The meowing bird

for a quid he’d type up a poem for you on the Underwood his grandmother used to write sorrowful letters to our mothers and wives during World War II. As we breathed in our djarum blacks on the steps in front of the Tate Modern, we watched the ripples fade as they traveled through the Thames river, and I could feel glimpses of the worlds they left behind.

i remember the smell of the man in a banana suit at his bachelor party in our hostel in edinburgh. i remember the lake in Maine that hugged my summer skin as the july sun set behind the mountains of a close friend’s childhood. or how the beloved flash rainfalls of ghana swept the red clay from our unkempt hair to our stained feet as we ran from the outdoor market to the police station that had a handwritten sign,  “always use condoms” posted above it’s door. 

or the way we sat in your room and you made me smile because you couldn’t remember how you got a framed Steadman’s illustration of Fear and Loathing the night before. how i slipped on the ice in New York’s January chill and you caught me as you snagged a cab for us to run away in. or how we got lost at King’s Cross when the station closed at midnight, we had to catch a bus and you promised you’d get me home. 

occasionally to her leisure, the wind will blow a familiar kiss on my lips and the tea will taste like the time i loved her most. and i realize, the moments i love returning to, have been here long before me.  the matter and mud that mended my bones are the lingering remnants belonging to forgotten cultures and lost languages of a world that continues to survive in my memories and words. 

do i love to travel because i feel infinite? belonging to everything and nothing; to everyone and no one. the oversoul Emerson once spoke of, “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”

compilation test (04)

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Paintings (oil on canvas) by French artist, Brigitte Coucoureux. In order from top to bottom: Roi Arthur / Prince Avenant / Prince Andrew / Prince Charles / Gahéris / Oiseau de Lune.

http://bridgetispainting.blogspot.com