JOHN SKEEN & RICHARD GARRIGUS - POEMS & PHOTOS

John Skeen is a composer, painter and poet living in Portland, ME. He began setting his own paintings to his own original music, writing the music manuscript on the painting itself.
He met Richard Garrigus, a bird photographer and artist, a few years ago, and started writing poems to Richard's photos. John puts Richard’s photo and his own poetic text on the same page, as one unit, thus setting up a kind of conversation between the two forms.

​Here, Like Cracked Mirrors,

      my disguises fall away
      in pieces.
      The marsh glows
      with its own light,
      and every hungry bird,
      vigorous green plant,
      and rotting log,
      reveals itself
      in what’s happening,
      bare
      and vulnerable.
      I didn’t know the world
      could be so intimate.
      I didn’t know I could.   
 
 
 
                                                           Photo by Richard Garrigus. Text by John Skeen.

                          The Long View

                                                                          As miraculous as flying is,
                                                                          even birds need
                                                                          their feathers to grow out first,
                                                                          before they can learn to fly.
                                                                          Could we imagine ourselves
                                                                          so in agreement with the world,
                                                                          that we actually become
                                                                          what the world imagines of us?
                                                                          And once fledged,
                                                                          who could we be then?
 
                                                              Photo by Richard Garrigus. Text by John Skeen.

​                Seeing Is Believing                                                         

 Suddenly face to face,
 we’re definitely seeing each other.
 What's not to believe?
 But the facts of the world come from a dream:
 that there will be life in the spaces,
 that water and trees and birds will appear,
 that Icarus will survive the solar fire
 and leave his footprints on the moon.
 Believing is seeing already,
 or we are blind indeed.
 
 
  
  
                   Photo by Richard Garrigus. Text by John Skeen.

                              From the First Light of the World,

                                                                  they pass shyly across
                                                                  the ebb and flood of gray tides.
                                                                  In their holy presence,
                                                                  I remember
                                                                  to breathe with them as they breathe,
                                                                  and move in the grace
                                                                  of their movement through a lowering mist,
                                                                  the whole earth weeping,
                                                                  and then they’re gone.
 
 
 
                                                                   Photo by Richard Garrigus. Text by John Skeen.

​And He Keeps Watch,

and when night
 comes, he flies ahead
 like spirit-light,
 and he sees clearly
 in the dark,
 which I cannot,
 and I follow.
 
 
 
 
             Photo by Richard Garrigus. Text by John Skeen.