Praise for Jawbone

“Jawbone is many things: a dialogue between an artist and a silent lover at one moment erotic and lyric and at the  next surreal; a romp through a contemporary world where Hunderwasser, Piisarro, Odilon Redon and Mario Lemiuex show profiles hitherto unseen; the artist cutting into the complacent crowd.  In a kind of showdown worthy of the young Wyndham Lewis meets the mature Salvador Dali, McCabe, as visual and literary artist, takes on the city.”

• Pierre LAbbé

“Steve McCabe’s poetry crackles with an ever-modulating music of obsession, a constant flow of sudden maxims of revelation, radioed to us from the beyond of art, love, and freedom.  This is poetry that breathes the true spirit of the avante garde: joyous, exploratory, improvisational, full of pleasure and adventure, fantasy and insight.”

• A.F. Moritz

“Part of what makes this strange, revelatory verse work is its musicality.  Music permeates McCabe’s lyrics and subject matter alike.  Lines such as, “The secrecy that nature is hinged on / Electrifies my hand / With the memory of your memories,” sing and capture that same feeling of beauty and longing.”

• Erinn Banting

”For Steve McCabe, “Information is a jewel-encrusted codpiece worn by a eunuch on his death bed,”  In its place he gives us a series of surreal love poems painted on the canvas of a mind that does not dream but lives in a paiting, the act of painting, and the revolution that is art.  From pointillism to fauvism, cubism to Paul Klee, McCabe the painter takes us out of the three dimensional universe into the two dimensional universe of the painter’s canvas, relentlessly searching for, uncovering, and sketching random leaps of joy.”

• Harold Rhenisch

Born on the Bayeux Tapestry                                                                                  

Down on the bayou below the  stars
Where they sew carpets
To hang on the walls
Telling the story
Of a king’s fall

I was born

* The Bayeux Tapestry  (c.1073-83); an embroidered frieze 230 ft. long 
 celebrating William the  Conquerer’s invasion of England

Hunderwasser and Hiroshoge                                                                                  

The universe elongates
Curving as Hunderwasser 
Paints surf on a face around the eye-
            Tidal waves bubble ingrained in a Japanese woodblock-print 
            The concentric and imaginary thumbprints of an uncut tree 
            Orbiting in view of a maverick sun

Stay at home within your eye 
The edifice a dazzling point of light

A flattened curve erotically pinpoints a  brilliance
The ocean pulls away as the advancing  black sky 
            uncovers one eye
Hunderwasser’s hand conceals the other 

The root structure of tidal waves slashes  like hail 
A trajectory aiming from deep space 
            refusing 
To burst into flame

Consider that Hunderwasser and Hiroshoge  may have been 
            comrades 
Stretching polished edges into gnarled  limbs cresting when you 
            become dust 
At the back of the wind

A daughter abandons her father’s hand the  lines on his palm 
Show the failures in his life as he fills  boxes pausing to bury 
            his head in the sky

Viennese Steeple                                                                                                                                                            

Flowers climb 
With me to a crescendo

Hunderwasser paints magic snow
I’ve got a fever just for you

Fishtails splash
Flattened like some kind of book
Underneath a plum tree
Hunderwasser paints green snow

With you on my arm
I’m the man on the moon
Your eyes blotting purple ink

Symbolic  Romance: A Gustave Moreau Painting or                                                                    
Odilon Redon  Lithograph          

Information is a jewel encrusted codpiece
Worn by a eunuch on his death bed

In the hands of the wrong person  revealing everything
In the hands of the right person  revealing impotence

The wheels roll and plants grow
A man and a woman approach one another 

Diamonds nick a valve in my heart and I  wake to find you 
Dressing me with misinformation

1930-1998 Augustin Filipovic Croatian-Canadian Sculptor                                

Today I saw dishes in the sink of a man dead for one year
His laundry in the middle of being sorted
A favourite leather coat buttoned on a thin wire hanger

Stretched out the space where his bed had been
Newspaper clippings - an exhibit of Sumerian art 
           ten years ago

A perfect plaster bust of his mother wrapped in plastic
Sitting on a stool facing a shelf strewn with the tools 
           of his sculptor trade

