Marmoset Revisits the Seaside

    On Saturday past I recalled the joy of watching a Marmoset frolicing about the foliage at  a jungle river, complete with manatee so graceful in the water  beneath a little bridge in a special animal house at the zoo in Pittsburgh, PA.  Words came bouncing out and I began to write a poem.  They blending into memory of a work by Dorian McGowan of Edward Lear's poem (see below).

It resulted in a card including the poem I wrote, with a marmoset, flashing paint brushes for Dorian who is recovering from a broken hip, a nasty trick of hidden ice of that deceptive season of Winter).  The Poem follows in a a more readable form.  Do know that as in all fantasy, you can be me,  a monkey, a tree, where today is tomorrow & tomorrow is yesterday . . .

A diddly poem for the artist owl, a graceful angel and a sacred yellow cat

O dear dear cuddly marmoset

So fun to watch your merman dance

Tumbling rumbling in the sea

Holding, boiling, roiling laughter back

to keep the fish at bay

Spitting suds and bubbles

Jumping upon the cockleshells

Angry barnacles breathed back

Sticking out their feathery tongues

Begging, yelling with watery spleen

“N’er err to dare come back!”

seething seashell venom

in twisted greenly crackly wrack

They sailed off in briny oyster shell

With oar of runcible spoon

An owl and cat in primate gowns

Pretending dreams of silvery moons

Laughing gulls and crooning loons

A day, a night a wild cold tale

A chocolate bar of joy to share

in champagne bath of glee

Invincible we think all hope

Forever and a day

For Dorian, © j.m.frase-white 5/2019

A Rift on Edward's Lear's the Owl & the Pussycat

by Dorian McGowan

from the exhibit Poetry Made Visible,  which I curated, Feb-March 2016

Northeast Kingdom Artisans Guild

This is the Woman

Joan R., Baltimore, 1967

This is the woman who

drained her toilet dry

 painting butterflies in enamel

spiraling ‘round the bowl

to dance in every flush

This is the woman who

pushed all her bedroom furniture

together to create

a bower tower  bird nest

beneath the deep blue ceiling

she’d painted and covered

with luminescent stars

this is the woman who

was driven to paint wildly

a strange abstract work

she brought for us to see:

black zigzagging, sliding

scaring the blood  red ground

halted by a  grand orange X

We gazed bedazzled

Colors, lines screaming  out to us

and Joan,  as if waking with a cry

 muttered

“of god, this is where . . .

he died”

This is the woman

Who drove the VW bug

that skidded and killed

the man we all called Angel

The perfect blue-eyed hippie

All in love, but not lovers like Joan

Brazenly mapped before us

now

forever

the pain scarring scaring her mind

(middle of the night meditation/poem)

 3/26/19  jmf-w

TBT: School of Fish Revisited

Paper coming unglued, colors fading.  I just made anew, an old work, of shifting name, the latest "A Flight for Unity".  Now redone, fish on new acrylic painted canvas paper, the base a patina of resin, to keep the watercolor from fading and blue painters tape drying, she now comes with a new poem.  For Carolyn.  A bit past black history month, but perfect for also for women's history month.

For Carolyn Greer, NCHS Class of 1965

Sometimes we walk among giants

Heroes, whom we call by other names

With venom or salacious smile, jigaboo or nigger

Or if polite or kind, colored girl or negro,

Rarely, which some still refuse to do

Call her by her name

We can blame the age, we can blame our teenage

Society or religion, but we can denote

That beneath those guises

humanity sometimes arises

She was a first

The first, a negro in our class

among the tribe of teens 

classes by social status

athlete or scornfully academic

by wealth or poverty

by town, and there by side of the tracts

farm, town or family ties

secure in our supreme color

until Carolyn broke the mold

That was her, the giant, quiet, and respectful

not haughty, proud or pretty

just a gentle, smiling without malice

alarmingly without façade

Car-o-lyn, her one assertive gesture

discreet, affirmative

She broke us, this quiet lady

the mold those centuries had built

Jim Crowe and malice had constructed

She swam against the current

To break the bondage of slavery

Not quite lost, grits upon the teem

colonial coronels  and southern belles

confederate fiction believed as gospel true

Tara and Rhett Butler, the antebellum froth

glued the savage whites together

In hypothetic piety, in the Lord’s whitewashed house

Out of our teenage innocence,

Clothed in ignorance

Humanity wrapped in garments

Violently sealed in evangelical words

Carolyn helped us take the baby steps

into the sunlight of the possible heaven

the dream of colorblindness

of unity and honor,

and oh, yes, truth, justice and a maybe

to quote the Superman, the true American way

14 March 2019; Women’s Month

Tales Untold (mum on Mum)

