Two books by Mark Terrill have arrived with ekphrastic (if I may be so bold) poems of great appeal: The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express, a slim volume of 32 poems, attractively produced in 2009 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company, and Great Balls of Doubt, a collection of 96 poems with illustrations by Jon Langford, published in 2020 by Verse Chorus Press.
Here are two poems with images from daily life and the thoughts they arouse, both excerpted from The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express.
Upside the Morning
I catch myself catching myself
standing in the garden
in the throes of thinking
if it's beauty that gets a hold on us
or us that gets a hold on beauty.
Compared to the tiny green bugs
crawling down my arm
my metaphysical ineptitude
is about the size of a small car.
I look over toward the shed
and see you standing there
tending to your seedlings
with almost unconscious devotion,
framed in an opening in the trees,
now uppity lush and leafy green
in the first burst of spring,
backlit and gloriously golden-edged
by the morning sun, like some kind of
highly charged radiant fauvist miracle,
and can't help but wonder just who
has a hold on what.
A Poem for Patriots Brand new shiny unopened bottle of Russian vodka on the kitchen table next to invisible unknown mystery cake from the baker hidden away in vaguely surrealist brown paper wrapping each with their own promising portent . . . The squeak of the ironing board in the next room, Joan Baez murdering Bob Dylan in the background; red, green, blue and yellow plastic Easter eggs swinging in the breeze in the neighbors' trees; the words—purblind yet mercurial— can still only say what the words mean. On TV between shots of suicide-bomber carnage and discreet mini-camera shots of the underside of the turned down cards of tournament poker players I saw in a documentary how the American lotus grows up out of the same mud and muck like any other lotus in the world.