Wax in a stainless steel saucepan resting on the unplugged 
           hot plate
 A bank draft stuck to the drafting table/ a tipped over 
           spray-paint can/ wax  bubbles
On the tile floor/ a poster from Moos Gallery in Yorkville 
           1970’s 
Augustin looked like a European movie star

Another photo torn at the edges black and white a young student 
            forming 
A life-size nude and now dapper dressed in a tuxedo 
Helping the cheerful blonde girl onto the stage for a spot lit 
           springtime waltz

Long-handled brushes in a glass jar sit on the windowsill 
          aimed at the sun
Two empty bottles of white wine almost touch
           testaments unfinished

Winning the Mayor of Rome’s Award
A young man intertwined with Trudeaumania
His abstract sculpture featured in Canada’s official 
           Centennial Book

And on the last 4th of July of this century I am 
           photographing 
His bust of John Kennedy
Small models cast in bronze feature a total likeness
Serving as the model for a larger more expressive 
           plaster head-

The cut of the jaw, the cheekbone, the profile; serve the 
           image of  pure realism
A sorrowful stillness cloaks the eyes as if a man has read 
           his own future
Gashes of emotion shape the bones of art, dreams and memory

The solid ecstasy of volume cutting as deeply as a tool 
           into wax 
Enveloping the joy carried to North America  in the 
Strong hands of the young sculptor 
           dying on Palm Sunday

Spiral Contessa                                                                                                       

Insinuates herself between your eyes
Ever outward yet inward a peeled orange
Telling you look at her while her face is  covered
Striking to the core 
You are hard pressed
She resides ever-winding circulating the  evening breeze
A sudden flash darkening you perceive her  quoting Wilde

You are in her the same never quite  between her eyes
You are the gloved hand
She knows how to stir those faint  remembrances
And becomes electrified when you pour  them into her
With black smoke.

For As Long As It Takes To Deliver  Your Promise                                                

The olive hair on your arm
Lay like a prayer
As my finger opened your hymnal

You sang quietly as a bird
Discovering the first rays of dawn
Tightening like a belt

I sucked in my breath lifting an  earthenware jug
To pour you into your form

The outline of your sigh wraps around my  shoulder
Like a hair on the bed

Morning opens its mouth to swallow high  noon
As I do you

Your breath tightens and releases
Like a table set for twelve
And the luminosity you pour over me

Your arms are the shadow 
In Italian cinema
So unlike this meditation on our  aloneness

Speckled-Grey                                                                                                         

The veil covering your face/ the water so  blue/ the paper 
            naming you 
Beneath a white veil/
I skipped a stone in the valley of honey  you parted your 
            hips/  like clouds
So spent I barely unlocked my bike you  wore a red veil/ 
I tore up the paper tossing bread in the  air/  
How can we live this way/ “How can we  live this way?”
            I answer leaning 

On a clover stick/ sky unfolding the  crumpled papers
Your great-grandfather talking to mine  leaned on a stickYou wore a white gown
I skipped a stone in the valley of honey  the sparkling water 
            green as an emerald
Tracking you to the water’s edge/ a veil  covered your face

Bough                                                                                                                      

The eyelids found a home on faces
 Desperate to stop seeing
Burning darkness

Eyelids thin as a solar flare
Flew as if magnetized
To the lovers paralysed by vision

I looked into your deepest memory
And saw myself swimming
Your body arcing with the kiss of an oriental bough

The white of your eye an alabaster tomb
I am buried alive able to blink
Our eyelids exchange the blindness of love

Balcony                                                                                                                   

Of a day when harps were a part of the  furniture 
            and architects composed 
At odd angles our hands and feet brought  us pleasure 
We knew to whisper the sound of a  sparrow’s throat  

Stranded 

On a railroad crossing with steel rails  through the middle 
            of our lives 
Shining as brightly as the inside of our  mouths we 
Heard a whistle and uttered are we not  here to see and 

Touch?

Above us the sky grew bluer and wider  with extra rooms 
            we imagined 
A heaven without sounds opposite to all  we knew 
Your legs singing springtime returning to  the harps 

Submerged 

On a porch near the lost continent 
            wind 
Impersonating your hair