new strings
in the Bamboo Room
jamming with Joyce
Trieste, 1915. Photograph by Ottacaro Weiss, a friend who was "scandalized" by Joyce's guitar playing. The guitar is now on display at the James Joyce Museum in Martello Tower.
redwood haiku
among ferns
in a redwood grove
finger pickin' guitar
| http://tinyurl.com/czbgybk |
A Message From Melpomene / photo by peach
sing me back home...
these hands remember pickin'
this land is your land
A Guitar Is Like Midnight
No two guitars are alike.
In fact, no two guitarists are alike.
And, if you ever get a chance to listen,
listen to different people play
the same guitar,
one after another,
you'll find out…
a guitar is more like midnight
than a monkey wrench.
A wrench is a tool designed
to do one thing, well.
Don’t know if there’s a god or not,
or if a part of me will live on after I’m gone.
But,
I’ll tell you this,
the guitar has a soul.
Maybe it’s how they’re made,
wood and steel,
cut, bent and molded, inlaid
sanded and polished and rubbed and coated
with mysterious quicksilver vapors
and liquid silks, rubbed and polished.
Strung
and tuned and played and played
and tuned and restrung
and tuned
and tuned
and played.
Held close and caressed…
sometimes feather strummed.
Other times picked and beaten blue
with every color
of joy
hard luck
childhood laughs
and case after case
of one-true-love memories.
Or lonely like a guitar in a case
under the bed unopened,
unplayed and brittle.
One day you open that case and find
Autumn inside.
Pick it up and play.
Where is Spring?
I don’t remember
Summer leaving.
What kind of leaves are these?
Now every song you pick
is like a trail of frets on a rosewood neck
through an October forest
of spruce
of ovangkol koa
of hearts of maple.
now my heart remembers what my hands forget
music echoes where old songs collect
find this guitar another home
for me to leave this poem
- Peach
"Harlequin With Guitar" 1919 Juan Gris
front porch
sunlight and shadows
on the old guitar
driving west into Arizona...
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