Maud Lorraine Gottwalls, Age 14

(My Mum.  On back in her beautiful handwriting:

Greensboro High School, Junior Class 1931)

Intimate Unknown  

In our life

Lives we know/didn’t know

even though

 Mother, Father, grand, 2^nd hand

have lives beyond our birth

tales they didn’t tell

tales we did not tell

true tales, not smooth fabrications

made, put-on masks

of lives we did not live

shielding, cautioning

intimate  lives lived

untold, between you

the other

the pain, the pleasure

the fear, the horror, the wonders

not told                                                        yet

sometimes echoing in

the strange canyons of aloneness

in the quiet of night

or the whorl of the crowd

always arriving unaware

unbidden

in the deepest niches of mind

and body

alarms of secrecy

screeching tonelessly

a taste on the wind                        a glimpse

16 August -18 October 2018

©James M. Frase-White  10/2018

Grandpop & Grandmom Gottwalls

w/unknown Girl

My (Step)Father, Joseph F. White & Little me, @1951 or 2

Moon thoughts, Earthy designs

Evolution of a Moondream

©J.M. Frase-White

10" x 10", Acrylic on Canvas

May I ask the Equator, dear?

A sliver edge of moon

hints tomorrow's sun

  as people in Poland

sip mid-day coffee

Night of celestial calm

the crescent yellow-white

echoes the silence of street lights

smiling mirrors of rivermoon

stars glare above silhouette mountains

firing dots into black night

eyes of ancient starfires

hope of our eternity

Are hours longer around the waist of earth?

so much wider than here in the North

where dark in gradient comes

on our revolving home

leading us each day

to new night and sunrise

until we set and join her

in the continual soaring path

circling, circling, circling

in meaningful meaningless life

 © j.m. frase-white 2018 

 4 am, Sept 6/October 9, 2018

Time & Distance

©J.M. Frase-White

10" x 10", Acrylic on Canvas

"

Reading Kant in Tehran, 1979

From:  "Apocalypse"  2013

Kant & Iran, 1979

The two young women

Khadija, Aisha

were in my Kant class

with Dr. Melican, a champion

illuminating hours of fact,

enticing  knowledge

sending sparks igniting  your mind

with fires of wisdom,                        logic

a challenge,                    an engagement

to the marvels of thought

All over Boston

Posters bulleted on walls, streetlights

subway tunnels, on bulletin boards

the face of the Ayatollah

Evangelizing the overthrow of

The CIA-made King

My boss, department chairman, the head

Of the scholastic immigration board

Fighting for the students to go home

Or to stay 

A refuge in the halls of learning

Or fighting in the streets of Tehran

Ibrahim burst into our office

His beard fighting to sprout

and  leak out his ears

words rushing from his mouth

His passion inflammable

His desire to return home

A passionate apostle

To fight for Islam

Evangelically calling divinity

Burning to save a soul

Ibrahim flew East

His  jihad, his sacred Hajj

The two women

entered quietly

with bowed heads, wrapped in brown scarfs

begged to stay, in sorrow, in hope

to home to forever delayed

a family torn apart, with Immanuel standing

calling

Preaching the need

to feed

the mind

21 August 2018

For Arthur J. O’Shea, Ph.D.

Chairman, Dept. of  Psychology, Boston State College

And those two brave women who stayed

Their courage nailed to me
©James M. Frase-White 2018

White Man Dreams

The music filling me, flying away with me, flamingos migrating the 'dark' continent of Africa, ancestral home that returns in dreams.  From Kronos Quartet's 1992 Album, Pieces of Africa, came the inspiration: White Man Sleeps by Kevin Volans.  Listen to the YouTube link to movement II, and follow the pink birds to the blue waters of Bujumbura,

                 https://youtu.be/XNlfD-sGNsQ

Flying to Bujumbura in 2014-15 

Textured, cardstock and canvas papers with a handy map from

National Geographic

©James M. Frase-White 2015