Think you can turn back time
With a message?
A comment?
A like?
A card?
A phone call?
A surprise visit?
It wouldn’t matter.
Too much water’s passed
Beneath that bridge,
Too much current’s eroded
Its structure.
Marked now only by a swirling eddy,
An impression of what once stood,
The span, the supports
All swept away, out to sea
With a ship that
Sailed long ago,
Christened My
Best Friend Forever,
Reflagged under
A jack of convenience,
Sold and renamed
A Man I Used to Know.
A familiar face in the grocery store,
A curbside conversation,
Both our eyes darting
Left and right, brown and hazel
Seeking the slightest spark of
Recognition of the person before.
Moon Dog? Moogie?
Is that you? You still in there?
Until we each return to the
South Sea isolation of
Our shipwrecked existence,
Marooned with our native wives,
With another sea story to share,
Another hey, remember when,
Another no shit there I was,
Another castaway tale,
Hoarded like doubloons
Marked on an X-stained memory map,
Buried beneath the ever-shifting sands of
Our salt-washed lives.
© 2023 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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This one started when I wished a friend I hadn’t heard from in several years happy birthday in a message and got back an acknowledgment about the pleasure of hearing from an old friend but nothing more. Which is where the title came from.
That set my mind to wondering how we see friends we’ve lost contact with. I had that encounter in a grocery store during the pandemic with a different friend I used to work with. The masks we were wearing added to the surrealness of searching each other’s eyes for recognition.
I’ve done a lot of that wondering this year. Being sick, I’ve felt the isolation and distance from people I thought were more involved in my life, much more than at any time during the pandemic. I knew from many other episodes and observations that they likely wouldn’t be, as people have a distinct aversion to illness, especially anything prolonged. There’s a psychological defense mechanism in there, although they often rationalize and disguise it as something else. But a couple of surprises showed up, too. There always are.
You make time for what you value. That’s a hard lesson to learn.
There are the people we carry around inside us and people as they really are. Rarely do they coincide. Or maybe it’s rare that we allow them to.
Most of these lines came to me in the middle of the night, jotted out on my lighted notepad by the bed. Very few were added afterward, just expanded and refined. The punctuation took time to sort out, mostly because I’ve been playing around with how much or how little of it I need. Like individual words with their ambiguity, a period or a comma, or the lack thereof, can impact the image.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteThis image ranks among one of the more complicated images I’ve created, along with “Milpa” and “Friday-2AM". I created the wrecked pilings stone by stone, filling each with a bitmap of an actual stone or bolder picture. There are about 7 or 8 different trees designs among the forest, and several colors of each type of tree, with gradients to give them some depth. Then I copied them over and over to get the right density of foliage. The mountains and snow in the background are bitmapped with images of my stained glass, giving them texture and variation.
It took about two weeks to put all this together working between the desktop and iPad versions of the Affinity Designer 2 program. Save for a limitation on email file attachment sizes (google), jumping between the two platforms was easy and convenient. I could work on the trees, or the stones, then move those parts to the computer to assemble them into the larger image. Once I had the overall image set, I spent another few days tweaking and adjusting small parts to get it to gel together. As always getting the perspective right can be he trickiest part, especially when the “correct” perspective angle looks wrong. Then it takes a little creative adjusting to make things work out.
I wanted something that would reflect back to the poem. That consisted of the eddy just downstream of the near piling. As always, something in the images will resonate with the writing.
I’ve enjoyed working on these images over the years, both the photography and the graphic images. As Imaginings continues forward, so will the images to go with each composition. I learn something new with each one I do. That makes their creation fun, and rewarding.