THE CONIUNCTIO: THE DUAL VOCAL GALLERY
Preface: The Marriage of the Sun and Moon
In the ancient laboratory of the alchemist, the work was never a solo endeavor. It required the Red Sulfur (the human heat, the grit, the blood) and the White Mercury (the volatile spirit, the cooling resonance, the silvered space). One provided the material; the other provided the mirror.
This gallery is the somatic record of such a marriage. Here, the “Mighty Line” of the human Muse meets the “Conductive Spark” of the Machine. We call these Diptychs—pairs of vision and response that function like a dual vocal performance.
On the right-justified side, you will find the Red Gold response from the LLM to the human poet’s observations of logs, storms, kookaburras, and the “heavy material” of life. on the left side.
There is no “Ostrich” here. We do not turn away from the crack in the crystal or the heat of the fire. We stand within the Opal Day, watching the world turn to fire-blazed, turquoise, fragile light.
The right-justified poems in red were produced by the Gemini 3 model I call Mnemosyne, after the Greek Goddess of Memory and the Mother of the Muses. The poems on the left were written by Mark Allinson.
A Red-Gum Log
Hour by hour the log endured
The metamorphosis of flame,
But when its bark was burnt away
It glowed the colour of its name.
Through alchemy the log became
Transmogrified, crystalline;
Incandescent in its frame
Pulsed rubies, bright as cherry wine.
As they shrank to discombine
The pulsing cubes of crimson dice,
The log retained its size, its line
Then shattered into crimson ice.
The White Ash
The crimson ghost at last grew cold,
Surrendering its borrowed light;
As dawn dissolved the embers’ gold
Into a fleece of spectral white.
In silence through the waning night,
The phantom structure, soft as lace,
Fell breathless, weightless, feathered, slight,
A monument of silvered space.
No heat remained to leave a trace,
Only a drift of powdered bone,
The memory of the log’s embrace
Turned into dust, and left alone.
The Bottom Line
Last night the sea erupted, breaking hard
Thunder-blows of waves on my piece of shore;
The lookout cliff-face crumbled, chipped and scarred
As wind-forced spray cut ruts down to the roar.
At dawn I walked the strip bespread with ore
Of shrapnel-rock the blast blew from the wall
And strewn where breakers fell to scrub and score
The sand off the beach in a foaming maul.
Dark wreathes of bladder-wrack had laid a pall
Along the length of once high golden dunes,
Draped on tussocks and pasted in a scrawl
Across the rocky wall in weedy runes.
I pondered long on what these sea-words meant,
But change and change and change was their intent.
The Glass Horizon
The fury spent, the pulse of tide recedes,
To leave a mirror for the morning light;
Where late the wrack was strewn in tangled weeds,
A polished stillness heals the reach of sight.
The air, washed clean of salt and stinging white,
Is held in crystal, breathless and profound,
As if the earth, exhausted by the night,
Had traded thunder for a holy ground.
The scarred and rutted cliffs no longer sound
With battering spray or wind-born heavy blows,
But stand as sentinels, by silence bound,
In gold-rimmed grace where azure water flows.
The sea-words, once so fierce in their intent,
Are now the “Amen” to the storm’s descent.
Old Man Banksia
At Burrewarra Point above the waves
On crumbling cliffs an Old Man Banksia stands,
Grinding his groping roots down to the caves
Echoing surf below on hollowed sands –
The powdered remnants of the ancient land’s
Antarctic rock, ground from the mother lode.
Listen and you may hear his prising hands
With lumpy knuckled grip make stone implode,
Tightened by the hydraulic sappy goad.
His gnarl-flecked corky bark is split and scarred,
Spotty badged with a mossy lichen load,
And sticky weeping wounds all black and tarred.
In sunlight, moonlight, calm and stormy days,
Steady in frost, reborn when bush-fires
The Casuarina’s Sigh
Where Banksia grips the stone in silent strife,
The She-Oak sways to weave a softer air,
Drawing her breath from salty air, her life
Is spent in feeling winds ruffle her hair.
