Saturday, August 13, 2016

ABOVE THE BAY


Here is a picture of myself and my high school boyfriend Gregory in August 1965. We were 17 and 19 that sailing summer. Young love grew too complex and we lost touch for decades.  Now he lives in a seacoast city near London with the ocean a mere walk away while I look out my window to see the Blue Ridge Mountains and deer grazing fallen apples in my back yard. I couldn’t imagine in 1965 I would leave our home state of Rhode Island or the shores of Narragansett Bay. Greg and I have been internet pen pals since 1999, when I discovered on Amazon his first brilliant book on popular art and culture and sent congratulations. We talked and keep on talking. I sat down when we first got in touch and jotted down a rhyming poem to honor our shared past:

ABOVE THE BAY (1999)

A small boat bobs upon the bay
A mere speck in the tide.
Memory’s the vessel
Where youth’s dominion hides.

Love without love’s wisdom,
Love’s patience, or love’s care
Skimming over wavelets
Shimmering in the air.

Undiscovered sorrows
Just dreams, forgotten soon –
Too busy with the sunshine
Too rakish with the moon

Too full of life to know it
Too drunk with swollen kisses.
What is the stuff of paradise?
We wake to find that this is.

(copyright Cathy Larson Sky) 


 photo credit: G N Votolato


Saturday, March 12, 2016

TIME KEEPER for E.O.





Tonight the tempo is lashing. Ladies and lords chase an invisible fox. Inside the music I dive through choppy white water, cram notes onto the bow in random bunches. Lose phrasing. Lose connection. When Eoghan straps on his accordion (his box) there’s a change. Eoghan’s foot tap is steady. Metronomic. His fingers roam the buttons. Pleated bellows wad and stretch. 


I lean my good ear into the bank of sound, focus on Eoghan’s bandwidth. After a few measures, I’m in the flow. A friend takes the seat beside me. He’s eager. Puts his flute together, slaps its case shut. When he starts to play, he’s outside the beat. Flute’s a fluttering sparrow. He raises an eyebrow my way.  Help? But I can barely hold my own. We both start going under. Eoghan’s taking a smoke break. I shoot him a look.  Help!


Catching on, he drops his cigarette and raises the accordion to his lap. Couple of phrases, the tune’s back on track. When I mouthe thank you Eoghan holds my gaze and bows to me in courtly slo-mo. Never missing a note. When his head’s bowed, I swear I see a halo around Eoghan’s skull. Then (on the wall behind him) a golden tunnel. Ancestors stream through the ether, fine electrodes humming.