents upbillow like the veils
Of Solomon's Temple, shimmer in the rain,
And all is peace. Slowly the daylight falls,
And voice and lute bring back the stars again."

Charles Spear

"Scott Moncrieff's Beowulf

In the curdled afterglow of night
The long ship leaves the cliff, the ness, the cave;
Unending arcs of icy light
Flicker about her on the climbing wave;

And coming close fierce warriors crowd
To shout across the Swan's Way. See! They pass.
She drives through trailing veils of cloud,
And time pours down like rain on weeping glass."

Charles Spear

   "News from Paris"

Down through Venetian blinds the morning air
Sifts from a sky where peach and azure fuse;
Street noises enter too, and in a distant square
A regimental band plays Sambre et Meuse.

It is Felicity: she sits and reads once more
The Gothic script of the West-Easterly Divan;
Her silver shoe just touches the waxed floor,
And pot pourri transcends the vase from old Japan."

Charles Spear

"The Prisoner

I walked along the winding road;
It was high summer; on one side
Behind pale foliage sinuously flowed
The hand-sown wheat in rustling pride.

Grey sprawling stone, before me towered the school;
I touched the chapel-corner through the hedge,
Traced dimly in the window's painted pool
Three mitres and the shield with rope and wedge.

Deep peace! Yet there was panic terror shut inside;
The bronze bells rolled and reeled in flowing tide.
Against that shock time buckled to resist,
And no sound pierced the loneliness, no voices cried;
Only the great towers trembled in the pouring mist."

Charles Spear

Stealing Heaven from the Lips of God.

   “At a Danse Macabre

The glittering topaz in your glass
Was vintaged forty years ago;
Your emerald has seen eight Kings pass,
A thousand thousand candles glow.

Watched in a jewel, the taper curls;
The royal men, the wine that flows
Are tints and crowns; the peerless girls
Are broken shadows of a rose.”

Charles Spear 

   "Christoph

The wind blew strongly like the voice of fate
Through cheerless sunlight, and the black yawl strained
And creaked across the sullen slate
Of Zuider Zee. That night it rained;

The Hook of Holland drenched in diamonds lay
Far southward; but the exile coming home
Turns back to hours like golden tissues stacked away
And sees no more the sulky, weltering foam,
But only roses, or white honey in the comb."

Charles Spear 

Rumors of Baxter. 

      "Memoriter

Ovals of opal on dislustred seas,
Skyshine, and all that indolent afternoon
No clash of arms, no shouting on the breeze;
Only the reeds moaned soft or high their empty rune.

The paladins played chess and did not care,
The crocus pierced the turf with random dart.
Then twanged a cord. Through space, from Oultremer
That other arrow veered toward your heart."

Charles Spear 
 

    "The Disinherited"

They cared for nothing but the days and hours
Of freedom, and in silent scorn
Ignored the worldly watchers and the powers,
Left staples shattered and uptorn,
Filed window-bars and dynamited towers.

What was their wisdom whom no vice could hold?
Remote as any gipsy rover,
They stared along the cliffs, mauve fold on fold,
And watched the bees fly over.

From velvet hills, trees in the riverbed, 
From glassy reefs in skeins of foam,
They reared the shell of vision and of words unsaid
To be their haunting and their earthly home."

Charles Spear 
 

Taonga restored.