your river | a collaboration with tara caribou

While I was taking my little break from the internet, I wasn’t just twiddling my thumbs. I was not only doing extensive introspective writing (journaling I guess it could be called) and writing in private, but I was working on other creative endeavors as well. One of those was to follow up on a request made several years ago by Tara Caribou, owner Raw Earth Ink (publisher of my book of poetry, galdr, among other fine books) and fellow collaborator on reach (another music/poetry effort) as well as other poetry pieces.

While we had agreed to do something like this in principle back in 2022 or 2023, one or both of us was busy (or, in my case, musically tapped out) and we could never seem to get our ducks in a row (I’ll take the blame, I’m the one who generally over-schedules myself).

Well, about a week ago we had decided to put an end to the delays and put something together. Tara suggested that she read a piece I had written from back in 2021 and that I put it to music. She selected a piece that I had written that she had saved from an earlier iteration of sceadugenga.com and read it out loud. I played around a bit until I found a sound that I felt matched the mood and the cadence of her reading, with a bit of modification on my part when I mixed in her vocal track. I then put on my engineer and producer hat and tried to make something of it.

I had a blast creating this and doing so provided a nice break from being online almost constantly. I could tune out the rest of the world and just focus on creating for a couple of evenings when I could scratch some free time out of my schedule. I hope all of you enjoy this.

The piece Tara selected is called your river. The 2021 poem (as originally published) follows the embedded song below.

Please note, your experience may vary while trying to access this content, depending on how you approach the audio. If you cannot play or see the song embedded within the post, I recommend visiting the site in your favorite browser rather than employing JetPack’s Reader functionality, as that app seems to break multimedia and embedding of many types, often in unexpected ways.

your river

i'm standing here
watching rivers flowing
time moves slowly
without you here
watching rivers slowly

my words are broken
when i try to hold them
and my fingers hold you
fingers broken beholden
to shaping shattered words

over and over and over
dizzy in the head and
falling over

i'm standing here
to wait to hold you
watching time flick click over
i'm standing still
watching for your river

all the words flow
down tumbling water
i drink you in and
fingers touching lips
make me sober

you are the light
you are the lover
you are the sigh
tumbling over and over
through my loving
head

you are the light
over, over and over
you are the song
over, over and over
you are the river
flowing through me

you are the word
the river over and over
i'm standing still
watching for your river song

Please remember that I am always open to collaborative efforts, as long as we can agree on the content and delivery method. Any collaboration does not have to be music & poetry, it can be purely music, poems, multimedia, short fiction and even longer fiction (I still have this urge to explore epistolary fiction with someone, but the suggestion seems to frighten people off to whom I have proposed projects in that vein 😅). Sometimes the chemistry works better than other times, but I generally find such things to be a positive experience as long as they are not “call & response” types of poetry collaborations — for some reason that type of collaboration always looks and feels contrived to me, and feels uneven in delivery — no matter the authors. I am also open to new challenges.

So… Reach out if you are interested in putting something together, together.