Duggan & Salmons – May 2019

Brian Salmons and Teresa Duggan traded art and words. Teresa shared this image, titled “Concerned Gargoyle,” with Brian:

In response, Brian wrote this poem:

Green Man

…on February 12, a number of members saw the owl perched on the antenna of a house adjoining Latrobe Park on Locust Point, about five blocks away from Fort McHenry. This was the last recorded sighting of the Snowy Owl in the area.
—D. Girard Jewell, in the March 1975 issue of Maryland Birdlife

You’re not actually green, but once,
long ago, you were newly carved.
An edgy chimera with a beard that
flowed with the times, disarmed

the unbeliever—the stone-preacher.
A grotesque warning of the great tax
foretold. Then they built a park.
And then a playground. Perhaps

you blinked. Green Man, gasping
in waves of change, your grievance calls
slighter than the sea drips from a whelk.
We fill the same world. Tell the demons

I love to climb on the monkey bars.
Tell them to sheath their thumbscrews
and spill down the spiral slide. Christ
is a drum sounding paths to truth.

I hear the kebero and choose green
to mean growth. Come winter, my religion
will lift your limestone eyes to see
how the snowy owl caught a pigeon.

* * * * *

Brian shared this poem with Teresa:

Accommodation Reflex 

The rain constellating on the window,
a thin ellipse traced by the blinds pushed
by air susurrating from the drop ceiling,
the laughter cracking that air,
pulls out a chair. Meaning sits.
My accommodation arcs
 as reflexively
  as a blink but
   the
   rain
   falls
  cold to the touch,
 unbent in
 my
mounting sky.
I do not requite its indifference,
or the matterless space cooling my reach.
I offer my remaining esteem and thin to impossible scope.
I map the patternless
to the Pleiades and Orion to make
meaning stand beyond
this Karman line.

In response, Teresa made this image, titled “Karman Line Constellations”: