Rorschach Dragonfly: Song Lyrics by Tom Kozlowski and Roy Bentley

Image of dragonfly showing Rorschach pattern

Have you ever met someone in an instant undefined?
Like one of those ink-blot tests where you say what comes to mind?
We were both casualties, tattooed histories.
We were like amputees, battlefield refugees.

We listened to songs of death at the door—
veteran voices, without metaphor.

A little night magic began and ended with you.

I’ve heard or read it somewhere—
what you manifest is before you.
Is it in you? Is it in me?
Is it Infinite Possibility?

In a gallery that love-kissed day,
David watches Bathsheba bathe.
What the two of us couldn’t say, hearts paraphrased.

Ceilings of glass, light and a canvas of nudes—
I wanted to hold you, step into the painting with you.

A little night magic began and ended with you . . .

Thieving hours like fireflies,
insect tangos in my hand—
I saw that same light in your eyes
reflect back into mine . . .

Ceilings of glass, light and a canvas of nudes—
I wanted to hold you, step into the painting with you.

A little night magic began and ended with you . . .
A little night magic began and ended with you . . .

I called out to you under April skies , , ,
You answered back my name on wings of dragonflies.

 

Music by Tom Kozlowski. Lyrics by Tom Kozlowski and Roy Bentley.

Copyright © 2014 by Tom Kozlowski and Roy Bentley. All rights reserved.

Roy Bentley About Roy Bentley

Roy Bentley is the author of Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama Press), Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press), and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press). A new book, Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has been selected by Billy Collins as a finalist for the 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and will be publlshed in the spring of 2018 by the University of Arkansas Press. Work from that collection has appeared in Shenandoah, Pleiades, Rattle, Blackbird, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.

Comments

  1. Eric M. Martin says:

    Another really nice piece here.

    Am I right to identify some ideas relating to Pan, the pastoral magic/mystic god…in a kind of Romantic nature-as-magic sense (or in the mystical sense of elevated spiritual interconnectedness experienced through nature)…? There seems to be something Roman here, just beneath the surface.

    In any event, my mind moves in that direction listening to this song and reading the poem.

    Nice work!

    • Roy Bentley says:

      Eric,

      It’s gratifying when a song touches someone. I continue to confess a great deal of amazement at the process. Always surprises me, given the difficulty of the enterprise, when the magic is there.

      Thank you so much for that reaction.

      Roy

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