Celtic Radio: Images 13 and 14

XIII.
(Antibes-Picasso Museum)

Surfmusic:wet stones,
Grimacing boulders,
Writhing beasts drunk in sea froth.
My head is spinning
From Picasso’s paintings:
Ferocity and outward calm
So wild, so pure
Like the mad love I feel for the blue sea
From the window of Chateau Grimaldi.

To stay drunk on beauty half
The first night and double the following day.
Sickness that follows beauty too palpable
Gazing long into her eyes.

Vertigo of deepness within your soul
The everchanging light on your face.
The only sound I hear is a heartbeat---

Black Cubist sculpture slashing open the land and water.
His works are wide worlds falling at the edges of the wall.
They call me into the muddled blue darkness
of a world created fresh and free.
Rudimental,
Percussive steps in a city of freemen.

Art of art,
Mirror of this poem
Gazing hard into the sea
Wave splattered
Velvet green revealing
Tiny crabs
Sideways soldiers marching heroically on pin fingers.

The Surfmusic is within me
I am healing
I am praying for every living thing to rise.

XIV.
{A. Antibes-Cathedral}
Listening to the priest’s soothing sermon,
I cannot get the sense his French sentences
Though his voice is calm and pure.

I want to be a living stone
Or perhaps a little candle before the tabernacle.
Joy rises up within my heart
Joy passing all understanding---
‘Le priere universelle.’

“I believe in the resurrection of the dead
and in the life of the world to come.”

Within I am lit up as gold and blue moonlight on the onyx sea.
My sickness is crushed
The walls of my heart shatter
In an orange furnace
In a golden womb
The sun is within me.
A master glassblower turns his pipe blending
Marble pigments into crystal wonder.

Sunsets upon the water in her emerald eyes
White fish dive near the boulders in the milky green mist
Prayer is my joy.
I pray for all of the things I cannot say.

{B. On the Street}
Beneath the old pines
Black dogs rest with drunk travelers
Another two bottles arrive as the evening starts to glow.

Shady pink haze falls over Antibes’ pale white horizon of condominium towers,
The motor starts to slow.
Cigarettes are lit one after the other
Tourists mill by
In fuschias, red, and cadmium yellow.

There is jazz in the air in this happy town.
It is another type of joy
Another town created for human joy
Another paradise.

The cathedral is a stone’s throw beyond the rampart.
Home is very near and very far away. Busses come and go
The road winds on and on through the night.