The Mystic in the Basement

10 07 2009

for Ronald Rowe

He descends
with me

and carries
up

lumps of
cement

and splintery
old boards

and sweeps
the broken glass

the heaps,
the hoards

of half-finished,
never-read, never-sent

abandoned-
but-not

abandoned-
enough

the torn,
worn

frustrated
garments

fraying, moth-eaten—
when

that is done
he goes

for lunch
and writes

a poem
about the sapphire

crystalline sphere,
split

facings of
the star dome

the infinite
at Hi-Fi

Pizza over a
slice

then goes
to McDonald’s

for
coffee.

by Monica Raymond

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Cheap Date

2 04 2009


(Click on image to view at larger size.)

by Dick Freeman and Monica Raymond

Process notes

Dick:
The drawing proceeds from a new practice I described to Monica, noting, on black paper with white pencil, subjects of interest to me. This becoming an “impromtu,” semiotic document with a supportive, yet fragmented, dialogue leading toward a playful and gratifying result.

Monica:
We were sitting in the cafe in front of the Harvest Food Coop in Cambridge. Dick told me he had been doing sketches and notes on black paper with a white colored pencil. We were talking about another collaborative project I was involved in, and how that had gotten into a discussion of the relationship between science and poetry. When Dick went to the counter to get us hot chocolate, I wrote E=MC2 on the black page.

He came back and made another move. And so our collaboration continued, taking turns. Dick sometimes erased or blurred his own lines. He told me to feel free to erase his lines as well, but I really didn’t. And I wasn’t so sure I wanted him erasing mine!

Dick:
The conversation about the relationship between the sciences and the arts and some people’s inferences that these subjects are necessarily in insolvable conflict, impelled me to tell Monica, during pauses from sketching, about my 20-something-year argument with a friend and mentor who had actually passed away quite early in the very respectful discussion. I had imagined most the argument for both of us. My friend’s position had been that “science and technology are destroying the world because, unlike art which puts things together, science takes things apart.” He was in his early 60’s, a highly acclaimed painter and former art reviewer when our discussions began. I was an aesthetically ambitious, 20-something painter with very limited reading experience then. Still, I intuitively inferred that my friend’s belief was inaccurate. After many years of reading and reflection, I concluded that it is neither science nor technology that are destructive, these being only very sophisticated tools. Rather it is arrogance that leads to destruction.

Monica:
Gradually, we each added words, lines and smudges to the drawings. A happy moment for me was when Dick added little lights to what I thought I had drawn as a claw, turning it into a candelabra. We talked as we drew, about the way the drawing seemed to evoke the feeling of chalk on a blackboard, kids playing around after the professor is gone for the day.

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Another for Jim

29 12 2008

Harshly. Harshness that subsides to beauty
but not yet. Landscape
softened to torrent, wash of windshield wipers, wish
wash, blurring the bumpers and the bumper
stickers, bare trees spilling to action.
What it is to imagine atrocity. With clarity.
Shudders and stutters,
glazed eyes, loginess derived from antipsychotics.
What we think of
as madness actually side-effects of drugs
used to forestall it. Think

of this. Information, imagination, the relation
between.
Your taxes pay for war and torture in
El Salvador.

Here it gets thin, not what happens
horribly, but before
and after, how image soothes the gap,
maybe a rooster, shrieking berserk,
becomes a hand tearing the landscape, its
photo, torn paper. You went into this
further. Behind the techno-scrim, bright pilots

expose their weapons, you felt for what went on.
Under cloud cover. Then mad for good,
not numb in the gameshow eye. But nonstop
talk, breakneck drive.

by Monica Raymond

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What the Echo Knows

23 09 2008

Hiccups
as oratory—
why shouldn’t repetition

be the story
we learn most
from?

She was some
yes-man
girl, always

saying what she
had heard
him say

but by going
on, made it
her own

and her yes
es
sss

turned
to a
hiss

dakini
of
bliss

Then
serpents
were her lovers

by Monica Raymond

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Inside Leviathan

3 07 2008

But actually I didn’t take you far,
not far enough. I started to dream
we were clothed,
trying to make love. That time we crossed
the bridge at night, the lights white moths
to my myopic eyes, shimmering in aureoles
of blurred flutter,
I saw me push you off. I should
have pushed you

into something wetter, to that archaic
world
where knife-edge reds form, gleam
and tune the keyboards
of apartments to cathedrals, where globes
quicken to probes,
poignards that seem to pierce
the dark surface they ride on, that black
horse
latitude of luminescent jellyfish, where
bitter

sardine, small fry, those turned to dragons
by the press
of reflective scales, the dugong mermaids swim, all
plankton inside leviathan.

by Monica Raymond

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Pathetic Fallacy

5 05 2008

We’d like to remind you
how built things arrive at collapse,
says the shed. The rust streaks
on my corrugated lid are not
meant
for beauty, though they are beautiful.
We’d like to remind you
how things close in, says the boxwood.
Behind the gate
almost we meet. We could close the man
and woman

and child in the house. In the station
wagon, vines
cry up through the rusted bottom
panel. A sedan
is best as a planter, says what’s
green. Say the sprouts
in the taupe-orange soil of the garden,
we are trim. We spill
over our tops like a fountain. It is
rare to live
among plants and stones, gray weathered
boards that gab.

Concrete has no words, that’s why
we adlib for it—
hearts and our names.

by Monica Raymond

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Indeterminate

16 02 2008

Compassion cannot count, it has a way
of loosely dropping petals, asking
“loves me or loves me not…” It cannot
……. scent
a trail, find remedy, can’t trot, bring home
message or method, rub the turrets out.
It’s helpless as the dolphin boy
……. with nubs for hands for flippers.

Live among those who help themselves
……. and you
will be surprised by what that help
……. can do. Enthralled.
Appalled. Aghast. Your mouth an o.
……. The fool’s wide kiss
puckered to emptiness. Walking around
……. in circles. A zero
holds you. Or hold something. Move
……. inside
circumference a ghost. You can’t please
……. both

center, periphery. You jump between
……. them
Mexican bean, hiding from a quantum.

by Monica Raymond

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Moth and Rat

5 01 2008

Moth and rat
both gnawed holes in what was,
desperate appetite

that left
all garments holey. Moth and rat
knew no limit, would not

make a split
between
the dainty and the container

meant to contain it.
Sweat, blood,
cashmere, vicuña, alpaca,

fine Italian wool —
omnivorous and multicultural
were moth and rat.

If you would steel
yourself against incursion
tooth and claw, bore and bezel —

if you would live
as metal, robot skin
impervious to dust or fission,

well, you must find
that route alone.
Even bone’s permeable

and my skin
pitted with beings
trying to get out or in,

leaving their stingers, cursed,
blessed, in my flesh
till I am dressed

in the milkweed cloth
they have left me,
tit for tat:

sucking my sweetness
as I sucked the fat
dew and honey, the sap,

grass blades
where the sky showed through.
Filigree’s my map.

And what they did for me
I can do for you —
rat and moth, moth and rat.

by Monica Raymond

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