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.
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