I first saw it a month before he died,
When we took my father on
A drive through his high school town.
Thornton
We listened to the Shirelles
On the way, driving through vineyards
And dusty dirt roads. In Thornton,
Grapevines wither because it is cold,
The December ice too fresh, too biting
For their youthful leaves, and they die,
Brokenhearted for the flight of youth and sun.

You were a thorned rose; placed onto a rotting grave,
who made even death;
seem beautiful with *grace.

Fashion designers love foraging through the antique markets of Clignancourt in Paris and Portobello Road and Alfie’s Antiques markets in London snuffling out vintage pieces for inspiration. The flurry of romantic Victoriana on the catwalks for autumn can clearly be blamed on this obsession.

There has been an undercurrent of reserved, covered-up fashion ever since Pierpaolo Piccioli and his former co-designer Maria Grazia Chiuri introduced a more demure aesthetic to Valentino five years ago. Longer skirts, prim higher necklines and covered arms have become the slow trend of recent seasons creating a hyper-feminine look.

Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy and Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen have long been beguiled by the Gothic romanticism of Victorian fashion with their use of corsetry and dark dramatic lace and velvet for eveningwear.

In fact, London-based vintage fashion dealer Virginia Bates admits she doesn’t remember there ever being a time when Gothic Victoriana didn’t feature in at least one designer’s collection. “The fascination with the romantics, poets, artists and even horror [classics and films] give designers a great source of inspiration,” she says. “It’s an irresistible era.”

Certainly a lot of it has appeared on the catwalks this season at McQueen, Marc Jacobs, Burberry (shown only a month ago in the see-now, buy-now collection), Simone Rocha, Preen, Bora Aksu and Temperley London, as well as at smaller brands such as Alessandra Rich, Three Floor created by Yvonne Hoang and A.W.A.K.E.

There were dark distressed Linton tweeds, unravelling knits and black tulle in Simone Rocha’s autumn collection. Rocha was pregnant when she started designing it and was inspired by Victorian dress and motherhood, in particular the nightgowns and matrons.

“All the wrapping and swaddling of babies,” she says, before elaborating on how “the Victorian ideals of properness were made perverse with the conservative and covered-up pieces contrasted by the sheer and embroidered fabrics.”These gauzy vaporous fabrics succeeded in making her eerily romantic silhouette look rather contemporary and daring.

Subversion is key to making such a prim and proper period in fashion history modern and relevant for women today. Marc Jacobs, for instance mixed long Victorian coats, ballooning crinolines and crochet doily collars with sweatshirt tops and laser-cut leather for skirts and jackets together with some scary Goth horror make-up. Nothing is, or should be literal.

As Justin Thornton of Preen says “we love the Victorians, the laces and the white shirts, but it is the vintage pieces rather than the era that inspire us”. His partner Thea Bregazzi has collected aristocratic laces and ruffly vintage shirts from Portobello Road market for as long as he has known her and these frequently find their way into their collections, “but linings would be ripped, garments will have holes in them – it is a deconstructed look”.Virginia Bates once owned a famous vintage fashion emporium in Holland Park with a client list including the biggest names in fashion from John Galliano to Donna Karan and Naomi Campbell. Now she only works with private clients and designers and they, especially, she says were looking for genuine Victorian pieces when planning their autumn collections.

“A black fitted jacket with inserts of handmade lace [that is] embellished with crystal and jet beads, ***** and silk lined ... How exciting and inspiring is that? Silk and fine lawn shirts, soft and flowing with ruffles. Don’t we all want to wear one and live the dream?”

Thankfully a few designers do right now, and there were lots of heavenly creatures in fragile asymmetric lace dresses toughened up with leather corsetry at Alexander McQueen, and richly coloured swishy dresses at Bora Aksu. While Christopher Bailey cherry-picked the centuries in his Burberry collection, lighting upon frilled white cotton shirts, nipped in jackets and military capes from the Victorian era. Given that Victoria reigned for more than 60 years there is a lot of history for designers to plunder, so this will not be the last we will see it.Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/short-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses

Remember the time before you
grew tired? You gave me Thornton. I keep it
with me to bring up pleasantries before this
got broken.  The dedication inside from

mother said “Be Joyful” I hold it with glee,
a souvenir of that year, sometime in
December.  It brought a shiver of uncertainty,
when clouds covered this memory.  It still holds

together despite its loose binding. I told you
one day you’d walk away. Then made it happen. I can’t
copy it. I would if I could. I tried but it wouldn’t
print out. Lucky for me, I hold the original.

A Summers Morn    (Robert Thornton)   2012



On clear and bright sweet summer's morn
all hint of darkness past.
where glistening spray of dew drops form
resplendently on grass.

And scented rush of flower in bloom
awakened by sunlight,
steers heart and soul away from gloom
and fills them with delight.