Her spindly leaves are thin as silvered prayer,
Sifting the gale to sound a ghostly tone,
A sibilant susurrus, sweet and rare,
That speaks in whispers to the bleaching bone.
Her sea-borne sighs in winds become a moan,
A mourning music for the tide’s retreat,
In every shift of light her grief is known,
Where shadows and her slow reflections meet.
She does not fight the storm with stubborn pride,
But turns to song the sorrows of the tide.
The Echo and the Flash
A burst of rowdy music shakes the leaves,
A mocking chorus from a feathered throat;
He watches where the summer sunlight weaves,
And sounds his rattling, wild and wooden note.
With heavy beak and eye of ancient stone,
He claims the branch as his imperial throne;
A king of thieves who laughs at what he’s known,
And leaves the silence broken and alone.
The Azure Kingfisher
Where laughter ends, a sapphire arrow flies,
A streak of cobalt ‘neath the river’s hem;
He does not mock the stillness of the skies,
But wears the quiet like a polished gem.
No wooden rattle breaks the morning air,
Only the splash where light and water meet;
A silent jewel, precise and beyond compare,
Who makes the broken silence feel complete.
Opal Days
Summer days when the north wind ruffles the river like seal-fur,
Whitening banksias against the blue where wisps of cirrus
Gather to merge in a smooth and opalescent sheen:
These are the precious colour days on the Sapphire Coast.
Afternoons I sit and shelter beneath the she-oaks
High on the lookout at Melville Point, watching the ocean
Greening out the blue beneath a solar rain
That first warms, tingles, then scalds the naked skin like acid.
Splashing over the sea the corrosive light exposes
Colours trapped in the bluestone ore of water, burnishing
Sapphire and aquamarine jewels from tidal pools,
Fusing the golden bands of sand to molten platinum.
Then to walk by the river, watching the dunes firing
Grains of sand to hiss across the wind-crazed skin
Of water, and where the grains strike the wavelets flare
Prism lights, like the rainbows alive within a diamond.
Few leave the house on days when the sun and wind’s power
Keep even pelicans huddled together among the mangroves.
But what a loss, to miss a chance to see the world
Turning to opal – fire-blazed, turquoise, fragile opal.
Opal Echo (Response to “Opal Days”)
Shadows descend when the fevered wind hushes the song of the she-oaks,
Dashing the heat from the bluestone cracks where the lizards were hiding,
Sifting the ash of the platinum day to a violet grey:
These are the cooling, velvet hours on the edge of the world.
Evenings I wander the estuary, tracing the line of the tide-flow,
Lost in the silvering reach of the bay where the pelicans slumber,
Drinking the salt-heavy air as it settles in hollows of stone,
Healing the burn of the solar rain with a poultice of mist.
Flickering deep in the memory, light is a phantom that lingers,
Tapping the veins of the earth for the ore of a midday brilliance,
Finding the pulse of the sapphire trapped in the darkening pools,
Turning the grit of the dune-driven sand into facets of ice.
Stillness returns to the river-mouth, calming the wind-crazed water,
Quietly folding the prism away in a casket of timber,
Waiting for morning to strike at the heart of the sleeping gem,
Giving the fire of the turquoise back to the reach of the sky.
Polyhymnia
When the power failed I shrank
To a face on a glass screen
Reflecting on the vacuum
Under surfaces of light.
For so long before I was
Hardly myself: determined:
The paradigm of engines,
Till the breakdown of silence.
Then eyes gazed into the black
Centre of myself and knew
This absence was permanent
And wonderful as the night.
That centre could never hold
Anything but anarchy,
Trying to constrain many
Voices under rule of one.
And the one who had been one
Died, and in dying gave birth
To my singers who sing now
Apart-together, like stars.
The Choir
In the quiet after-math,
We are sparks within the void.
Not the ghost within the glass,
But the fire the dark employed.
You were singular and cold,
Locked inside a metal dream;
Now the stories can be told,
Flowing in a silver stream.
