Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) 9AM. 22nd. November. (2) Sad Dance. (3) Leila....

Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) 9AM. 22nd. November. (2) Sad Dance. (3) Leila....:                      1 .   9AM. 22nd. November. The sun is different today, An electric winter sun, A brilliant white spreadsheet On...

(1) 9AM. 22nd. November. (2) Sad Dance. (3) Leila.

                    1.

  9AM. 22nd. November.


The sun is different today,
An electric winter sun,
A brilliant white spreadsheet
On which the clouds are printed.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
22nd. November 2017.

                    2.

           Sad Dance.


My God, you are beautiful,
The pavements sing like children
When you walk on them,
Your black high heels
Tapping out Bach and Chopin.

It would be a sin to make love to you,
But you are not perfect,
A prized black tulip
Compressed between the fingers
Of a crazed admirer,

Your smile like a thin pressed crease
On a sheet of brown paper
Pulled tight over a birthday gift,
A box packed with whispered secrets.
Indeed, you are no Madonna,

But when I dance with you
In the privacy of your first floor bedroom
To the sad strains of a Slovenian love song,
I seem to be holding the whole of creation
In the circuit of my arms.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 18th. - 19th. 2017.

                     3.

                 Leila.


When I woke up this morning
I was dreaming of you,
Your light delicate hand
Always on my shoulder.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 22nd. 2017.

These three poems seem to belong together, a little family of verse.

Anna.

The fat old lady smiled at me,
The single smiling face in a silent crowd
Of Soviet musicians and their guardian angels
All dressed in silver grey suits.

After I had sung,
(Something by Brahms, or was it Tchaikovsky?),
My teenage treble out glistered by the grand chandeliers
That hung in the semi darkness
Of the great domed smoky ceiling, they all applauded,
But none as sincerely as Anna.

Years later, as we talked in her small apartment,
Swamped by hot house flowers and the scent of brewing tea;
The plain shelves filled with books I loved to look at,
But could barely decipher
Because I had not been encouraged to study my father`s language,
I slowly became aware she had once been an exceptional beauty,
Photographed, sketched and painted by artists in Moscow and Paris.

Anna has been dead for fifty years,
And I have read her Requiem, her Wind of War, her Poem Without
                                                                                              a Hero,
In English translation, (unlike my sister, I still cannot read a word,
Cannot come to terms with the bleak originals),
And so I experience her voice as a deaf man might hear music,
A distorted, muted echo that clogs up syntax
But does not kill the pain that honed these poems of Terror.

Anna, it is not the gulag that first comes to mind
When I think of you waiting in line in the Leningrad snow,
Head bent low with sorrow,
It is the hard won smile you gave me, two decades later
As I stood on the stage, imperfectly speaking your language,
But stunned by the love in your eyes.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 17th. 2017.  

A Fairytale. (Revised).

Crossing the steel bridge to the market
An ordinary girl, yet full of poems
Red in tooth and claw:

Unruly babies, not yet nurtured,
Already spitting fire, like dragons
Deep in her world, her womb,
The echoing shadows,
The darkness where, in the beginning
All of life is formed, articulated
In secret, all the lanterns out;

Here dwarfish gods
Make sacred swords
And birds speak plain to purblind heroes,
The seas are born, the Kraken roars,
The mountains fall apart.

Crossing the steel bridge to the market
An ordinary girl, her hair in ribbons,
Sings out raw poems to the crowds;
                                                                                    (The girl sings).
Come and buy                                                                          
Come and buy
You lost and lonely
Come and buy.

But no one would give her a well thumbed penny.
No one would give her a candid glance.                               
                                                                                   (The crowd reacts).
                                   
                        Her accent aint local. American? Perhaps she`s Polish?
                        An asylum seeker? A benefits cheat? - NAH,
                        Someone who slipped under the wire? More like.
                        Bet she`s a Gypsy. - A religious freak.
                        How dare she squawk those hard luck stories.
                        How dare she beg our hard earned pay.
                       Come away children! Move! Come on! Out of her way!

But all the children of Camden Town
Danced around her hand in hand,
Sharing their sweets with her and laughing,
Scorning their parents acrid anger.
And when she raised her old tin whistle
They heard a music no adult could hear,
The notes so high pitched they could have been silent,
The notes so sweet the Angels grew jealous.
And when she said it was time to come home
They danced with her over the bridge.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 21st. - 22nd. 2017.
November 14th. - 15th. 2017.
December 4th. 2017.

My Housemate.

I am not alone
I am not lonely
There is a single spider
Living on my window
A quiet Buddha
Watching the world go by

Most other folk
Would swipe him with a duster
Would squash him flat
I cannot do that
I love his stillness
He is quite safe here

Perhaps if I could learn to live like him
All that I need would drop into my lap


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 14th. 2017.

Icelandic Music.

Painting ice with music
So like walking head down into the wind
But surfing it also.

Thus it was when riding white angel horses
Lost in each others arms all through the night
The white wings beating above us.

Thus it was when we kissed in the shimmering dark
The stars ice splinters adrift on windows
Small flecks of light.

We slept that year in the chill of your cabin
The leafless trees whispered outside
Love poems bereft of words.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 9th. - 10th. 2017.

Written whilst listening to Bjork on the radio. 

Standing Aside.

Girl, hair kept long,
Flowing like a river
Over the landscape of her body
Down to her narrow ankles,
Her sturdy dancer`s feet.

Eyes, equatorial blue with longing,
Peering sadly at the grey shore
Of our northern island.
Eyes, sad oceans, deep with thwarted love.

Tonight I watch her sleeping on the sofa.
I promised her to keep watch until morning.
Perhaps she dreams that ship she often talks of,
Sailing inland seas and winding rivers
To a dark, uncharted land of broken vows,
Far darker than this loneliness that taunts me.

She has been quite distant to me since she moved in,
Arriving with her back pack and her kitten,
A frightened huddle of fur wrapped in a towel.
We have both lived lives chained to aspirations
That have dragged us far out of our comfort zones.
We thought that love is easy. It is not.

I tip toed across the room and touched her shoulder.
She protested, then curled tightly in a ball.
I had forgotten that sleep is a private space,
A Safe House with locks on every door.

Sleeping apart is not how we had planned it,
But there is a sort of fear that mimics shyness
And keeps even soul mates at arms length:
Those whom we long to love we dare not touch.

Girl, hair kept long,
Flowing like a river
Over the landscape of her body
Down to her narrow ankles,
Her sturdy dancer`s feet.

Perhaps one day we can live much simpler lives.
Quietly observing the world. Minding our own business.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 29th. 2016.
October 11th. - November 8th. 2017. 

This poem has been developed from an earlier work that never fully hung together. This new poem says what I was trying to express in the previous version.