Where wondrous song of birds in trees
like church bells ring out loud,
and sun-drenched pasture once in seed
boast stems so tall and proud.

And shimmering haze of golden rays
cascade twixt every branch,
who's sleepy leaves, on gentle breeze
partake in fleeting dance.

Grey squirrels dash from tree to tree
their bushy tails held high,
and honey bees in troops of three
set sail with dragon fly.

Where trickling sound of nearby stream
breaks silence from the still,
that weaves it's route to stem and shoot
from nature's grand refill.

And winding path that snakes through dale
with stone-wall as its vein,
such well-trod ground that tells its tale
in footprints that remain.  

The ageless glory of a summer's day
in all its majesty,
A special miracle in every way
For all eternity.



End.

That climbing ratitude
In nightly interlude
And moral turpitude
Eats all the birdy-food

(I haven’t thought up an appropriate amphimacer [yes, I had to look that up] “ude” rhyme for the destruction of a bird feeder, but if I do it will go here)

Thus shows his gratitude
Oh! What an attitude!
I speak with acritude
Thus ends this platitude





For the true adventures of Billy Possum, see Thornton W. Burgess’ wonderful Mother West Wind stories.

Thanks to L.B. for a correction - Mr. B's possum is Billy, not Johnny.  No wonder Billy sometimes hisses!

the Florida sun and i
baked your memory
into the bricks of Winter Park
i built a home for you
amidst the concrete and stucco
off Mills and Thornton Avenue
outside a crowded little tea-house

we'd read our poetry out front
to choruses of snapping fingers
well after dark
before driving aimlessly
through Orlando streets
with a melancholy soundtrack
keeping us fixed firmly apart

i'd lay my hand like a fallen palm frond
well within your reach
praying to a god i don't believe in
that you'd tease the ink staining my wrists
with your pinprick fingertips

i remember when we
sat beneath the pine trees
i tried to look into your eyes
but the windswept clouds
drifted listlessly
and for a moment
i was blinded

i could've sworn that there
were constellations
where your
irises ought to be
a nebulous Andromeda
hurtling eternally

so send me a sign
through earthquakes
and light-waves
that i don't belong here
pining

I love you boo
And you love me too.
But we can't make it through.
Let's stop playing eachother for fools
We need to make it through.
One way or the other we will have eachother.
Just not as lovers.
We have kids so we will see one another.
But in some crazy way
Your my Roy Thornton
In my modern day bonnie and clyde love storie.
Don't ever fear because your love will be here.
You will always be our number 1.
From now Till forever.
Your kids will always love yea.

you recite the
lord's prayer
but i don't
hear a
messiah
whispering in
my skull

you read me
lines from the
Dhammapada
but i do not
care for the
Buddha's boorish
proverbs and
tired truisms

i can only
focus on the
inflection
in your voice
when you pause
in the space
between words

i can't see you smile
but i can hear you
catching your
breath as heat
spreads across
your cheeks and
you free slick fingers
from wet pink flesh

you're burning in
the poems you
read at a secluded
café on Thornton
silhouetted by light
like a beacon of hope
a lighthouse guiding
me back home

your words are
the  rope i
knot about
my throat
kick the chair
beneath my feet
and leave me
                       d
                       a
                       n
                       g
                       l
                       i
                       n
                       g

A Song of Lehman

Me: Just listen to my reasoning.

David: Oh God.

Me: Continuing our daily conversation; listen, our poem is prayed from common mouths but does that make our rightness any more meaningful even if it comes from Kristen's Good Place?

David: I feel you. Microphone checking our heart: 1,2,1,2; what night is this? Nothing beats nothing.

Me: X-mouth, foh sure. Men at work? More tongues from your lips? I'm X-mouth, foh sure; far from a path of pathology!

Come on! Step in with me, or maybe I should step off to pass.

Call, listen, move; it's stay the same game, hear it? It's the same holler, it's the same collar. Feel our words?

Big mamma hands us a Thornton, makes us moan and cry, makes us mourners mourning against them others in the fields still fighting.

If I die David, would you save my single Odin eye, and leave her under the crow's wing to claim the hated dead around me?

David: Shuck our fat mouth and throw away that proud husk;

She stalks our steps now with fellen eyes, like a lion hidden, waiting to tear a byte us.

I say meet her half way, at least wake up and throw her a bone; maybe give her our life with a sword.

In my hands, my flesh, my men, my women of the world, we part our lives, part our flesh and fill them with treasures. We hide there. We happy children coming from and inheriting privilege places.

Me: Facetime me David. I would be so happy if we were right in our picture too!

THE OLD LIVING LARK

"I like being dead me!"
he says.

"Much better than that living lark!"
he says.

"What I like is the complete absence of time."
he says.

"Or the way time collapses in on itself."
he says.

"Or all time happens at the same time?"
he says.

