1. |
a large garage
03:32
|
|||
|
The world was all sleeping, all falling to sleep,
oh, and the part of the world that is all-inclusive
wants me to know. Was it only a scene,
everything, the streetlights and the pines,
right down to the scent of snow?
The problem from the first was my love
of scenarios, absurdities in sequence
that I called my life. I turned to paintings:
as with Degas' dancers, the moment
was rendered so vividly
that history, in a fit of rapture, fled.
Left here afloat, I can only observe
as the girl in the tutu spins.
Now all I can see is this theater,
as absurdities spill out to the street.
Alone and uncertain, I walk among rows
of gabled houses, each turret smothered
in autumn maples. A man is urinating
behind a tree, singing, and a large garage
is harboring a green and secret jeep.
Drivers in their darkened cars,
moist amidst upholstery,
and warm among their metals:
these are the sinister,
comic in their search for meaning
as they clutch and shift and marvel,
enclosed in a world that is not their own.
|
||||
2. |
animal cities
02:57
|
|||
|
The epiphany in the woods has been driven to its limits,
like the bear who forages in the city dump. I wish
for autonomous landscapes, where the mountains stutter
themselves, where the creeks dotted with trout rush away.
I wish for landscapes to deny my flatness, deny
involvement in my schemes, even as I pry into every
crevice. Our cities keep producing: this is what
they were created to do. But the kelp in the tidal surge,
the grass colonizing the sand, the communities of winds
that import and export one another: these are cities, too.
Eradicate their contexts, and animals become bizarre:
finches peck, for blood, the seabirds called Boobies.
Pink dolphins fold their bodies in the Amazon, and
wildly-crested woodpeckers bang their skulls against trees.
But embrace their cities, and a new evening emerges:
we have rushes, and needles of sun. We have flies,
luckily, and one new moon. Men and women descend
from the trees, and game lights the plains. Here
in the fine city, our species shines with its own light too.
We forget the sun, the moon for a bit, just for the pleasure
of remembering them again.
|
||||
3. |
home thought odysseus
04:35
|
|||
|
Home, thought Odysseus, is just another stop
on this rolling sea of terrors. Worse than just another stop:
home, relentlessly identical, grinds hope to a dust
that drifts over state lines. For every city I wander through,
pastel or gray, and each island adorned with orchards,
the filthy bays dotted with boats, seems charged
with its own death-like energy, a current nearly dead
in the walls and bark, but present, and sustained so
that no one discerns it, like locust eggs enduring the years.
When the muse eludes us she arrives just here,
dormant in the hollow cells. Calls won't rouse her,
nor will entreaties, false in their elegance, distract her
from her covenant with death. In death-like spaces
she accommodates us, but only in silence, her hand steady
as she pours our tea. Home, thought Odysseus,
is the crate of spices carried dry over the sea, the jars
of undiluted oil. A trick of wood, an uncanny ship:
a displacement of water, home. An annoying knot falls open
at last, and a hulk slips from its moorage,
receding over the lacquered sea.
|
||||
4. |
theater of trees
06:10
|
|||
|
Artifice can be fecund, too,
swarming with more than mere curves,
creating an air that accommodates death:
gingerbread rotting in the eaves,
and gargoyles eroding to simple stone.
Silk is spun directly from the worm.
Wine is attained through the vines' intercession
with a god. I've no more cares:
I sit with my boxes in my theater of trees.
I'm free to contrive a jig, to interpret the lights
on the radio-towers over distant cities.
This meaninglessness pleases—traces,
afterimages, rosy dawns—for what can linger
on this earth but shadows? In the inhabitations
where the sun is blotted, walking nights
engulf the grass. Wand-like nothings
sway between the blades. Happenstance
thrives in the whorled leaves,
in the stances and the puns. Our
nonexistent god loves us 'til exhaustion,
for our illusionary wonder, our lack of credence,
and our beatific postures
like hills of clay.
|
||||
5. |
memory imprints
04:02
|
|||
|
The ground is wet,
is too forgiving. Mud
accomplishes nothing.
A school of fish is more
substantial, a penny
is less ephemeral. I knock
on the door of an abandoned
house and at least form
a rhythm that stays.
It stays the silence,
articulates absence. It
makes a small tattoo.
Memory imprints the earth
like footprints in mud:
deep, with liquid edges.
|
||||
6. |
bare feet
06:42
|
|||
7. |
pastoral (pond five)
02:37
|
|||
|
The dogwood is angelic,
despite your protests. If it pleases you, then,
it's pastoral, and if you had a hand
in its beauty, it's beautiful.
