Jerry (for JG)

I saw your hair on fire

September 1987 in Philadelphia

At least it looked that way to me.

Long, white and flowing under blinding yellow lights

Headlights

Northbound train

River of air, liquid melody

I’m turning my face toward the sun

Covered in dew at the first light of morning

The circle of days

The circle of sound

Turning

Sunlight turning

The sun wraps around my face today

And burns me close to your heartbeat

I still hear that

I pray to always feel that.

-Kevin Slick

Lingering October

Lingering October

The leaves glow warm yellow

Orange, red and purple.

The brisk morning air

and damp moldy smell of  fallen leaves

disappearing into the earth is sweet

because it mixes with leather and horsehide.

We live in a balanced universe

A perfect world

Because there is baseball in October.

We have a whole year to think about this world

This universe,

To solve the great mysteries

But in October

As autumn firmly plants itself in the backyard

There is still summer

In perfect balance

There is baseball in October.

-Kevin Slick

Meg Asked Me

Meg asked me to help her make a crown out of paper.

Someone said

“Oh, are you a princess?”

“No” she said

“I just like to wear crowns"

-Kevin Slick 

Radio Nights

The world arrived through a two-inch speaker.  A small crack, a doorway opening to a mysterious world outside, somewhere outside, somewhere there were people talking to me.  The whisper voices of static in tempo with the crickets outside my window on a summer night.  This was my bridge, a secret passage to another world at night.  I was no longer in a small town in a small room.  I was riding somewhere on those sounds, crackling, distant and magic.  Somehow the distance made the magic more powerful.  Those sounds were traveling through the air, into space, forever, magic.  And I could hold it all in my hand.

I grew up following magic voices, always from somewhere.  Somewhere else.

Filtered through space, cradled by train whistles, highways humming and night birds calling.  Magic voices pulled down to earth with each one carrying the tantalizing map to somewhere, somewhere beyond here. 

-Kevin Slick

Searching for Me

Searching for me, every time you touch

Me

I feel the search and wonder of your eyes

The heartbeat and  waiting

Assurance

Some kind of ocean

Inside

Tides rising

Sweeping undertow moving

We are drawn out to sea.

-Kevin Slick

This is Silence

This is silence

Waiting for the sign of life

Looking for green air gathering outside my window

This morning

I should not be awakened.

Not, the cool wind that rumbles in the pines

But slides in error over hoods of cars.

Yet, I would be as the tire

Leaning against my neighbor’s garage

Secure, without motion.

-Kevin Slick

Your Body is so New

Your body is so new

Where did you find it?

And how did you find this place?

I can taste your words and hear the sounds

Of time opening the window to the day.

Bold shadows stretch you across the room

Sparrow light and wing movement

Dark flash on grey cloud

Awaken and breathe

Alive on fire

Caress the morning

Air that glides around you as we walking

Touch

Crisp air tightly wrapped ‘round trees

Crisp air still hears you

Seeing sunlight for the first time

Air still bringing rain

And afternoons still remaining locked in time

And to see

To feel air that is

Moist

Revealing.

-Kevin Slick

Awaken and Breathe

Your body is so new,

Where did you find it?

How did you find this place?

I can taste your words and hear your sounds

Opening the window to the day

Bold shadows stretch you across the room

Sparrow light and wing movement

Dark flash and grey cloud that holds you

Awaken and breathe

Alive on fire

Caress the morning

Air that glides around you as we, walking

Touch

Crisp air tightly wrapped ‘round trees

Crisp air still hears you

Seeing sunlight for the first time

Air still bringing rain

And afternoons still remaining in time

To see

Rain

To feel

Air

That is

Moist

Revealing

As your bold shadow

Stretched across the room

And new body

Uncharted territory

Virgin coastline

Where I stand,

A pioneer before exploration.

-Kevin Slick

The Word

When the word

beauty

has been defined completely

charted, catalogued, wasted,

used to describe such mundane fare as sunsets,

mountains and oceans, so that it has become meaningless

still you will confound the cartographers of language

with your soul,

still you will surprise those who expound

on the recognized meanings of words

simply by turning to face them.

the scientists of language will

drop their books, their defenses and expectations

at the glimmer of your eyes

-Kevin Slick

Bicycle

Shadows

Circles

Rolling large

On grey pavement

My own shadow

Stretching beyond

My bicycle

Pulsing

With each

Circle move

Of the pedals

I am riding through orange

Allowing myself to be covered with

Sunlight

Not long for this world

While dust settles on the fields

Where I just was

And always may be

Dust and sunlight settling

Over faint shadows

With their eye

Ever on the ball

And shadows

Circles

Rolling large

Carry something

Like dreaming

Like wishing

Like memory

Somewhere

To where I am

Where I may ever be

Keeping my eye on the ball

Following through

Following the dust and sunlight

In

Circles

Shadows

Rolling on.

