Jonathan Beale- Three Poems

Poem 1

Caught

After Hokusai A sudden gust of wind at Ejiri

Four souls among the grasses

Hardened - to the bitter

Breeze – no hiding place.

The Tokaido Road carries

Them toward their fates:

The papers are blown away

With the butts of their day

Is caught in the blinks

Of an eye’s blin’. I

Almost see – they dance

With the wind –

Fuji’s base arc

Kisses the sky and sea –

Up to then, their words:

Ordered, kept, restrained.

The day blows

Away to the future

To the past.

Poem 2  

After Stanley Spencer The Baptism (1952)

Since…

            Since…

                        Since…

Beneath, as familiar as the sun you or I know.

They made a door to another land

This door has been opened to many

They who have entered into this place.

They are both primeval and everyday.

The viewers in the…

Stand behind the reclining souls.

Lost from a Roman decedent scene.

Somehow a thread weaves

Them via a base vein of humanity.

Those drops from the bowl/howl in life -

Not just active yet living breath

Giving life as ova & seed

The connectivity of (water – of – life)

There is an absence….

Something; someone perhaps

Appears to be not there.

You, me, perhaps

Who knows?

Pax.

Poem 3

After Matthew Ritchie painting Portrait in 2064 (2001)

The metaphor is everywhere

In infancy; where does the life,

Punctuated begin.  Your simile is not mine.

There must be an image within the image.

The perfect facsimile of the eye

This portrayed eye.  Nothing changes, nothing 

Can.  From 1964, those future junctures,

Abstracted through the imagination and via

The Medias greed – life perfect future tense.

This was, as then, last century -

To reach 35 years hence whose

Musical epoch formed a unique dynasty.

We looked @ each other

Living eyes to know the unknown 

And the unknowable – the cigarette burns to extinction.

II

The hooping states – between.

One, two, four, sixteen,

…and on.  And over –

Who are they?  – Who?

The portrait painter

100 years hence, in his eye.

What world will we be in?

As 100 years on - can death

Be deferred and deferred ad infinitum.

The fertile years alongside the harsh.

Reflective and those places when

The once long sun used to abide.

This picture in landscape or

Portrait or both.  Showing the life

Irredeemable.  The frame is caught

Now, forever, for whenever the scene

Besides the remaining life fading -

Among the abstraction and tenses

The obituaries have fallen by the wayside

Images stand in every dimension

Carving history for those born in 2064. 

III

In the world then a stone was cast.

An arm threw a stone, to be lost in the brambles,

Of the masses, in their days punctuated by wages &

Of the daily – disaster, humdrum, and  

The world 50 years on would come.

The SF world of fiction and cinema

Escapism got caught up and intertwined

Slowly, slowly, with the daily reality.

Another 50 years on, what will the world be in

2064?  For today is as far away as Jupiter or Mars.

The Cold War has been and gone.

In 100 years hence will The Man with the Blue Guitar

Be as tangible as you or I?  In this fresh future

Epoch in which this portrait in 2064 exists.