October 2017
David Chorlton
DavidChorlton@centurylink.net
I am a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. My poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and reflect my affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. My newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and late in 2017 The Bitter Oleander Press will publish Shatter the Bell in my Ear, my translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.  http://www.davidchorlton.mysite.com​


​Author's Note:  In the late 1960s and early 70s, I discovered Giorgione, and was fortunate in seeing many originals in (then) Leningrad, Vienna, Paris, and the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, home of “The Tempest.” The mood of the scene with its ruins and the mysterious way in which the lives of the man and woman intersected creates a tension absent from most of his contemporaries’ work. 
Decades later, seeing an impending tempest prompts a reaction that Giorgione could never have anticipated with the 21st century world in a climate-changing storm of its own, a circumstance that often influences my writing. As for my painting, the idea behind it started out with looking at “The Tempest” and wondering about how to pay visual tribute to it. In the end, I had a simple solution that features a sphinx moth, something I’ve developed a fascination for since seeing the moths here in Arizona. 
Giorgione - "The Tempest" (c. 1506)
David Chorlton - "Night Storm" (2017)

​
​Tempest Variations
 
I
Comes a moment when the river
slows, the summer heavy foliage
falls silent, the city walls turn pale,
church towers shiver
against the blackening sky
while the young man in his uniform
loosens his collar and wipes
the lightning from his brow.
 
II
Thunder fills two porcelain
jugs to overflowing
where they balance on a wall
between moths drawn to the light
that is the universe
and the one whose wings vibrate above
a single, colored flower
of the Earth.
 
III
All the skyline is a madrigal
and the ruins sing of long ago
while the river does not listen
as it follows time
to the beat of raindrops,
slow at first, then
building to a gallop with nobody
holding the reins.
 
IV
Behind the clouds an angry god
is beating metal sheets
where once
he hammered sunlight
from a forge.
 
V
The first flash cleaves the sky in two:
half for the few
who own all the land, half
for the many who work it. And alone
at the roadside, a woman
weighs an empty hand
against the one that holds her child.
 
VI
The light lasts a second
that reveals a soul
inside everything alive.
 
VII
In the calm before
there’s a scent of jasmine
and a bramble with blood
on its thorns. In the calm that follows
there’s a soldier who’s lost
and a ripple in the clouds
where a thunderbolt passed through.  
 
VIII
It happens unexpectedly, the darkening
and the taste
of moisture in the air
before a drop has fallen. There is
silence deep enough for a fox’s
den, then the crack
in an ornamental vessel
is the first sound. It becomes
a glacier when it breaks.
©2017 David Chorlton​
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