by Jack Ramey | Jan 23, 2018 | Jack Ramey, John Keats, Poetry
VII Lay me down in cool salt water. Lay me down like Noah’s daughter. Lay me down and tell me you miss me. Lay me down when I’m dead, and kiss me. In the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome Close by the pyramid of Cestius The bones of John Keats lay down in cool Earth. His words were not writ on water As it says on his stone, his last request. Green leaves of ground-cover fill the grave :– This now resurgent life of his remains. But his Real remains are writ upon the winds of eternity Sung over and over lo these last two hundred years And will be as long as English poetry is remembered. A small gray cat circles my calves and lays Him down by Keats’ grave. These cats, some say, Are the ghosts of those buried here, and they Lay upon the stones and plots as if protecting them From daemons who would steal their souls or Their legacies. This gray stays. Is protective. Abides like all-abiding Death. Makes his bed now Upon the tripod’s canvas case as I recite for camera And for “the darkling” the great Ode to a Nightingale And caress with my finger tips the green grass Of Keats’ hair as my tears water the soil of his long- Gone longing for death and the bliss of final solitude. ...
by Jack Ramey | Jan 7, 2018 | Jack Ramey, Poetry
Vincenzo Viviani and Giovanni Battista de Nelli strove to save Galileo’s legacy : Viviani keeping all of his master’s papers in a huge closet along one wall of his house in Florence rewriting many letters excising references to Copernicus and blasphemous heliocentricity. When he died his nephew inherited the house and kept the papers, but when he died, his nephew dumped them all into a bin to make room for his linen bedclothes and sold them off in bundles to merchants for wrapping paper: gravitational theory to take home sugar, parabolic arcs of projectiles for some pecorino. In 1750 Nelli bought some mortadella from a local butcher for a picnic, and when he unwrapped it, he found a paper in Galileo’s handwriting which he recognized on the spot. He rushed back to the shop, bought up the entire lot, and spent the remaining years of his life trying to put them all back together again. Featured Art: Lire 2000 Galileo Galilei, by OneArmedMan via Wikimedia...
by Jack Ramey | Oct 28, 2017 | Jack Ramey, Poetry
The caper always goes wrong. Some dope makes a stupid move Like shooting the cashier or a copper Or someone gets the shakes And talks too much or Someone doesn’t move at all and staring Into the abyss he inadvertently Screws the pooch Or someone moves too soon and there’s no Getaway car parked by the curb Or maybe the dumb mutt follows The car and the pooch screws you. The caper always goes wrong And someone’s got to pay the piper Because that someone’s already Called the tune and the tune Has lost its melody. Doomed And rotten you go through the motions Knowing too well the motions all Lead down into an empty well And no wish is going to get you through. Featured Photograph: Bogart and Ida Lupino in ‘High Sierra’ directed by Raoul Walsh, 1941 Related Article: The Film Noir File: Bogie is at the top in ‘High Sierra’ by Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington, filmnoirblonde.com “In 1941, the same year he played Sam Spade, private eye, one of the greatest of all movie detectives, in John Huston’s classic film noir “The Maltese Falcon,” Humphrey Bogart also played one of the greatest of all movie gangsters, Roy Earle, in Raoul Walsh‘s classic noir, “High Sierra.” If Spade was one of the meanest, most realistic and most unsympathetic of all movie detectives (up until then), Earle was one of the roughest, least clichéd but most surprisingly sympathetic gangsters. He’s a hard guy with a soft streak, whose sentimentality (especially toward women and little dogs), may trip him up in the...
by Jack Ramey | Jul 1, 2017 | Art, Jack Ramey, plato, Poetry
The skin that hangs from this skeleton is cloud stuff: tree limbs on a hilltop seen from a moving vehicle – ineluctable like foxfire in nightwind, vanishing within seconds after sight. The tegument between these bones feels right; tightened to keep me strung high and low (cap a pe) from waist to crown to toe and then below all things connective like my lord’s puppet all unstrung. Femurs found in a dig in Egypt; metatarsals un- covered beneath centuries of dust in Mesopotamia and parts of a skull in a helmet in a river in England: all these things were once living and breathing: creation’s transitive explosion of love and here I still am in the middle of it all alive and wondering how it all will end. The thigh bone connected to the hip bone, the hip bone connected to the love bone now hear the word of the Lord. Or is it Darwin? Why must we choose as if from a menu of entrees in the bistro of history? Garden of Eden or Olduvai Gorge? Cain and Abel or Australopithecus africanus? Noah or Homo Erectus? Revelation or walking fish? Which? Or both, or none? Can anyone judge or even begin to care? Too many questions without enough answers. This is the way it always must be. I can feel it in my bones: all two hundred and six of them rattling around in a cage of flesh – bone house, brain house, sea road of muscle and fat waving us on into infinity’s mystery. from Eavesdropping in Plato’s Café Also published at Indiana Humanities...
by Jack Ramey | Mar 21, 2017 | Jack Ramey, Poetry, Uncategorized
After winter’s ragged grin, spring comes greening in with leaf-curling smiles of hope for new beginnings: delirious-wild-flowerings in the serious month of May and, in spite of Eliot’s cruelest month, crocus and Iris and lilac and clematis, jonquils and tulips all rise up from their sleep in the perfumed poetry of April fading then back into oblivion never to be retrieved again until next year, when the cycle begins again with redbud trees and nomophobia blooming against the heart again. Honeysuckle vines and bridal wreath streaking through the palms up through the arms to the heart and lungs and brainstem of this organism which is a small part of the vast organism of air and water and leaf and cloud and dirt and stars we sometimes call “this vast creation,” for lack of better words or more elegant turns of phrase. The earth is all before me as Wordsworth said long ago. So I cannot miss my way, even if my only guide is a pale wandering cloud. Featured Photograph: Purple Clematis by Nancy...
by Jack Ramey | Mar 1, 2017 | Jack Ramey, Poetry
March, that classical month, sits upon her pillars supported by the plinth of dying winter and yearning towards the moony start of spring. The first of the month that classical month where the fish still swims towards the ram and the longest day of the year awaits the beginning where Kora will rise from the ground with flowered crown to greet her mother and bring joy to earth’s caught creatures. Ah March, you classical month you stop in the rush of time you cusp, you reminder that all things flow and follow the still beauty of constancy and renewal the logic of the turning year the priceless tale told over and over with the hope of each returning spring. . Featured Art: Cellarius ptolemaic system, by Loon, J. van (Johannes), ca. 1611–1686. National Library of Australia [Public domain], via Wikimedia...
