Introductory Observation :
my 4 web sites (in alphabetical order) are all
copyright reserved as per parties listed below.
All the images therein are Art copyright CT.
However, good photographs may be taken.
Portfolio coding letters : W, X, X, and Y.
Notionally the Jpeg files making up the sites
could be run end to end in slideshow format.
June 4th 2024 note by Christopher Truman
SCULPTURE PAGES
photo-poetry exploration
in slow film format+ line art
and hyper text+ meta text
Agnus Dei Qui
(unus poema)
Walled sundial time is slower
than heart-beat clock time -
unum apricus post meridiem
sed mihi tristis tristis tristis!
Tempus fugit. Carpe alienus
diem a tune in rapt sunlight
Agnus Dei qui tollis...calor
heard from the nunnery to zen
for tristis Soror Jane
==================
SUNDIAL COUPLETS
after Alexander Pope
ex. summer school 2019
The Tabula
By a sunlit Venus, rasa
a tablet flaunts a tabula
Dune
A swallow flew though a zero
and on, to the nadir of none
For Socrates
You said: the life unexamined
is not worth living, to a death
The Crossing (after Koko)
Cold moon, the last river ferry
smoky, bats wheeling: a cry
Sundial
Time is etched on a sundial
to a form of concentration
Late Summer
Sun on the marsh valerian
I became a lotus flower
Graeco-Roman
The spirit of Palladio
was Graeco, not concrete Roman
La Louvesc
A Jesuit Seminary
and sparrows flaunting in rafter
Prime Mover
Who first entered sundial zen?
The one Ornamental Hermit
Dry Mezzogiorno
Sunlit annihilation
with blue blaze all intensity
Angled Shade
We need a bench in a corner
to watch time on a sundial
Programming (after A. Pope)
Manners, deportment and proper
elocution need to be taught
Secular Society (for H. Bosch)
No grace, before eating: the pride
in gluttony before a fall
Subliminal (after Simone Weil)
Beauty in creation, sublime
as our God in a lit beauty
Dystopian Fall (after Spengler)
The advance of the zombie, fish-
eyed, lacking reason and language
Lunar Eclipse (for Robert Lowell)
I drank a full moon with vodka
last night, shining dim golden-white
Lacking Summer
rather, she said, after pale days
but, then, whatever did she mean?
Benediction Exposition
The monstrance, and ciborium
can flare the soul with a wafer
Eternal War with AI
Where, the spirit-lock in AI?
the Sanctus? the Trinitatis?
Internet Mass Projection
We can chant the Agnus Dei
and 'wine is spiritual drink'
For Alexander Pope
There is a fluidity quick
in Pope, taking us by surprise
Parody of Pope (after Juvenal)
The white, elegant colonnade
is no place to eat marmalade
Stuccoed Portico (after Browning)
Have we, dear sir, been here before?
and the pose of that femme fatale?
After Ode Horace
The golden-glow evening sunlight
on leaf, and girl, will not last
Probatum Est
Lettuce and cowslip wine, for rest
and a quieting of passion
The Birth of Venus
Ode Horace kept a scallop shell
for their twirl to Primavera
Cadence of The Dawn
In the inner ear, a fine tune
to a fresh dawn wind can violin
On the Promontory
Out at sea, a marine murmur
of dry celestial music
Chapel In The Pines
Moonlit, to the hum of the wind
through an open door, descanting
By The Tumbled Graves
Is the early dawn roseate
rose-pink, a sky flush with longing?
The Twickenham Villa
Alexander, keen on marble
saw Palladian in sylvan
His Augustan Grotto
An underground spring seen spurting
he walled a grotto, wanted nymphs
Summer Pastoral
Come, lovely Nymph, Alexander
wrote, near in Elysium delight
The Harmless Grove
Though no viper hid, Alexa
felt the Serpent Love in his breast
The Crystal Tide
Is the River Thames a mirror?
gliding glassy past a Villa
Invitation Declined (for C)
I did once propose sipping Earl
Grey Tea, in a green rotunda
To The Bordello
Pope found embarking by water
easier for reaching Soho
Inundation 1 (after Swinburne)
The rain is thinning, and petals
from a frail rose lie around
Inundation 2 (after Eliot)
The rain now thinning, and petals
off a frail rose lie around
Summer Night
The cypress mourns in the palace
walk, Tennyson, and does not wave
Preserve of Citrus Fruit
Latin: melimelum, from Greek
melimelon: honey apple
Landing Latin
Marine, marinus; mariner,
nauta; conubialis, love
Ex. Roman Fragments (hic)
After a young woman singing
in ecstasy for an hour
Loeb Lingua Franca
In Berlin, Germany, Ovid
read in English for the Latin
Cutting Ivy For Lucy
The tendrils did long perturb her
clinging over her panel fence
Epistle for Lucy (after Pope)
Lucy, the high ivy tendrils
have been removed, and you are free
Rose Garden (after Pound)
The Elizabethan roses
have gone a deep rich pink: blazon
Arkadia, Poland (near Nieborow)
English landscape park, with a lake,
a Roman Aqueduct, Temple
Duino Castle 1947
My parents given a master
bedroom. Rilke walked a rampart
'Le silence eternel de ces espaces'
L' abime est moi threatened Pascal
French master of the glacial
Baudelaire (for T.S. Eliot)
Feared the bat-wing of insanity
flapping around a room, cloud-free
Edited From Swinburne
He, of the hounds of spring, running
for the Thracian ships: vigil
Ex. Swinburne 2
A hoof-ed heal of a satyr
and Pan by noon, Bacchus by night
The Nikita Chute (for Nikita)
A hole in the floor, down you go
and which way for Sara Paco
Chatham PA (lent for the night)
I like women young in nipple-
firming muslin, and faint jean-cloth
The Davos Conspiracy
Paving the way for the ski-rich,
the uber over the unter
The Sicilian Muses (Hybla)
Theocritus, the first writer
of pastoral Sicilian
On Mount Hybla (for Virgil)
Honey and thyme on the mountain
gave succour to the wry shepherd
Piled High
Lovely, the cumuli, as if
on The Cornish Riviera
Ithaca
Pale, the Nereids in a cavern
at their altars, river sea-foam
For 'fantastisko skonio' Rita
You fry roundels of cut garlic
chopped carrot lying alongside
Minority Report
Beneath glass, someone is clipping
a rare plant, one of the few left
New Armageddon
Wild boar, entering old Rome
bite, terrifying the canine
'Le Banquet Celeste' (Messiaen)
On an abstract plane, to the left
and to the right, a broadening
Dry The Bones
A wind in the sail, yet low
on calcium, weevils nibble
Bach Cantatas
They, the sound of heaven singing
and an ecstasy in Leipzig
Political Prisoner
Near to death, with scarlet fever
in both hands, he feared a cracking
By The Northern Ramparts
I, suddenly in Sicily
again, loved the Parish Baroque
In The Lady Side-Chapel
Christ the open-armed said to me:
treasure your villa and garden
Facing North Africa
The sea-front bleak at Marsala
and Trapani, a sun blazing
Bright Gela Morning
In the main square, every man
young at a game of outdoor chess
'As Some Coy Nymph'
Wild corn, in Windsor Forest
is to be found, in the Sylvan
At The Graveside
After the fallen leafy lanes
a robin, her smile, bouquets
Automne
Il y a un peu de soleil
dans le jardin, et les nuages
Sur Le Terre Cuite Terrasse
J'ai eu le plaisir de sieger
avec les chats ce beau matin
Sur le Pont d'Avignon
Fiona a chante cette chanson;
j'ecoute de sa mort sous le pont
Vents Froid
C'est froid ce jour maintenant
et le temps passe lentement
Albion Mort
Tout etre fou en Angleterre
avec pas de culture ou sens
1916: Pour Verdun
Les Rosbifs etaient tres sanglant
dans le grand boueux de La Somme
Nostalgie De La Boue
Pourquoi, pour le poete maudit?
apres les gros rats dans la rue
Bats Mentale
Les chauvre-souris en Baudelaire
battre, attaquant son sante
Surviving Surveillance
Never talk, text or e-mail
and just go for a country walk
The Sortie
You leave the mobile telephone
back at the house, head for thick trees
Encrypting Self
The true you must remain hidden
and think of old East Germany
Liberation De Midi
Le soleil libre de l'arbre
est dans le milieu de l'azur
Angst
Gott! Mein Gott! ist da en Heimat
in die Wald und Thüringen?
