HIDDEN WINE presents

Reading, Story-telling and Book Signing

	FREE EVENING EVENT
	Lightning-Bark Words From the Cave of Cesh Corran: An Evening with Martin Shaw and Jay Leeming— For one night only we are proud to present an evening with UK storyteller Martin Shaw and poet Jay Leeming. This is a rallying call for all vagabonds, brigands and piratical nomads to gather for a night of rousing Gaelic story and electifying poetry. Once present we will light fires, rub shoulders and feed the horses for the ride up to our home of delightful wildness, The Minnesota Mens Conference. Please join us at your rightful place by the fire. Monday, September 3rd, 2007 Magers and Quinn Bookstore 3038 Hennepin Avenue South, Minneapolis Monday, September 3rd, 6:00 Free

Martin Shaw is an award winning rites-of-passage leader, storyteller and mythologist. An international teacher, he is also a visiting lecturer on the Strategic Leadership Programme at Templeton College, Oxford. Based on Dartmoor in the UK, he is author of ‘A Branch From the Lightning Tree’ ( avail 2008)

‘Martin is a teacher of rare and fierce beauty. To hear him tell a story can be like falling of a cliff or entering a persian garden. He is a great enemy of mediocrity, wherever it hides.’

— Daniel Deardorff, Author and mythologist.

Jay Leeming is the author of “Dynamite on a China Plate," a book of poems published by The Backwaters Press. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines including Ploughshares, Poetry East and the Gettysburg Review. He has been a featured reader and teacher at Butler University, the Omega Institute, Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conference, the Woodstock Poetry Festival and the International Centre for World Spirituality in Edinburgh, Scotland. He lives and teaches in Ithaca, New York.

information on the web: http://jayleeming.com

more sample poems: Jay Leeming

For more information call:
Craig Ungerman (860) 923-6987

for registration click here

Walking Coy Hill Road

1.

Two weeks until solstice, and there’s so much light
every day feels like three days. I spent the first one eating oatmeal,
the second washing down a pile of old boards for $10 an hour.
On the third day I took a bath in accordance with the scriptures
that my body learned while floating in the womb.
Perhaps because life is short
we should live each moment at full volume
with the pedal jammed against the floor.
At sunset I sat down by the pond to eat my brown rice,
and a gun went off in the trees.

2.

I have spent time in the alternate universes
where you and I live happily ever after.
Like the one in which I am just a little older
and so marry you after all, or the one
in which we both live in the same town
and so get to know each other more gently.
But it’s no use. For us to be together now
so much would have to be different
that we would be total strangers to ourselves.
Sometimes I catch sight of us
sitting at a table in the bakery, each of us held
by the other, though we are not touching.

3.

This morning on the news the Attorney General said
that citizens’ rights must be violated further
or else “our ability to catch terrorists will be more difficult.”
These days eloquence in the capitol is shot on sight.
Jefferson’s thousand-volume library
can only show us how far we’ve fallen,
a circle of light we see above us in the dark
before the well-opening is covered with a stone.

4.

Sometimes the moon writes your shadow
on the road ahead of you like it’s trying to tell you something.
My ancestors probably knew that language,
but I could only understand it if I slept for twenty years
at a ninety-degree angle to the nightly news.
So I walk in boots of ignorance
hoping I’ll hear the message again in a dream,
or that any damage I may cause
will be healed by the next ice age.

5.

These words arrived suddenly, like large glasses of water
handed to me as I walked down Coy Hill Road at dusk.
I nearly dropped them before I made it into the house.
In fact it’s possible I left most of the gift out there in the dark
to be swallowed by coyotes, or woven as raindrops
into the phoebe’s mossy nest.
If anything’s missing I’m not sure I could tell.
When you’ve lived indoors as long as we have
entire continents can vanish beneath the sea
before you notice anything’s gone.

copyright ©2007 Jay Leeming, all rights reserved

508 1/2 Utica Street Ithaca, NY 14850