Raymond Farr

Homage to Homage to the Imagination*


One night I sailed off

So long Wynken, Blynken, & Nod

So long zoppa

Farewell [ ]

So long [ ]

The waters of no more pain
Are found within this

Or so cried the stars to
French poet Charles Baudelaire

A dream poem
From breakfast on

In fact an improved version of

A Dutch picture
Which [ ] read aloud

In fact a nod to Surrealism

The year 1869
The year 2007

& which zoppa quoted—

A delightful little
Episode
One night
Among my friends—

But don’t be fooled
This is a detail read aloud

It might be gloomy—

A lovely bedtime

A small sampling
Entitled simply

A good poem—

But oh how classically fun

To stop, pause, take a step
& salute the dream land

In this version
It walks parallel

Giving a nod
To Octavio Paz



* Source of text was a Google key word search of the phrase: “Nod poems.”

Satu Kaikkonen

Prometheus, pour the wine to the earth

My best days are gone,

the beards of the trees are verging on the wind.

Prometheus, pour the wine to the earth,

irrigate from it the mountainside,

make the language of the flowers empty.

If I would understand what the rivers are talking,

I would write the heavens crack,

I would remember what it seems to the mind of an awakened pigeon

when its beak splits the egg-shell space

for a first time.

Have a mercy on me!

I don’t want my hands to beat the memory of the life,

my foot to forget how to run,

and so, therefore!

Take a piece of the white bread, erase the letters,

then bow and say three times three,

the oath of thirteen,

open the lantern of our pilgrimage,

but don’t blow before the horse

runs through the field and sings a song

for the fox.

Satu Kaikkonen

dream'less

I confound you by our evry part,
          we shall changed into  birds
and the sky is a blanket
     from which the light dives its naked shadow.

Dreams eat us the same way
as the flowers are eating their way through the earth.
Waking up is a risky oppoturnity, a measure,
which painfulness is forgotten
               time after time more easily.


Your face will be dearer to me day after day altought
I forget  the continuums of  your little details.
I touch you through my dream
- you are far away, and near,
so near as the length of the breath,
under these same
clouds

at the place I don’t know
yet, maybe never.

Gerry Boyd

the rapture never comes too late

the seductive regret of scarlet lipstick late applied

is easily erased by the chartreuse ferns of a feathery dawn

and a woody prayer of silver moss that is perfect in its worship:

when your flowered skirt is breathlessly lifted

over the variegated heaven of your musky thighs,

ah! there the firm blossom issues, and causes us to climb-

baptized so surely with a rainy spring of hidden desire,

this precious bulb so long buried, in a fashionable arcade,

by the distracting drifts of bleak chatter and snowy bores

has burst through the dam that was always too weak to hold it.

so ecstatic to take the waters, in the roaring way of alpine cures,

from the holy torrents, once reserved, for stark liturgical glaciers:

in the graying cloud of snow melt, an edelweiss has blossomed,

delicious, at the summit, in its white and dusky innocence.

Gerry Boyd

murmurs from a perfect afternoon

i. drifting into that hermetic seal

the picket fence stands proudly unwashed

in the three trunk hemlock afternoon:

it is all held together by wispy cables

and the dreamy embroidery of soapy eyelets-

those painted threads of yellow, green, and rust

that are all inside a glassed-washed afternoon:

the clearing fog of then and now and when.

a tempting little drip will propel the suspect elders

to wander into the white promise of the warping slats.

ii. the trifurcation is an amusement that briefly matters

she dances in the chartreuse lemon spring,

is the green summer of our frothing joy-

she flutters again in orange leaves,

that, saintly, burst and burn in autumn:

ironic words of appreciation always seem to fail

in a way that is pervasive and, oddly, geometric

on the tear-stained Appian Way of patio pavers:

there are many things that cease to matter

in the Euclidian formulae of wind-swept leaves.

yet, we try, and try again, to simply find the point.

iii. back to the idle rust of dropping cones

each shadowy dot of near and distant leaves

is bartered by the tricky once-washed slats,

traded for a moment that waves good-bye, well met:

saplings proudly foil the coniferous quivering-

the compost can, always, existentially blue,

a calming retreat from the obscenity of now

that is telegraphed by this obstinate relic-

boasting of a clarity almost reached

if, indeed, it was reachable at all.

the rest just freezes,

impotent in the set of choices and meanings-

what is the course beyond the fence?

through the unwashed slats there is only:

the soothing green of the distance mown,

the windy rhythm of dappled seed,

the promise of pale berries, lush and sown.

Satu Kaikkonen

so light that I would be

the moment will be yours who fly away
                     I will fall trough the wind so light
that I would be
without you lightweight, non-existent
a water-cutted leaf, spat into the darkness of the night
a fleeting leaf

                     I do not want the  time passing over the trees
as a foreign

Satu Kaikkonen

the will of the mind

the dreams are owned by strangers.
                   if I had men they would be he.
he lives far away, in a place, where all the windows are beginning from letter a.
in a place where the nights are under the stars, and
                            dates are speaking eyes smelling as coffee.

he is gone,  and for ever here, as the will of the mind
sticking the bosom of a dream  early in the morning.



                                                               unable to catch I hold his hair through my hands
his smile, his eyes elsewhere
which are seeing another way.

                                                                 so tenderly I would been quiet, quiet, quiet.