Wanderte Ritte
Doenhoff verboten Friedrichstein
trecked zu Hamburg von Ostpreussen
November 11th 2019 or, 11 11
nota bene:
'On every side,/spaces, the bat-wing
of insanity' from Le Gouffre (The Abyss)
by Baudelaire from 'Imitations' (1971)
by Robert Lowell. There are 14 of them
and they are excellent.
============================
all composed by Christopher Truman who has
the persona of a Lord Rokeby on Facebook
and/or The Ornamental Hermit (c. the 18th c.)
for www.sundialzen.com and eventual storage
on Jpeg image files for future generations
=======================
SUNDIAL TEXT
EVOCATIONS
Vinegar Vignette
No elbows on the table
or sloping arms, bronzed marching
Combatant
White-plated rhodium
she loved the odium
living in The Fourth Reich.
I said, no: The Fifth Reich
and the half-track as large
by the flagged podium
to a smart pounding band
The Combed Spun Plumage
will be as fine as that of a pheasant
sunning on the Dome of The Trinity.
Below, the ashen peasant kneeling
Lyric
Her golden hair
a blonde breeze
(sunlit temple)
her lips, a peach
a rivulet
in Sicily:
blood orange
tongue sinewy
lemon olives
At Selinunte
remembering the carnage
of the Punic Wars, grappling
and red dismembering
to the fate of Carthage, I saw
the march of the elephants
and the death of monuments
The Blooded Sheet
Cherry picking, a fruit too far
in the grove of the marauder
the broad balcony of his villa
above the dusty village square
Inauguration Day 2060
Horseman, interred in the statue!
and carbonised. The Republic
summons to lit screens green
underground (written on the hoof)
on an epic inauguration day
for a much later President Ike.
Snow is falling like a fatal ash
and the hunger games are over
in too many a wired province.
The disfigured, barbed to caves,
prefiguring a genetic late DNA
disorder are sent to quarantine
by those still able to ration night
from day and find love in the stars.
Dark the 'Cyclonic zero of the Word'
The Quadriga
For the bridles charging ost
sky widening above the chariot
to an epic proportion
blitzed blue in a Preussen mania
despite the cornflower
Deep South Fan
Bourbon in the back porch
afloat on jagged rocks
beats camomile on the lawn
and it is a long way
whistling, to New Orleans
The soldiers had to march
to a drumming, drumming
Umbra, Carpe Diem
The golden evening sunlight
failing on tatty dry leaves
and scaly tree-trunk, given a glow
could be from an Ode by Horace
lamenting a passing, the dawn
like golden-stone maybe the last
Ut Pictura Poesis
'As with the painter's work,
so with the poet's' wrote Horace
and 'Concordia discors'
Atque inter silvas Academi
quaerere verum. Vita summam
brevis. O magna Carthago!
In Schlesien or, Silesia
A curvy figurine, her pert breasts
scorched in the spring of rapine
and pillage, sashays blackened
by a mown carriage drive verge
and now, a summer grandeur lawn
open with two banded deck chairs
ready as for a county tea in England
opens you into a novel by V. Woolf
yet, here you are far away in Silesia
and in a late afternoon laurel shade
they linger and bark, like ravenous
stray dogs and there can be amnesia
in a sunlit Poland and East Germany.
Where is lithe cartwheeling Sashen?
Was she born in Austria-Hungary?
A terrible beauty, and flaking roses
and you wonder: was there croquet
ever, on the lawn, to Earl Grey tea?
Ypres Wipers Ypres Jeepers Creepers
Dulce decorum...The futility of war?
