- by David Gilmour
Encounter with Frogs
What is an impression worth?
A frog. And a jar of ruddy leeches.
When I say “frog,” I think “Frogs.
Frogs are good to think.”
The matter of frog experience first floats
Then sinks mostly unknowable, spuriously
Into the spawning pond of memory.
It’s a rich seminal soup, full of eyes,
Magnified, each a natural universe.
These eyes are vocal once they spring
Breaking through the skin of things.
In season, everywhere. Then they’re out.
Wonders of compromise, they extend themselves
To bridge the poles of water world and padded land.
And the extensions can be perceived from the eyes
As orderly change, clear and strange,
As leggy fish with iguana tails,
As animals flying on all fours,
Fully outstretched, twice their size,
Jumping, climbing piggy-back,
Unabashedly clambering onto one another’s backs,
Orange on orange, green on green,
Clinging colorfully, eyes bulging,
They seem a surprise even to themselves.
When they leap
From the dense compact of bone and skin,
The plastic tapestry
Takes shape. As lightning bolts or spotted lilies on fresh
green waters.
Frogs.
Frogs are naturally good to think,
To take inside as part of insubstantial life,
Changing order, cruising the classifications.
Their song defeats the ears, allegro!
The rhythmic noise communicates,
Encroaching on all other senses,
Setting forth reverie:
Bullrushes,
Against the moon and stars,
Spiked grasses on the mirror lake,
Edging the weeds, where
Sedge warblers are sleeping on blue eggs.
The scene you see cannot be forced,
Cannot be tidily arranged
By science or dulling habit.
My eyes within no longer truly see.
There they swim in thicker waters,
As Comets,
Shooting across the neural galaxies,
Where they re-connect icons.
From a blade of grass, the rest:
The moon,
Stars
Pond
Echoing ripples across
Shattering the constellations,
Ruffling the lily pad
And its camping amphibious motility.
Making the connections symphonic, concrete,
Like visiting forgotten shrines,
So much depends on Memory.
Glazed frogs transporting—déjà vu—
Faint essences to flush meadowlarks
From the nesting spirit
To wild flights of fancy.
Each a winged message,
Calling, answering unasked questions.
My gaze, pilgrim in a landscape
Painting itself inside,
Inviting me to choose the color and the brush.
This is a risky business,
Uninhibited mind-blooming,
Thinking
On the odd chance a relevant word
Will leap the illogical impasse.
By David Gilmour
Paper Stars
- by David Gilmour
Paper Stars
I’m full of wonder how the stars
Affect the likes of you and me,
As once they did the kings and priests of Babylon.
Even the wizard of Ozymandias,
However magical his ill-starred life,
Did not register on the hieroglyphic tablets,
While the colossus himself was fated to become
A pair of non-contiguous toes
Cemented on a crumbling pedestal,
An alabaster head sunk up to a matted brow
In crystalline sand more brilliant
Than innumerable gems circling in the celestial sea.
Wonder grows as the constellation on the equator
Mean so much to augurs of the charted lights;
They know the financial record in the wallet on my hip.
They dip into my private anxieties as I once
Searched my pockets for the green bull’s-eye
I lost to Jimmy’s blue cap on the mud casino,
The broad playground of planetary marble games.
I wonder how the shiny bits of night can make the Bull,
The clustered eye and butchered ends
Most vital to the backward-gazing Ram,
More violent to my distant wanderings from the ecliptic,
And why that Giant with Medusa’s head is given no nod
As recognition of murder surrounding my comfort zone.
For terrible slaughters plague the city in the daily rags,
Visible day by day, night by night, just off the central drags
Though kindnesses go unrecognized in the changing haze,
And yet these omens come pouring down when any child is born.
Who are these starry powers that influence life on earth,
That we become Assyrian kings and Ninevite scribes
Deciphering signs in the morning sheets between our fingertips?
David Gilmour (4/28/2025)
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