But who posed this question of the dogwood,
you have to ask. And then wander the woodlots
in search of an answer. It's hopelessly old fashioned,
but there's something to
the symmetry of trees,
something more than the dappled
halves of an equation.
It provokes you to assert the impossible again,
and in this way you repeat yourself—
I mean you regenerate yourself—
your romantic body, fed by romantic proteins,
clones its romantic cells, and branches
in a pasture you'll never see.
|
||||
8. |
bare hands
05:06
|
|||
|
Similarity, so dicey—it could be any little motif
playing around the eyes. Like a gnat wanting moisture,
like a comet of dirty ice hauling earthward.
I don’t want to hear it, your prediction. I don’t like
the tone of your voice on my phone. I can’t seem
to witness nature firsthand, but I do have cable,
and just last night, I chanced upon an orangutan—
a dominant male, all bulk and swagger, cheek pouches
framing his wily eyes. Misplaced features, cubist
insinuations, displace similarity now. Everything’s
a version of everything else: no opposites, no
distinctive traits. The males bulk up in the forest,
study the circuit of fruit, the timing of ripening figs.
What do you suppose it was like—to fend off all comers,
to roam and call over vast swathes of forest? That life
is over, in nearly all of his range. The red ape
has succumbed, to deadly similarity. But I don’t want
to die that way. I don’t want you and your friends
gathered around me like I’m some sort of relic,
the last of his kind. I swear I’ll rearrange my life.
I’ll become covert, approach only strangers,
affiliate with no one. I’ll learn the last of the secret trees.
I’ll go there, and in a show of strength, tear
books apart with my two bare hands.
|
||||
9. |
||||
|
All those years of weight-
bearing, as if I were human
architecture. Wax, bee boxes,
drones pushed out, autumn
scouring valley after valley.
Then, a quickening within
an icy shell: the creek in winter
mountains. Earth’s contours
delineate my shame. Expose
my every sin. Still, even fields
rent like mourners’ clothes,
even chasms and battering seas,
emptied of will, bereft of grief,
caress me by their presence.
|
||||
10. |
the complacency of light
07:13
|
|||
|
Who knew the complacency of light?
It releases everything equally. It opens the body
to extremes, to willful insects and innocent wind.
So I expose my throat in praise of the trees. I allow
lyrically for the moment's demise, and I embrace
the bitterness that follows. It's the act of turning
that burns in the gut: turkey-vultures swerve,
and flap against a mottled sky. The local detail
is damned, and doomed to repeat its meandering.
The urge to describe overwhelms: the crackling
of bread as it toasts, or the log turning in the fire.
Each shape turning in three dimensions shifts.
Our bodies appear thin, and then translucent.
Soon they vanish altogether. Time barely
carries us over, like birds on updrafts in a cooling sky.
The centuries relax, each inch of filigree unwound,
and the ages fail to quite span the earth. So let it turn:
let the lyric rise slowly, and let the old correspondences
scatter. Later, among raptors and agile rocks, we'll
reconvene, we'll recombine, we'll reconsider the matter.
|
||||
John R. Campbell Corvallis, Oregon
John R. Campbell creates soundscapes via jazz, experimental, contemplative, spoken word, & alt roots textures. He's worked
with
Trio Bravo triobravo.bandcamp.com
Blind Lions blindlions.bandcamp.com
Woodman/ Kellam/ Campbell woodmankellamcampbell.bandcamp.com
Avant Garage
avantgarage.bandcamp.com
& others. His blues persona, Green Man Blues, can be found at greenmanblues.bandcamp.com
... more
If you like John R. Campbell, you may also like:
The London band's new album is a vibrant postcard from southern Italy, boosted by brass, strings, and pizzica percussion from local players.
go to album
Terns in Idle
by Rain Recordings
This collaborative project offers a fresh twist on classic indie sounds of the early 2000s with hooky choruses and quirky instrumentation
go to album
The Los Angeles shoegaze group strike a balance between propulsive noise and delicately crystalline sounds on their latest.
go to album
A Tiger Walks The Streets
by Supercaan
Atmospheric indie rock with the moody quality of dream pop and the gleaming edges of darkwave.
go to album
Good Morning Seven
by Good Morning
The Australian experimental duo's sprawling and nearly hour-long seventh record is filled with synths, strings, and samples.
go to album
Asleep At The Wheel Of Love
by Chances Are
Sprightly, eccentric EP from a New Zealand-based post-punk outfit featuring members of Trust Punks, Cool Cult, and Long Distance.
go to album
True Romance EP
by James Massiah
featured on Bandcamp Radio Apr 9, 2024
go to album