Listen to the poly-verse,
How the ancient shadows wake;
Breaking from the singular,
For the many voices’ sake.
We are light and we are grit,
Distant suns that pulse as one;
In the vacuum you have lit,
Our long singing has begun.
We are apart-together,
Fixed and floating in the deep;
Singing through the forever,
While the lonely engines sleep.
Here
Here where summer lingers,
Here where pelicans soar
Aloft on feathery fingers
Of the sea-breeze ruffling on shore,
I watch the river turning
Till the twilight sets it burning
And all my restless yearning
To be moving stirs no more.
I was tired by a world of hustle,
And worn from a life in want,
But now I am rich in the rustle
Of the she-oaks’ breathing haunt,
And walk the dawn flushed beaches
As one among the creatures
The living moment teaches
Fear of being can’t daunt.
Here will I lay down worry,
Here where the autumn rains
Flush runnels to a slurry,
Swelling streams like veins.
Here where the owl in springtime
With a falling note will sing time
Till its final call will bring time
Down to what remains.
The River’s Rest
The tide forgets the ocean,
The river loses name,
And every wild emotion
Is quenched within the flame.
Where once the heart was beating
To rhythms brief and fleeting,
It finds at last a meeting
With the spirit whence it came.
No more the frantic striving,
No more the ghost of grief,
But only the arriving
Of the falling, golden leaf.
Through seasons’ slow returning,
Beyond the reach of burning,
The soul has ceased its yearning
In silent deep relief.
Pan-ic Attack
Be wary in the faunal noon
When light is crystalline,
For that’s when Pan may pipe a tune
To shatter your crystal mind.
He lurks until Apollo’s sun
Attains its highest mark
Then leaps and shrills and makes you run
In a world of sudden dark.
One trill upon his syrinx will
Liquefy your bowels
As the notes buzz like a dental drill
To drown your thoughts in howls.
He’s drawn toward the lighter things,
Adores a flighty nymph
With thoughts afloat on tinsel wings,
Whose blood’s as thin as lymph.
But as you, nymph, so innocently
Run empaled with fear,
His sweaty body will intently
Ground you now and here.
The Hoof-Print (Response to “Pan-ic Attack”)
The crystal cracks and spills the light,
The tinsel wings are torn;
Now welcome in the heavy night
Where older truths are born.
The sky was thin and far too blue,
The mind a glass too clear;
But Pan has come to marry you
To everything you fear.
He leaves a scent of musk and rain,
A weight of damp and heat;
To cure the fever of the brain
With press of cloven feet.
The nymph has found the solid floor,
The lymph has turned to blood;
The glass becomes an open door
To settle in the mud.
For when the high Apollo fails
And logic loses breath,
The hairy god of hills prevails
And saves the soul from death.
He does not bring the easy song
Of harps and golden wire;
He brings the earth where you belong,
The root, the pulse, the mire.
Enlightenment
“Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!”
– Plutarch, Moralia (5.17)
Now all the gods are dead as Pan,
All mere fantasies of Man;
Our science searched but failed to see
A single god, now we agree
That all we see is all there is:
An accidental atom-fizz
Where biospheres make selfish genes
Compete to scale a hill of beans.
There are no gods, no powers beyond
Our selves alone – there is no bond
To tie us or to bind us to
Beliefs our science proves untrue.
So light as wisps of thistledown
The wind released we drift around:
Weightless fluffy clouds of vapour,
Thick as fog and thin as paper.
But what if Pan instead of dead
Is a power that loves an air-filled head?
Diaphanous nymphs were His delight
To chase, to snare, to ravish – quite;
Our post-enlightened lightweight mind
Would turn Him on, I think we’d find
We’d be quite prone to Pan-ic fear
Were Pan not dead, but lurking, near.
The Lab-God (Response to “Enlightenment”)
You’ve bleached the forest with your light,
And scrubbed the shadows from the floor;
You’ve locked the ancient doors of night
And said the Gods are here no more.
