Patrick Meadows studied English literature and music at Florida State University. He has published science fiction in Analog, Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, and crime stories in Ellery Queen and Mike Shayne as well as poetry in Grub Street and the New Letters literary quarterly.
He has been living in Europe for a long time, and is currently gathering thoughts and notes of travels and events over these years.
He often visits Florida, and is researching a novel concerning the building of canals and railroads in Florida at the end of the 19th century, and the founding by Russians of St. Petersburg. His hero is the infamous Dr. Weightnovel, who died of poison in a Tampa prison.
In a parallel life, he also publishesplaying editions of the musical works of neglected composers, most recently the Anglo-African Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not Taylor-Coleridge, to be clear) and Philadelphian William Wallace Gilchrist.
it’s christmas day.
the wind is up a bit,
clouds are preparing a total invasion – it’s been blue skies for weeks.
long live merrie, and happie kubrick
already the days are a few seconds longer than last week;
that always encourages me to get my wind up,
to take a new chomp at the biscuit of significant living.
like a prestidigitator, the mind pops out of the hat
the world as we have known it, large as life,
sitting in the sun on the St Marks square,
scarf flapping in the breeze, smiling or bite your beard.
you in your kitchen in freeport making simple soup
then, whoops
a morning in the blue room in salisbury on the way to tampa,
light playing in branches outside the window,
f with a cup of coffee looking askance at the slightly uneven keyboard of
the piano, and whoosh
my brother in dark glasses in the airport bar, plotting murder,
mari leaning against marble fluted columns at the temple of aphrodite
somewhere in turkey,
her white skirt blowing (does that photo still exist, you wonder),
but this vision is run over by a red mercury convertible on a dusty road,
or left in a minimized window
when fred clutches his right(?) hand under his armpit
as the scorpion swelling begins
and we all jump
into her car and puncture in our haste the oil pan,
and so on and on,
a veritable pride of kodaks in this and that apartment or field or why not,
the smell of a street in athens, where the roasting meat makes memory
salivate for more?
the wind howling in kushadasi…
marvel at the gigabytes we have in common memory…
and yet we are all puzzles to one another,
most of the pieces scattered in the many years of silence and no contact
soon our satellite will leave the influence of the sun – think of it!
it seems whatever we find, we have space for it under our skulls
where did i see this: like a sponge too drenched, the mind when saturated
with grief spills and thus we created tears
also: when soaked with such splendid shared time, we overflow into smiles
and lungs swollen with exhilaration as if we could breathe life into each
other and the universe itself, merely by saying robert, fred, italy, greece,
doug, leftittown (to prequote robbie), tree, rose, red clay, green fields,
mother earth
as 9-year-old yoji in soller said if god is everywhere you and i are god
Poetry in this post: © Patrick Meadows
Published with the permission of Patrick Meadows