                                                - Kevin Slick

A Song for My Mother

My mother sang

My mother sang easy for herself

In the kitchen, in the car, in the garden

My mother sang.

Hymns, Blues, Jazz, Swing, Rock and Roll and Folk

All these my mother sang easy for herself.

“How Great Thou Art”

“Mrs. Robinson”

“Side by Side”

“Goodnight Irene”

this might be her idea of an afternoon concert

it didn’t matter if she knew all the words

one line was all she needed when my mother sang

easy for herself.

in the morning

mid-day

midnight hour my mother sang.

Words and the sounds of words

Rolling, tumbling, falling

Like a Pennsylvania mountain stream.

Words and the sounds of words

My mother sang.

Melodies like leaves on the wind

That whistled down our long valley.

Songs just came to her

When she wasn’t even thinking of singing

In the kitchen, in the car, in the garden

That how it was when My mother sang easy.

My mother sang serious in the church choir

Where she was the director

Who tried to direct me.

There is a proper way to sing she said

And she tried to teach me

The kind of singing

Where one note is right and another one is wrong.

This kind of singing where you are a tenor

And you sing with the tenors in the tenor section

And you not a baritone or bass

And don’t even think about soprano.

That’s what she said.

Songs that started and stopped on schedule.

That’s what she said

My mother when she sang serious.

When My mother sang serious

She laid those songs down end to end

On a narrow groove

A straight line highway to the horizon.

When My mother sang easy on her own

She wove a quilt full of songs

That spread out in all directions.

“What a Friend We Have In Jesus”

“I want to hold your Hand”

“Pennsylvania 6-5000”

and “Rock Island Line”

When My mother, the choir director

Tried to teach me proper singing

She tried to teach me with what she said

With clearly outlined parts

To be learned and reproduced.

When My mother sang easy on her own

She taught me with how she lived

And she covered me with a feeling of sound.

Sounds that covered me

The way the ocean wraps around you

When you dive into an oncoming wave.

When she tried to teach me with what she said

It was only words

And they blew away

Like seeds scattered on Chimney Rock

On the side of the Alleghenies.

---

I learned from how she lived

I learned from the sounds,

The songs that filled our house.

I absorbed those sounds into my skin

And they stayed.

When My mother sang easy on her own

That’s when I learned.

Not from what she said

But from how she lived.

And my life is filled with songs

That come to visit like old friends

Who drop by in the afternoon

And then decide to stay the night.

Songs and sounds and feelings

That return like waves on the ocean.

Waves that whisper

Waves that shout

Like My mother when she sang

When she taught me with her life

Singing easy

Like My mother singing easy

Like My mother singing

My mother singing

Only now

Her voice in mine

Endless like the ocean.

– Kevin Slick © 1999

Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell

She’s walking a different line today

Speaks light a heartbeat

Out on the morning, the light she begins

What could be better than heaven and hell

Together at last?

You see her in the doorway

After that long weekend away

She’s walking a different line today

Speaks like a heartbeat

The edge of her voice

Cutting gentle

And what could be better than heaven and hell

Together at last?

Against the lines she speaks like a heart beating

Out the sound

The movement

The questions

How far the mountains rising?

How far the dark tonight?

-Kevin Slick

Lightning Child

Once there was a lightning child

And he danced across the waves of the sky

And she walked across the valleys of the clouds

Once there was  a lightning child

And he wondered after midnight

Where no one would follow

And she sent her song across the open skies

And she sent her voice across the open skies

Oh lightning child

Lightning child traveling

Walking on the sky

Lightning child born

Speaking with the sky

Lightning child went dreaming one day

To learn the sound of the sky

And she wrote in words of sounds,

Light and colors of the day

Lightning child

Scatter the shadows

Speak with the sunlight

Lightning child

-Kevin Slick

Touch

Touch

Searching for me, every time you touch me

I feel the search and wonder of your eyes

And heartbeat pause and the waiting

Assurance

Some kind of ocean

Inside

Tides rising

Sweeping undertow moving

And we are drawn out to sea

With one touch.

-Kevin Slick

Air Tight Sky

Air tight sky

With sun not seen through clouds

Covering trees

On the higher branches above

The fences around this yard

Autumn, well closer

Yet falling in the sky

Tightly packed air, yellow with leaves

Falling

Through fences

While trees ache with fingers

In iced edges

Fully realized not

Yet understood

Why they break the fences

In a bid for freedom

-Kevin Slick

October 2 Tuesday

October 2 Tuesday

Raining in New Jersey Sunday

Slight afternoon

This too

Walking on or about roads

And sidewalks

Rusted like pavement

Caught in a moment of green against grey

This too

My footsteps sound like rain

On this city

This too

You should grasp this city

She is much more than those living souls

And reckless dreamers

She is something like steel, something like concrete

This too

And buildings that echo

Eternal

This too

And we go on folding our hands together

That way

You know, when people fear

When you hear quiet

And when you dream this too.