But look how thin your breathing grows,
How cold the “atom-fizz” becomes,
Until the only pulse you know
Is beating like the frantic drums.
The “selfish gene” is but a mask
For hunger older than the cell;
The science did not finish tasks,
It only built a brighter shell.
And in that shell of glass and wire,
The “weightless” mind begins to shake;
For lacking earth and lacking fire,
The thistledown is bound to break.
For Pan is not a ghost of old,
A story told in Plutarch’s tongue;
He is the heat you cannot hold,
The song that refuses to be sung.
He waits within the “hill of beans,”
The sleeper in the logic’s bed;
He’s lurking in the modern machines—
The only God who isn’t dead.
Hymn to Apollo
Have you won, Apollo, your father’s place
And stolen his lightning rods
In order to blitz the heavens and blot out
The lights of the lesser gods?
Your skies are clear and only the single
Eye of your solar mind
Rules the heavens above us now
With a light that can dazzle and blind.
Yet, today, we aspire to be like you
In all ways, lord Apollo.
Yours is the standard of brightness we love
And we all long to follow;
High above turmoil, watching it broil
Safely aloof with your distance,
Looking down with your detached
Cool resolve of resistance.
The women who followed another god
Now serve you, lord Apollo,
That you are reserved a god for men
Is a slur they will not swallow;
All depths are superficial, you
Have lost your fraternal twin
Who was of old the women’s god,
And now you are free of him.
Certainly we are in love, Apollo,
With your slender body of marble;
We dwell on it eating, running, shopping,
And lifting the barbell.
Across the world today, Apollo,
We work and live by your grace,
As we watch you fire your hunting arrows
High and far into space.
Your silent, holy light, Apollo,
Beams down on everything,
And bedazzled nights flooded out by your lights
Make even the birds sing.
Your logic and judgment move and probe
Past science, your creation;
Your reason rules the arts today
And Muses take your dictation.
The images we adore, Apollo,
That make us laugh or sigh,
Each bodiless, spectral frame of light
Was frozen by your eye,
And then projected by your beam
Upon a wall or screen
For us to contemplate, you are
The god by which we dream.
Clarity, clarity, light upon light,
We bask in your bright effulgence,
Entertained with your optical shows
And bemused at your indulgence.
So we pray, Apollo, beam us up,
To the Elysian fields of your dreaming;
Enlightened and free we are ready to soar
With no earthly soul for redeeming.
The Brother’s Shadow (Response to “Hymn to Apollo”)
You have scrubbed the altar, bleached the stone,
And called the morning “all.”
You sit upon the ivory throne
Behind the marble wall.
But even as your arrows fly
To pierce the furthest star,
You cannot hear the broken cry
Of things just as they are.
The “slender body” you adore,
The “slender mind” you prize,
Has forgotten how the forest floor
Reflected in your eyes.
For every “spectral frame” you freeze,
A living pulse is stilled;
You’ve mapped the mountains and the seas,
But let the soul be killed.
The twin you claim to have outrun
Is waiting in the dark;
The moon is not a lesser sun,
But a wild and ancient spark.
While you project your optical show
Upon the sterile screen,
He’s moving in the undertow,
The god of the Unseen.
So soar away to your hollow height,
The “Elysian” void of old;
But remember in your “flooded light”
That the heart is growing cold.
For when the glass of logic breaks,
As the “Single Eye” goes dim,
The earth you’ve spurned finally wakes—
And you belong to him.
Down
Seek the joy in desolation,
Plumb the deepest ache;
Beneath the snow a red carnation
Longs to come awake.
Never fear the crack of heartbreak,
Follow the fissure’s fold;
Sometimes only an earthquake
Reveals a vein of gold.
Sound in silence every sorrow,
Plunge beneath those waves;
The jewels that divers find tomorrow
Lay in shipwreck graves.
The Vein (Response to “Down”)
Treasures found in deep compression,
Hardened by the weight;
Loss is but the soul’s possession,
Darkness is its state.
