Street Scene, 9th. Lunar Month 1856.

Studying a print by Utagawa Hiroshige
I fall asleep in my rocking chair
And find myself quietly strolling through
The back streets of Edo.

The people that I meet
Nod politely as I pass;
Their faces, deep in shadow,
Their voices muffled whispers.

Almost invisible beneath the yellow umbrellas
That shield their heads from the evening rain
Gently sloping down from purple clouds,
I sense their eyes are shrewdly watching me
With a delicate precision.

To find a sleep walker in their midst,
A stranger unperturbed by the rawness
Of the autumn evening,
Is an event that breaks all the complex rules
By which they live their lives.
They pass me by as they would pass a beggar,
Or an official they do not care to meet.

The opening chorus of Brahms Requiem
Jolts me awake. I have dropped the book
On the kitchen carpet. I observe it is not damaged
And has remained open at the page
That I was carefully studying
Before I suddenly drifted into sleep.

I pick up the book and re-acquaint myself
With the brightly lit shops and wooden houses,
The neat umbrellas tilted in the wind.
And for a moment I am almost back in Edo,
Strolling quietly through the evening crowds,
An outsider trying to make myself at home.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 12th. 2018.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Schooled by Cinema.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Schooled by Cinema.:                       1 You teach us with machines Wars imagery, Projecting through dark halls transparent dead, Their days of terror r...

(1) Love Story. Revised.(2) A Fragment.

                  1.

          Love Story.


My personal B Class Movie
Flickers through my brain,
Preventing me from sleeping.

A girl who no longer lives
Walks down a street that has ceased to exist,
I stumble and fall at her side.
If we had married would she still be alive?

I remember the dogs barking,
The moon the colour of marigolds
Huge in an autumn sky.

The silence between us was brittle
With a thousand unspoken regrets.

Love tore us to tiny shreds
As though we were paper dolls,

Dolls thrown out by a child
In a sudden selfish fit.

The girl succumbed to opioids.
I rarely leave my home.
We could not have lived together.
We could never have lived apart.

My personal B Class Movie
Flickers through my brain,
Preventing me from sleeping,

Casting shadows on the moon.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 7th. - 8th. - 10th. 2018.

                  2.

       A Fragment.

I cried out my heart,
Only the wind heard me,
And a bird with a broken wing.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 6th. 2018.

(1) Hiroshima Remembered. (2) September 30th. 2018. (3) Phone Call.

Hiroshima Remembered.


Houses of wood and paper,
How beautiful.
How fleeting.

           *

September 30th. 2018.


Not your voice,
Not your heartbeat,
Just your breathe upon my face.

           *

The patio rose
I sent you last summer,
Is it still blooming?

            *

Another autumn,
The sheets are cold,
Faded lipstick on my pillow.

            *

I sat meditating.
When you sang in the kitchen
I laughed like a child.

            *
   
    Phone Call.

You call me.
I pick up the receiver.
You are too shy to speak.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 30th. - November 4th. 2018.

Age.

Now that I am more than 70
My life line is almost undone,
But old age should be a time of fecundity,
Not of dearth.

Cracked trunks held firm by steel supports
May yield their richest harvests
The closer they lean to the turf.

Spring blossoms adorning gnarled boughs
Open wide, like a prisoner`s eyes
To filch a glimmer of light,

A glimpse of the morning sun.
But too soon, frail petals descending,
Transformed into rust coloured tears
That dissolve in the cold dank earth,

Where all that begins must vanish,
All that ends be brought to new birth.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
April 27th. 28th. 2014. - October 30th. 31st. 2018.

(1) These We Cannot Know. (2) Rose hips.

My sperm frozen - graded and stored -
Perhaps - in a hundred years or more -
I shall father IVF children

A new family that may from time to time
Imagine my voice explaining to them
A history almost completely forgotten

A history sketched in dusty folders
Intelligible only to specialist scholars
Who can decipher a lost dialect

A parochial language - long out of fashion
Because all that we love has faded to dust
Like carnations pressed in a wedding album

A plush book packed with faded pictures
Even the widow can no longer decipher
Or bring back to life in her imagination.

We are all the children of hope filled dreams
That vanish like frost in the morning light.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 27th. - 28th. 2018.

                     *

              Rose hips.

After the first frost
The rose hips are
Delicious


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th.2018.

Japan.(Revised).

I did not know Mount Fuji was so large.
The artist has certainly come up with a powerful image,
Part real - part picture postcard.
Sailing boats - four or five deft pen strokes -
Float in a pale blue bay.
A purple scarf of cloud surrounds the mountain top.
Sometimes I press my ears close to the paper,
But as yet I`ve never heard the temple bells.

This dream of Edo was painted years before
American gunships appeared one misty morning
To blackmail the Shogunate into modern times.
This is the dream not shown in the faded images
Arranged, with awkward skill, not careful art,
By a young marine back in the eighteen eighties,
During a courtesy visit by the British Navy.
He prefered the box and lens to crafted woodcuts,
The truth was best preserved in black and white.

The glass plates have long ago been broken.
The photos in my great grandfathers album
Show an old world splintering at the edges,
Falling apart under the weight of progress.
No voices are extant, only these silent pictures
Of scenes so still they could have been invented
But remain authentic to the clash of cultures. -

The sun has set over distant Fuji.
A strip of Prussian Blue depicts the sky.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 4th. - 6th. 2017. - October 23rd. - 24th. - December 3rd. 2018.
October 27th. - 28th. 2019.