With all Flanders taken, the enemy
Siege Guns could be firing on Kent,
our merchant shipping in the Channel.
The Krupp 'Lange Max' gun can fire
an HE shell up to thirty-five miles,
and thus threaten The Port of London
At The Menin Gate
They trumpet for eternity
at eight every evening
the coffered vault echoing
to the summit of heaven,
with every angel listening
Again At Duino Castle Trieste
At the long war's end, my father
became aide-de-camp to General
Airey at our Duino Castle
where Rilke had walked the parapet
composing a wrought Elegy
and they both studied Tito
the Marshal threatening Stalin
with Yugoslavia. Earlier,
in British Military Intelligence,
examining a ruined villa
my father found an Italian girl
in hiding in the basement.
They embarked on a love affair
and she even came out to Malaya
My Father, Dick
Both of his parents dead, their mansion
'Thornthwaite' in Shanghai long gone
to hoodlums playing billiards
in his father Regie's favourite room
when not entertaining in the dining
room, on an elaborate scale
for The International Settlement
saw his adored 'spy' sister Nancy
found dead one morning by her cook
in World War Two, after playing tennis
the day before near to Fleet Lido
with an Officer or three in Hampshire
at her Brook Cottage, her cause of death
uncertain, and then subject to inquiry;
my sad father, rather alone, had but
his one sister Kit, working at Blenheim
in league with Bletchley Park, filing
as one from a 'reliable' background
and his brother Hugh could not be found
My Shanghai Trust 'Aunt Kit'
who loved her dog 'Buster' so
later went living in partitioning
India, until forced back home
to her dividends in Hampshire
with Digby, who later left her
for one Sharon of Basildon
then a boat pram in the hall;
Digby worked in advertising
alcoholic with a head wound
though rejected by every Officer
in his old Anglo-Indian Army
Cavalry Regiment, and Sharon
was his sexy secretary living low
in cute Basildon, Essex; Kit
cried for a month at Brookside
after his unwelcome departure
but in bed, she had never tried.
My father and Kit went to see her
What Of Electric Blue
Basildon Bond writing paper?
What of an oral by Sharon,
Catullus, and was Kit with Lesbia?
and terrified of childbirth, yes
The Shuttleworths India 1947
Major Digby Shuttleworth MC
King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry
owned a bungalow in Deolali.
Did they, once back home, go doolally?
and spent every Saturday beagling.
Their ship left India from Bombay
Divorced Fiddlers Green
The Guardian Royal Exchange
would keep Kit in clover
many lonely years later,
estranged far from Shanghai
lamenting the loss of Nancy
Joan Barbed
She detested, outright
the lounge lizard, the pansy
and no doubt thought
cottaging to be a flogging
matter, so to speak
and laughed at 'the hippy'.
She offered me a one-way
ticket to New Zealand
The 100 Club London
With my Godmother Katherine Studd
Kit's preferred Night Club, from '42
was The Feldman Jazz Club, just opened
in a deep basement in Oxford Street.
Their promotional jingle ran thus:
Forget the Doodle bug-
Come and Jitterbug-
At the Feldman Club
soon a haunt of the American
GI, and the affluent Officer.
She tried not to get the last train back.
The Club did not go the way
of the smarter Café de Paris
in Coventry Street, bombed in March 1941
Papyrus Scroll Delivery
The read poem is horizontal
but deep text online is vertical
though either at a slight angle.
Catullus can be a wall of Latin:
for Horace, the chariot road
for delivery to the Roman villa
President Macron
wants to reinvent a Franconia
incorporating Lotharingia
in a remembering of Verdun
as reparation from Preussen
with one Treasury, in Frankfurt
The Jealous Reich
Of Toronto to New Delhi
and Hong Kong, which is why Berlin
Question For Oxford Union Debate
Should the practice of cottaging,
vile in the public convenience,
be made a criminal offence, again?
one might add. Oscar Wilde, a pink
threat to our vital Empire, which
saved Europe from Nazi Germany
deserved to be punished. The sub-text.
