Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

(Performance notes: I performed some music to entertain the residents of The Aegis, a high-end, luxury rest home, in 1999 with my friend, the violinist Ches Willis, a piano player and other musicians.

The acoustics in their living room surpassed those of any hall or room I have played in. The relatives of the residents arrived from the airport for their visits driven by a chauffeured Rolls Royce. Urns of ashes ( cremated bones) were installed in a special bronze wall in the rose garden on the property.




The Aegis


is a fancy nursing home where
the walls are glass
and the columns are twittered with
rose plaster and goldfinches.
Every room has a window and is a real winner.
Winches, belt-thin, hoist
the ruined flanks to dinner.
A background of Haydn,
a foreground of porcelain bridges and
scooting replaced hips.
This is the finest chandelier light
glancing from Waterford goblets.
What’s in the basement?
More clean.
The bones are in the garden.


9/05







definition of "aegis" :
(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/aegis)

Aegis Combat System
Description: The Aegis system was designed as a total weapon system, from detection to kill. The heart of the system is an advanced, automatic detect and track, multi-function phased-array radar, the AN/SPY-1. This high powered (four megawatt) radar is able to perform search, track and missile guidance functions simultaneously with a track capacity of over 100 targets. The first Engineering Development Model (EDM-1) was installed in the test ship, USS Norton Sound (AVM 1) in 1973.

I am a sick puppy cause that is the first thought that crossed my mind.

Then I thought of Athena

aegis | a shield; Zeus had a goat-skin aegis, while Athena adorned the aegis with the head of Medusa

As you are well aware of I am brain impaired with poetry. I am so grateful that I can still read. I can’t “hear” this poem, but I can “see” it. Thank for the beauty of those images.

Now go sh*t in your hat.. Sorry kind professor I am just in bitchy mood lately, maybe a late onset of male menopause. I figured I should have been done with that years ago.

That image of clean bones brings to mind a pretty little female skull, long polished clean by the worms. The Sylvia Plath effect. Why is poetry such a blood sport for women? Just wondering. Not really asking.

thanks

"clean as licked bones" is how Rilke puts it, Still.

We just hear too much of Anne Sexton, Sylvia, and Virginia ( Woolf).

You also have, in this country, wonderful females like Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Bishop, world class drunks and world class poets, who made it to old age and kept writing ( and drinking).

AND the magnificent Marianne Moore ( not a drinker), and her boyfriends, the Brooklyn Dodgers:


(paste)


http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit11/authors-7.html


Check the end of paragraph one on this web page . . .



--Z

"columns are twittered"...

"scooting replaced hips"...


very nice. I can see this place clearly...
(chuckle inducing)

( onstage: Z ( left) and Ches (right) performing at The Aegis, 1999.)

( local newspaper photo)








I suppose this link ought to be placed on Kat's "the right time to die" thread, but here it is, anyway:

http://www.aegisal.com/

Make sure to wait a few seconds while the "cover page" dissolves to the "home page."