like white fruit drifting from the sky, like a swirl of cold blossoms that hide patches of hardened blackberry ice

_
[some of the crystals of snow falling were huge, clumped together, like chunks of coconut, reminding me of falling white fruit, and the second image of a swirl of cold blossoms should have come first, blossoms before fruit, but that's not how the image composed itself and I had no energy to resist with insistence on some modicum of poetic logic - but I had already fallen in love with the image 'blackberry snow' -no idea where it came from- how freshly falling billowy snow tastes to my synaesthetic seeing... later in the day I was able to re-assert some poetic order to the image and called it properly 'blackberry ice' referring to the black ice on which we can slip, skid, fall, tumble...

the image sounds like a fancy fruity cocktail? I wish...]

A River
of Stones

                                          

A bath lit by flame. Candles whisper at the edges of the water. And a singer whose song arises from the caves of the earth rising up through the steam.

_
[A host of candles. Tealights placed around the edge of the bath. Lisa Gerrard's The Silver Tree (scroll down to find it).]

A River
of Stones

                                          

What histories are written in the feet? Who can read the lines? Steps through the years. The earth presses against our feet. Ancient bone runes, graveyards rising, shoes fill with dirt, with seeds that unfurl cartographies inscribed in swirls of lines, ridges and hollows that map life in calloused, toughened skin.

These animal pads.

Their
finely boned dance.



____



If you click on any image it'll take you to the album, and a larger slideshow if you so wish.




___
Written for Big Tent Poetry prompt: feet.

YouTube is now offering the players that were in beta. I think they are terrific.

Remember, first you must create a playlist with the videos you would like to show in your player. To do this, click on the videos and add them to a playlist. When you create your custom player you will be given a list of your playlists to choose from.


I have this one on the first page of my website. I'm not sure how to find it in the new menus, but if you go here http://www.youtube.com/custom_player you can highlight it as a layout style and then you'll get the embed code. Be careful, though, YouTube says: "The layout option is only available when you first create a player. Once you've chosen a layout and saved the player, you won't be able to change it."



In the bottom left corner, click on the box after the Play sign but before the Volume control and the videos in the playlist will appear along the bottom of the screen. It's a toggle switch: click on it again to make them disappear. Use the arrow at the end to see subsequent pages.

Clicking on the Videopoetry playlist will take you to a cool page in which the videos are shown in mini size in a vertical line, along with total playtime.

I am amazed to see the 13 videos I have in this playlist are a total of 41 minutes! Each one took a minimum of 20 hours to produce, and the longer ones in the 50 hour range!

Crazy what we do for enjoyment, huh?

A man as wide as he is tall throws birdseed. His old Jack Russell watches. Twelve rock doves peck like feathery iridescent ocean waves.

(Actually, I think I can remove the second sentence to make a better image:

A man as wide as he is tall throws birdseed. Twelve rock doves peck like feathery iridescent ocean waves.

But I leave the Jack Russell in since this distills moments in my life - I see these two nearly every day out my window, sometimes I chat with the man. And one day I will read this post, and remember them. So the image is for my own keepsake. One of the stones in my silk pouch of poetry and memory.)
_

A River
of Stones



                                          

A sealed envelope, my nephew's present from his uncle, unexpectedly falls out from behind a bookcase. l hold it, notice the moment.
_

A River
of Stones



                                          

Clap of wings, a ledge. Street grey, pin black eyes- the pavement where I walk, or the fleeing sky, or a flock pecking bagel bits.

(I balk at putting the word 'watch' in, and hope you, the reader, can parse it anyhow.

Okay, putting it in:

Clap of wings, a ledge. Street grey, pin black eyes watch
the pavement where I walk, or the fleeing sky, or a flock pecking bagel bits.

Without it, the missing verb appears anyhow. You should leap from the ledge to the view. No, I don't have to say imaginatively, I don't. No, no.)
_

A River
of Stones


                                          

The water of five great lakes rushes from the tap. My mug of sand, algal metal, dark minnow streaks.
_

A River
of Stones


                                          

direct link: Burning Brightly in the Night

Yes, the lady is tagged!!!!!!

:::laughing:::

I've re-done the soundtrack on this video. For inexplicable reason, I said 'billions' for the degrees of the sun's internal temperatures instead of 'millions' (in the readings I used). Trying to change a section of voice in a recording is nearly impossible - the timbre of voice, breath, emotion, you can never capture it twice.

So I spent 5 hours on Sunday re-recording and mixing. Then uploaded for 4 hours, only the upload to YouTube failed, for unknown reasons.

Then I went back into the recording, and wow, it was hours of more work trying to balance voice and music without distortion. The video was finally live on YouTube at 2am. What a long day!

The more I learn about sound production the less I realize I know. Back to the manual, I guess. (Apple's Final Cut Express manual, all 1200 pages of it, is the best - truly a good teacher).

I hope the final product - the video here - is watchable, listenable, and worth smiling over, and pondering over...

A few quick things - the swirling photons are tiny white seasonal lights and their motion is hand-held camera dancing. The figure was of me in Venus Enroute (one of the videos YouTube inexplicably froze for about 8 months after I embedded it at my SoundClick site and began allowing viewcounts only after I complained in a forum so the stats are entirely off).

Because I wanted that video darker, but the tunic to be bright satiny red I masked the figure in an oval matte to boost the red colour, and followed it frame by frame -in FinalCut Express you have to do this sort of thing manually- which took, if I recall, from about 9pm to 5am the next morning, about 8 hours, an intense labour.

You understand I simply couldn't go through such an exercise for this video, so I dropped that footage in here, then added a mirror filter to it (so there are a couple of figures, multiplicies, ahem, so to speak).

I've uploaded a music-only version to Facebook (it's public, so you can watch if you wish).

The fabulous music is by that very talented, brilliant young Spanish musician, José Travieso, 'El Juego de las Atracciones,' from, "A Retrospective: the early years."


©Brenda Clews, Dec 6, 2007

-

The music-only cut that I uploaded to Facebook (the quality is okay, but Facebook has a ways to go to catch up with YouTube I'd say):


A few stills:







                                          

The ball in the faintly pink nail polish in which suspended red hearts lie looks like a Mayan Pok-A-Tok waiting to be hip-kicked.

-
A River
of Stones