In this respect, I stand with V. Putin
rather than the former PM, Cameron
A Second Coming (In 587)
A salmon-pink dawn, and I think
of St. Augustine approaching Kent
to land on the Isle of Thanet
and proceed to Canterbury, a mission
initiated by Pope Gregory.
The Roman liturgy was in Latin
Variants For Alison
Ides (Girl)
Eall-wealdend, eall-gylden
se ides of se grain ond sie grene
From Low German or Low Saxon
out of Old Saxon near Hamburg
though the Weald is part-Sussex
and the girl Saschen has flaxen
hair, and, she, named after Saxony
butter-yellow and sunlit golden...
I am writing in Middlesex
Brim-fugel (Seagull)
Brim-fugel, brim-cald in brim-bliss
haefst bitre breost-cearo, ceald
Variants for Alison 2
Haerfest Rip Sang
Somor sunne for sunn-beam ond sun-
bearo, to rip ond rip-tima
Medo-heall Medo (Mead)
Se wudu-fugel in se weald
haefst song for se ceorl drincan
Seaxe Hus
G-timbrian mid bolttimber
for aeppeltun, blostm, bloma
Bleo Heofon
A dun-land se lamb, wudu-rose
in sceo und heafonbeacon
Albion Catastrophe 2020+
The lying political class brain dead
for a drear people largely unread
rarely wanting to get out of bed
and the starving many go unfed
a multitude paralysed with dread
to the sound of dark wings overhead
leaving rats to do the unexpected
running riot where most fear to tread
in a land with far too many ill-bred
The Normans
Where are The Normans, to re-order?
and for A Fourth Coming of Rome.
They, who rescued us from the Saxon
and brought us the Romanesque arch
Mansion Report
Admiring the weather with Lady
Bingham, the red-eyed scavengers off
her tennis court, sunny with scudding
cumuli, a clothed statue blowing
a pan pipe or horn, we went indoors
to hear a secret harpsichord keyed
for the few in an ochre-dun room
by bare Bach, a Louis Marchand
Brandenburg Jingle Jangle
Her harpsichord was of a batch
once pleasuring the King of Prussia
in 1769, over time
with a unique plectrum sonority.
He much wanted to conquer Saxony
after Silesia, his Bavaria, for which
Prussia had to win a third war
and defeat the whorl of Vienna
In July 1866
Prussia, armed with a faster loading
rifle, at The Battle of Koniggratz
beat Austria and Saxony
in one day. Forty thousand died
despite the Austrian cavalry.
Prussia won control of Germania
a torch passed from Vienna to Berlin
deciding the fate of Europa. Did
they laugh in the clubs of London?
when not worrying about India
The Radetzky March
To be a honed cavalry officer
mounted, the smart way of life
at The Empire's very frontier;
and the novels of Joseph Roth
Club Talk
There may be another Mutiny
and a further Lucknow. We may
need to order troops for Calcutta
in a tremendous hurry. We need
a submarine telegraph cable route
Bombay-Aden-Suez, for the 1870
British-Indian Cable on to Malta
and then to Gibraltar for Cornwall
beneath the hazardous Bay of Biscay
In July 1870
The Viceroy of India, being at Simla
for the summer, linked by telegraph
with the President of the USA
a message taking but forty minutes.
Lord Mayo engaged with his wife
in Piccadilly London in nine minutes
from the Himalayas in our hot Raj
after a laying of the submarine cable
making it easier to guide Singapore
The Law of St. Dominic's
Albion is still a Province of Rome
(Shakespeare, a closet Catholick)
Mynster Maesse
Se halga gast a se altare,
Anticrist hel-dor. Wundor
Ende
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Christopher Truman and sundial zen
His work has principally be seen as creating Zen narratives, loci or aids for meditation, a metaphysical 'storyboard' even. Finding a zen at Selinunte, Cathay can venn the neo-Platonic. In a group of prints, he mediates certain motifs in Vermeer; with another, creates a parallel parallel world to explore. A virtual infinity is quested.
Christopher Truman started his groups of prints with experimental Image Text arrays. The work now lives much in counterpoint to his poetry, reflective of many journeys
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