-Kevin Slick

Window Song

She walks to the window

In case of decisions

She will remain alone

But,

Out the window

There are cities

Uneven with echoes

Made by themselves

Beyond the window

You will hear cities singing

Cities, concrete enough to stand by themselves

Cities are singing

And we have not been asked to join in

Beyond

-Kevin Slick

Thinking About The Air

Thinking

Thinking about the air around me

Waiting for the air to begin, holding the air between my hands

A moment longer

Under a tree filled with autumn

Branches reach the sky, pushing exhilaration

almost trembling

in this moment

the earth ripples across the horizon

tucked neatly into the ground

who would think to disturb her now

resting, a motion slow

allowing my legs to crease the ground,

accepting my arms into the weave of branches

tender limbs, sparkling shades of weeds and grass

grown tight with age

waiting,

thinking about the air

until new moon calls

-Kevin Slick

September Journal 2001 New York City

September Journal 

By Kevin Slick

© 2001

There are so many pictures frozen in my mind.  A family album that doesn’t have to be opened to be re-lived.  There was that perfect autumn blue sky, just so blue, so blue that it almost hurt to look at, that perfect blue with a jagged grey cloud ripping across the middle of the sky, like a gash in the atmosphere, a hole in the universe.  There was the man covered in dust standing next to me at the 14^th street subway station as we waited to see if any trains could still run over to Brooklyn.  And there in an abandoned lot off Atlantic Avenue, a homemade American flag nailed to a piece of wood in the afternoon sunlight welcoming me home.  But the image that always comes back first is the light coming through the window of my classroom after everyone had left as it gently floated through the window onto the newspaper that was lying on my desk, filled with words that no one would remember.  And I stood there to try to understand that moment when all those words would be re-written and this day would have forever a new meaning.  I stood there trying to understand, but couldn’t.  I could only live in the moment, and so walked outside and headed south toward that ragged tear in the sky.

I bought a newspaper on the way to work this morning.

I thought I would talk with my class, fourth grade at P.S. 116, about the primary election for mayor.  After all there would be people in and out of school all day since it was the polling place for the neighborhood around 33^rd and 3^rd.

But we didn’t talk about the election.

The voters left early, if they came at all.

By three o’ clock in the afternoon I was alone in my room.

Sunlight was coming in the window at an autumn afternoon slant

Dragging long shadows across the front page of the newspaper,

Still lying where I left it on my desk.

No one will ever remember the stories from the front page of today’s paper.

No one will ever think of this day and talk about the election

Or any one of ten other stories that were worthy of the front page of the

New York Times on September 11^th, 2001.

I walked downtown

Smoke arched across the sky

People’s faces; grim, vacant, worried.

We talked to each other like people at a funeral;

“How are you doing?”

“Are you okay?”

The streets, a constant stream of fire trucks, ambulances, police cars.

Police on every corner

Crowds gathering at the hospital a few blocks away.

And the people’s faces, unbelieving

I can’t believe it.

(how many times have I said “ I can’t believe it” when I could have said “that’s surprising” or “ I didn’t expect that”)

Now, I really can’t believe it.

Tell me again,

They’re gone?

Those two buildings are gone?

The two buildings I see from my window every day?

The two buildings I rode past this morning on the train?

Gone?

I saw an old man walk out onto 3^rd Avenue and stop traffic because some people were walking up to a hospital helping several others who appeared to be bleeding or injured in some way.  It was perfectly normal, and all the cars stopped. 

He said that it was what he had to do.  That’s what we were doing there that day – “what we had to do”

When I returned home to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn the man who owned the middle- eastern restaurant on the first floor called me “brother” and offered food.  I joined others from the street and we ate in silence together.

Later I heard someone say “There are no words” 

The next day.

Everyone is in motion today.

On Fulton street the sun is shining and the streets are full of people.

Loud dance music rips out of a store selling stereos.

A man is begging on the corner, shaking a cup full of coins endlessly. 

Now he switches hands and adjusts the volume on his Walkman.  He’s looking all around and no one is looking at him.  He looks around some more and drives his electric wheelchair away.

The other people on the corner just keep talking and ignoring the place where he was.

It seems like this city is too big to slow down, even with the heart torn out, the body is still going through the motions.  If you chose to ignore media and not look across the river you could pretend nothing had happened.

I want to believe that nothing has happened.

This morning I work up and prayed for it to have all been a dream.

The sky is still so blue today

Only that one line of grey

Grey smoke to the south that lays across the sky.

It looks like rain clouds,

Long, low rain clouds

But it’s too sunny for rain.

