Since you passed away

One hundred forty nights

Of sleeping in the light

It’s far too hard

To be alone in the dark

-

My eyes are red

And wild with regret

Dear remembered afternoons

“I love you, goodbye, I’ll see you soon”

If only I could have known

How soon I’d leave us both alone

-

I blow sweet, hopeless, lonely kisses

To my first love, I’m weary of missing her

Does it have to be

Forever? I’m afraid to wait and see

I won’t turn my heart to ice

I can’t bring myself to kill you twice

* * *

Time has not yet undone

Tender-woven Hope

Tabernacled in your breast–

Hide not Nature’s rosen flush

Gild not Beauty with a Brush

I implore you, O daughter–

Be clothed in Song and crowned with Laughter!

March 9, 2010

Worth noting: Bright Star, a film centering on the great 19th century Romantic poet John Keats and his love affair with Fanny Brawn is the most inspiring film I’ve seen in a long time as a writer and reader. Go see it with a date. Or by yourself.

“She Walks in Beauty…”

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellow’d to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impair’d that nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress,

Or softly lightens o’er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!

Lord Byron, 1814

“The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept”

The harp the monarch minstrel swept,

The King of men, the loved of Heaven,

Which Music hallow’d while she wept

O’er tones her heart of hearts had given.

Redoubled be her tears, its chords are riven!

It soften’d men of iron mould;

It gave them virtues not their own;

No ear so dull, no soul so cold,

That felt not, fired not to the tone,

Till David’s lyre grew mightier than his throne!

It told the triumphs of our King,

It wafted glory to our God;

It made our gladden’d valleys ring,

The cedars bow, the mountains nod;

Its sound aspired to Heaven, and there abode!

Since then, though heard on earth no more,

Devotion and her daughter Love

Still bid the bursting spirit soar

To sounds that seem as from above,

In dreams that day’s broad light can not remove.

Lord Byron, 1814

Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art!

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores

Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:

No–yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

John Keats, 1820

Aaron Ivey does this thing called “artist night” at he and his wife Jamie’s place. They have a swank home. Artists get together and share their stuff; songwriters, poets, photographers, all creating and sharing in a constructive and encouraging environment.

Deep, honest, talented artists played their songs in a stripped-down, minimaliststyle. Austin Jones and Philip Edsel from Courrier, Jason Poe from Jets Under Fire, this guy named Nate who lives by Courrier, apparently, Devin M. Garza, Sr., Stephen Miller, and others (I just forgot their names) played. If you’re an Austin artist, make some way to get to the next artist night.

I shared this poem:

“Make Room”

Throw the emptiness in your arms

Out into that space we breathe;

Claim some lonely goodnight–

Whispered, Unanswered–

Was it for you?

Bring it in to live there

In the thinned air,

And a tired song,

Waning thin,

May rest in the vacant whisper’s home.

Is it for you?

***

Philip Edsel helped me with the punctuation. He’s a great writer.

“Make Room” was inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s first elegy from his Duino Elegies. It’s built it off his line: “Throw the emptiness in your arms out into that space we breathe.” It was written to think through movement and energy; when something dies, its energy goes somewhere else and another something is born. It’s cyclical. Actually, it’s the Circle of Life. The song from Lion King describes it better than I do, I just thought I’d add a little something to the metaphysical muddle of modern thought.

Courrier is a group of four men who has been faithful with little (they’ve even played at a pirate bar–ask them about it). They’ve played all around Texas, paying their dues. They have grown into one of the most versatile bands I’ve ever heard of: they can go into any environment and fill it with their huge sound. But they don’t have to blow your nose out your brains with their spacious stadium rock featured on upcoming EP “Like the Cold of Snow in the Time of Winter.” They are masters of adaptation; less like chameleons, more like James Bond: with style that kills and grace that inspires.

Their EP release show is not a take-it-or-leave-it social option on a Thursday night; it is a MUST ATTEND for all who want to hear where music is headed into the second decade of the new millenium. Courrier is the sound of the twenty-teens. This studio EP is just a foretaste of what’s to come.

Austin, TX, Thurs Oct 8 @ La Zona Rosa, doors at 8pm

No more need be said.

I wanted to create a character. So I looked around. Then I wrote. I made some of my thoughts his thoughts, and I borrowed friend’s dreams and made them his. My process was fluid, but perhaps too much so. I realize I didn’t describe his appearance at all.

How do you create characters? Do you make a list of traits first? Do you create fictional counterparts to real people? How do you introduce characters into a larger body of work? Do you start with appearance?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and processes. This is my crack at creating and introducing a character:

{August 17, 2009}
The old man brought his head low to drink the oily black coffee. Steam rolled up around his face as he sipped, pursed lips expecting the sharp heat. Dark jazz notes sauntered through the place, half-convincing the young, would-be intellectuals they were somewhere cultured. Like Paris. But they were in Ashford, Connecticut, and their notions of Paris were a fabric of borrowed memories and artbook photographs of Picasso, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway.

The old man dreamed like them once. He had believed he would teach at Oxford, and had since he was six years old. He had wanted to be a Great Mind. He looked now with some disdain at the students around him, though it didn’t show on his face. Not much did anymore. He quietly mocked their unkempt hair, worn Birkenstocks, thick glasses; tables cluttered with paper, books, pens, calculators; one table showed six demitasse cups between two people; even their beards, he thought, are contrived neurotic tendencies meant to portray academic zeal, as if they pursued knowledge at the cost of personal hygiene! They know nothing of the cost of becoming a Great Mind, the old man thought.

Quite unfortunately, however, he did.

–

“III, or, June 1, or, Color of a Storm in June”

I have known you

we orbit;

Each new moment

Infinite destroying, creating

Drinking

Violent summer storm

In our chest

Stars colliding

Drinking drinking

Reborn

–

June 1, 2009

–

“II”

Golden child of the Dawn

You shout the new morning

Ablaze

With your laughter,

God’s gift to me,

Without which I would not wake

Keep singing! Burn this old house down,

The Night and all its bitter vice,

But do not curse the ashes;

Whisper over them the fierce

Refrain of my

Resurrection

Your smile is a symphony!

Life runs through it

As light through an open

Window in Summer.

You shout the new morning ablaze–

Thank you. And good morning.

–

June 19, 2009

]]> http://devinross.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/god-made-the-automobile/feed/ 0 devinross spaceball http://devinross.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/inaugural-expression/ http://devinross.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/inaugural-expression/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:32:00 +0000 Devin Garza Continue reading →]]> My previous blog, Critiques on American Domesticity, was highly acclaimed in some underground literary circles. It was a quarterly, but I liked to call it a seasonal–that way it was more subliminally connected to the tides of Female Domestic Fashion, the subject to which it was entirely devoted. COAD survived one year in the brutal blog world, ultimately ebbed out into a riptide of criticism and fierce competition.

Like the phoenix, I rise from the ashes.

Musings exists to fulfill what COAD never could: my artistic yearning, the stifled poet within me screaming, “Help! I’m so stifled! I need release!” It’s like freeing a kidnapped person from the trunk of a car.

With no further ado, I now give my inaugural  artistic expression:

Embers of eternity, burning

Since heaven’s fire first

Hewed my earthy heart to beat,

Ignite

All my bones remember

Eden, and groan and burn

With all creation

–

July 6, 2009

–

This is in response to Ecclesiastes 3.11, “He has also set eternity in their heart.” That’s from the Bible.