"Look out the window. See..?"
he says.

"A Roman Legion being chased by a dinosaur!"
he says.

"...in a hover car!"
he says.

"Wonders will never cease!"
he says.

"And that dinosaur...can't even drive!"
he says.

"It all gets a bit Thornton Wilder-ish!"
he says.

"But I shouldn't be saying this to you!"
he says.

"Not while you're not dead yet!"
he says.

"Or say you escape by the skin of your teeth!"
he says.

"And don't die at all!"
he says.

"I'm dying..?"
I say.

"You could call it that."
he says.

"And what are you...a ghost?"
I say.

"Naw mate...didn't get my ghosting licence!"
he says.

"Failed it every time!"
he says.

"I'm here to help you cross!"
he says.

"Aww mate...don't you go and live on me!"
he says.

"I'll catch hell for this!"
he says.

"Sorry..!"
I say.

"Sorry! Sorry you says!"
he says.

And fades.

And life fades
back in again.

"Well..." I say to myself
"...it's back to the old living lark!"

Well, okay, it’s out there in the back yard
Where on display you’ll see: old boonie hats
Uncool, but good when working in the heat
And cotton khakis from the discount store

Just washed, and drying in the summer sun
Admired by every Merry Little Breeze 1
Skivvies and socks sewn in Cambodia
And work shirts stitched together in Viet-Nam

Nothing by Versace or Calvin Klein
Just old clothes drying on the old clothes line


1 Thornton W. Burgess’ Mother West Wind stories

Powerful!

Whilst investigating the death of a local actor, a cute author called Susan Meadows uncovers a legend about a supernaturally-cursed, enchanted gun circulating throughout Cornwall. As soon as anyone uses the gun, he or she has exactly 75 days left to live.

The doomed few appear to be ordinary people during day to day life, but when photographed, they look invisible. A marked person feels like a killer cat to touch.

Susan gets hold of the gun, refusing to believe the superstition. A collage of images flash into her mind: a grey fox balancing on a chilly actor, an old newspaper headline about a flying accident, a hooded owl ranting about eyes and a drinking well located in a deprived place.

When Susan notices her heart have cat-like properties, she realises that the curse of the enchanted gun is true and calls in her grandfather, a police officer called James Thornton, to help.

James examines the gun and willingly submits himself to the curse. He finds that the same visions flash before his eyes. He finds the grey fox balancing on a chilly actor particularly chilling. He joins the queue for a supernatural death.

Susan and James pursue a quest to uncover the meaning of the visions, starting with a search for the hooded owl. Will they be able to stop the curse before their time is up?

Shakespeare in the Staunton night
I-81 in snow

The Tempest on the stage
Rene Thornton years ago

The professor lived in Italy
A time or two you know

Als Ick Kan gentleman
Ay yay yay yay yo!

Immortality is not likely
But still I do love Plato

Dialogue with the other
Dialogue in the Phaedo

Shakespeare lives forever
I met him once in Staunton

He went by Rene Thornton
I'd like to let my aunt in

              literature!

Dr. Cohen calls Shakespeare's plays a gift
Surely he is right
Rene Thornton as Prospero
I launch the car into the night

Brutus is deluded
King Lear is a Fool
I am Cinna the Poet!
I taught at Sage Ridge School

God bless Garrison Keillor
And the Writer's Almanac
God bless Andy Samberg
And his snack attack

Desafortunadamente
My favorite Spanish word
Hope for la Gente
Wonder if she heard?

      Yo soy un Theonerd.

So I had to take a class on the existentialists
Part of my major
James Madison University
1989

I can't stand Sartre
Still love Camus
Honeymoon in Paris
World of strange design

Or maybe no design
Or maybe abandoned by God
1937
Picasso. Guernica

And Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Cost of Discipleship
Simone Weil in Assisi
****** on the rise

At times at night
Just now in fact
The terror, The darkness
Dread annihilation

Gratitude for movies
Susanna, Judith, Hamnet
Staunton aglow in snow
Dr. Cohen's dedication

    Rene Thornton as Prospero
           Standing Ovation

sometimes the ridiculous does devastate
so I slurp my miso soup

life is mostly boredom
I joined no acting troop

but I did see Shakespeare in Staunton
the Tempest on a winter night

said: great job! to Rene Thornton
then drove clean out of sight

    I 81 South. silent flight.

We come up short
And we go down hard

Her beautiful tulips
In our frontyard

Camille Paglia
What a canard!

Harold Bloom
Don't know Jack about the Bard

Dr. Ralph Cohen
Rene Thornton starred

Shakespeare in Staunton
I stand on Guard!

Dr. Cohen in Staunton
Shakespeare in the snow
Doin' it with the lights on
Down 81 I go

Loveliness the benches
Rene Thornton as Prospero
Play on! Play on! Play on!
Juliet -  your Romeo.