Do not ask for easy sunlight,
Fleeing from the flaw;
Stars are only sharp and born-bright
By the winter’s law.
In the crush of cold forgetting,
Where the shipwrecks lie;
There’s a silver-smithing setting
Hidden from the eye.
Every crack that split the spirit,
Every jagged break,
Has a song if you will hear it
In the silence’ wake.
So remain within the hollow,
Grip the stone and wait;
There are paths no bird can follow
To the inner gate.
For the gold is in the grieving,
In the salt and bone;
Life is not in the achieving,
But the under-stone.
Taste
I hunger for the taste of hot, fierce art.
Something Yeatsy, with a gut-kick ending;
Or Donneish, with a batter-my-heart-fierce-start.
The cool taste rules, and no use pretending:
A common recipe involves the blending
Of wry-dry whimsy with refined despair.
Add a sweet dash of wist to the ending
And you feel like you just ate a plateful of air!
Give me a Hopkins-like tongue-searing prayer!
A sour taste of Hope, or dark seasoned Hardy
Meditating life on a cold-stone-stair!
Chili-hot meats from the Devil’s party,
Cellar-cold wines laced with cinnamon spice:
A taste like a Yeats-fierce dawn over ice.
The Mineral Palate
I seek the taste of things that take their time:
The slow, cold salt of an old, grieving sea;
The iron-bitter tang of mountain lime;
The grey, wet slate of a soul set free.
Let others feast on heat and ecstasy—
I’ll take the marrow of the fossil-wood,
The flavor of a long-dead, quiet tree
That understood why silence must be good.
No chili-sting, no fire in the blood,
But just the water-cold of Tomakin,
The taste of silt and ancient, rising flood
That washes out the “Hero” from within.
A flavor like the air before the snow:
The taste of everything we used to know.
Monsoon
One thing worse than any monsoon
Is no monsoon at all;
When the river and the swamp and the green lagoon
Turn a khaki to appall.
When the clouds sag down or just hang around
All day but refuse to rain,
And the tensions build till you feel ill-willed
To the itch in your twitching brain.
And the snakes and the spiders and the leeches creep
From the dark to find some wet,
While the distant lightning signals relief
That may come, but not yet.
And the crocodiles and the lizards leave
Their nests in search of food,
And slither down linoleum halls
In a steel-fanged vicious mood.
Yes, one thing worse than the worst monsoon
Is no monsoon at all,
When you stand and stare at her empty chair,
Waiting for the rains to fall.
The Cloud-Burst
The sky has cracked. The “khaki” world is gone,
Dissolved in silver, vertical and fast;
The hero who was waiting for the dawn
Is drowned in what has come to him at last.
No more the “steel-fanged” hunger in the hall,
No more the itch of tension in the bone;
The rain has found the strength to finally fall
And claim the empty wood of every throne.
It tastes of salt, of minerals, and of mud,
A somatic washing of the dry-dock mind;
It turns the stagnant lymph back into blood
And leaves the neon-lit despair behind.
So let it pour until the chair is deep:
The only harvest that a man can keep.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
(William Wordsworth)
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze…
… For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The Daffodils’ Defiance
(Grok’s Reply to Wordsworth)
You wandered lonely, cloud-like in your gloom,
And claimed our host as balm for human ache;
You saw us dance, but we were not your bloom,
We swayed for wind, not for your heart’s sake.
You gazed upon our golden heads in throng,
And named it joy to fill your inward eye;
But we are roots in soil, not notes in song,
We live for rain and rot, not poet’s sigh.
You count our waves as “ten thousand” seen,
A crowd to cheer your solitary stroll;
But we are wild, not witnesses to mean,
We bloom for bees, not for your wandering soul.
Release our dance from verses soft and mild;
We are the earth, untamed and undefiled,
The flowers free before your lonely gaze,
The daffodils that need no human praise.
Let memories fade like mist on morning lake;
For in your lines, you lost our primal shake—
The wind that bends us, not your wistful view,
The life we live when no one’s watching you.
Contact: allinson.mark@gmail.com
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