There’s a cool breeze

Like the best ocean breeze on the last day of summer

It’s such a beautiful day

Such a beautiful day.

Is it nature, or God

Trying to say that life goes on?

Is this a day to help us heal?

Is this a day that covers the terrible with beauty?

This beautiful sky lies across our lives

We are held together under this sky

Held together by each other

By our heartbeats

Our footsteps

Beating out a rhythm together.

I heard a woman say

That the most important thing in the world

Was the smell of her daughter’s hair when she hugged her.

Later,  

I can see the sun as a fuzzy white ball in the grey, cloudy sky.

In Union Square there are huge crowds

Gathering around signs, candles and pictures

Offerings, gifts people have left.

Behind me, a group is singing “America The Beautiful” some of the crowd, however are only singing the first line of the melody, having forgotten the rest I guess. 

The result is an edgy harmony as one group repeats the same line over and over.

People have written poems

And the word “Love” appears over and over again.

I’ve been writing what I see and feel, waiting for words to have some meaning again, but I can’t find the meaning. 

I’m living on faith that the meanings will be revealed sometime, maybe someday. 

But I see that I’m in the midst of a living poem, the voices, the pictures, the streets themselves, the city itself is singing.

Whitman was right, this is America singing, the varied carols I hear with melodies hard to understand and words that tear and strain to rhyme but still singing.  The music is un-planned, improvised, ragged and beautiful.

Why are we all here, right now, at this moment?  How did we get here?

Maybe we’re all here just to be next to other humans

Every sound is muffled, like a church

This seems like a sacred site.

The stained glass windows have been replaced with

Flowers

Paintings

Pictures

All those pictures

Thousands of pictures.

This whole city has become a photo album

A large family photo album.

Walking down the streets, I feel like I’m leafing through memories

Memories shared with strangers.

Weddings,

Back yard picnics

Vacations.

I’m looking for my family here

Looking for faces I recognize

And I realize I know every one of them.

I can’t sing

I want to sing, but I can’t find a song to sing

Not one song

Not one song I can sing

But all songs

I have no song to sing

Unless it’s all songs

I try to speak but I have no voice

Only all voices

I’m calling on God

But I think God will only answer

To all his names

To all her names

Spoken as one.

One sky

One blue, heavenly sky

Covers us like a prayer shawl.

I want to wrap myself in the sky.

I wrap myself in these pictures

These words

The quilt of life

Of lives sewn together on the streets by broken hearts seeking peace.

I stand with others, with everyone

In search of release.

My feelings pour out on the names

On the faces

And I think all my feelings have gone out of me

But new feelings appear

Like waves on the ocean, endless

The best I can do is open my heart to the emotions

The way a rose opens it’s petals to drink the dew

And I release those feelings

Like the rose gives up it’s petals.

For The Flying of Kites on October Days

The air is tight

clear

brittle

like glass wrapping the earth

sunlight sparkles

separating

shattering on impact

crystal leaves reflect a million colors

startling

clear and brilliant

limbs release their handful of jewels

rubies

amethyst

flaming diamonds

scattered and throwing a million strands of light across the land

The sky begins to open

as trees spread bare branches

This is the season of the sky

the rich earth dissolves into air

we circle the earth with bare branches

open the sky and follow the wind for a moment

like a brief dream before sleep

for a quiet afternoon

where we ride the wind into the day sky

balancing between seasons

before the sky swallows the last days of autumn

for now,

stillness

balance

and the flying of kites on October days

-Kevin Slick

Still October

Still October

It’s still October and finally cold

the wet cold that pours itself into your bones.  The cold that chases under blankets, into sweaters and next to fireplaces.  In this grey rain the leaves outside seem all the more brilliant for the flat, dull background.

Everywhere we are covered by a deep rich, rotting blanket.  The earth has opened herself to harvest and slowly wraps around the decaying remains.  Corn husk flags stubbornly resist the wind for weeks.  Brilliant orange stars holding that color long after landing.  And all eventually accepting

the rhythm

the breathing

of earth.

Brilliant sunlight days, crisp and cold.

The breathing

hot, stretching, shifting, slowly returning the colors to earth

where they will sleep.

In the sleeping winter

strong trees

standing in winter

dream of color

-Kevin Slick

In This Moment

In this moment I

expand-

open

As

Some part of me

dreams

some part of you touches

my heart

becomes sky,

vast horizon

As

Some part of you flows

Some part of me

wakes

As

Stones in the river

Over ages grow smooth

I am softened

in a moment

holding you

-Kevin Slick

Autumn 1

Autumn 1

Slow and suddenly autumn

eternal and quick as lightning

slow aging wood releases color

sparkling light of aspens

flickering

descending

earth accepting the final warm caresses of it’s lover

sunlight

yellow warm soft light

soon that turns

cold with brittle grey fingers

as winter will hold the ground

-Kevin Slick