Rene Thornton
More than 137 roles
   Staunton strolls

"NOT ALL PEOPLE EXIST IN THE SAME NOW. . ."
( for brother Brian )

your smile
like music for a movie
that will never be made

you travel through
your life, now:
unable to arrive at the present

you no longer
live in the now
that I inhabit

this my great grief
life, but:
life without you

Death has taken you
slammed the door
in my face

me left here
you in an other
place

you have left the planet
somehow escaped Time's prison
a new day dawns without you in it

remembering how you
relished Block's words that
"NOT ALL PEOPLE EXIST

IN THE SAME NOW. . ."

applying the statement to
whatever happening
happened to be happening

your smile
like music for a movie
that can never be made



His world was a world of electricity and circuits and whatnot....mine was of books and study. Work being scarce in Ireland he came to London to be with me....work was just as scarce in London and so he went back...not realising he was about to step into the job that was to last over 20 years.

He could soak up my world of Eliot and Hamlet and Block but his world was beyond my ken.  He would pick up little nuggets of knowledge such as the Block quote and then laugh and apply it to all and every situation.

Little did I think that I would be applying it to his death as a means to understand how my brother can be dead and alive to me at the same time. He and I both living in different NOWS.

Grief is a process and I am lost in a maze of pain desperately trying to find a way out.


"Not all people exist in the same Now."

Ernest  Bloch  in  his 1935  Heritage of our Times(Erbschaft dieser Zeit ).

"Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others. Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which are intricately involved. One has one's times according to where one stands corporeally. . . times older than the present continue to effect older strata; here it is easy to return or dream one's way back to older times. . .in general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails. Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear.  . .many earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between."

*

"But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning."

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder in 1927.

I sent poems to my brother
Sent poems to my girlfriend

I know they think I'm strange
But I have stranger been

Shakespeare in Staunton
Rene Thornton's voice

The statue in Dublin
Of wordsmith Mr. Joyce

Today I miss my children
I lie here all alone

Why do I keep writing?
Unsure, unclear, unknown

Why am I so drawn
To the true blue Twilight Zone?

Exit 222
Staunton aglow in snow
Rene Thornton power
The magician Prospero

Once Upon a Time
Clockshop, Southern quaint
Patrick was a saint
But I surely ain't

He said I was a gift
One I'd like to give away
Will I die alone?
Will she remember what I say?

Ashes to the ocean
Silence to the sea
Exoplanets spin
Dublin meant to be

    Thailand, Land of the Free.

                   3333

THE OLD LIVING LARK

"I like being dead me!"
he says.

"Much better than that living lark!"
he says.

"What I like is the complete absence of time."
he says.

"Or the way time collapses in on itself."
he says.

"Look out the window. See..?"
he says.

"A Roman Legion being chased by a dinosaur!"
he says.

"...in a hover car!"
he says.

"Wonders will never cease!"
he says.

"And that dinosaur...can't even drive!"
he says.

"It all gets a bit Thornton Wilder-ish!"
he says.

"But I shouldn't be saying this to you!"
he says.

"Not while you're not dead yet!"
he says.

"Or says you escape by the skin of your teeth!"
he says.

"And don't die at all!"
he says.

"I'm dying..?"
I say.

"You could call it that."
he says.

"And what are you...a ghost?"
I say.

"Naw mate...didn't get my ghosting licence!"
he says.

"Failed it every time!"
he says.

"I'm here to help you cross!"
he says.

"Aww mate...don't you go and live on me!"
he says.

"I'll catch hell for this!"
he says.

"Sorry..!"
I say.

"Sorry! Sorry you says!"
he says.

And fades.

And life fades
back in again.

"Well..." I say to myself
"...it's back to the old living lark!"

Rene Thornton as Prospero
Staunton nightlight snow
                 Power!

Sometimes out of touch with reality
In touch with what?
October 31st
You can do what you want Abe but ...

2024
I plan to Sally forth
1987
So long, Ollie North

3333
Drummond Road in Toledo
Cinco de Mayo
Vegetarian burritos

Exit 222
Rene Thornton as Prospero
Denver, Colorado
Yo estudio

                      On we go.

From page 607 of An American Glossary (1962) by Richard Thornton we find: [1859  The Democratic party can no more run their party without ******* than you could run a steam-engine without fuel. That is all there is to Democracy; and when you cannot raise ******* enough for the market, then you must go abroad fishing through the whole world. — Mr. Wade of Ohio, U.S. Senate, Feb. 25 : id., p. 1354.]**  

A long time ago the world began
Hey ** the wind and the rain

If you go to Staunton, if you can
See Rene Thornton as Prospero again

Tomorrow I'll clean and organize
Tacos for my lunch

I think there may be aliens
But I don't know. Just a hunch.