Conches on Christmas

Antonio Cazorla

Conches on Christmas



Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss



except that there
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological affair,



and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—
an encrusted school of twenty-four
Gabriellan trumpets at my beach house door
and barely half-alive.



Oh, you can bet
I picked them up, waded right up to my ankles in
there among ’em, hefted ’em up to my ears to hear the din
of all things oceanwise and wet,



but every of the ancient, bearded, anthracite,
salt-water-logged spirals,
every of the massive and unwieldy, magisterial
mollusks shut tight—



no din, no horns roaring reveille, no warning, no beat, no taps,
no coral corpus,
no porpoise purpose
except it was a secret purpose kept strictly under wraps.



A fine Christmas gift indeed, this
obscure migration,
this half-dead conch confederation
which would have smelled yon tannenbaum like fish—



a fine set of unwrappable presents
and no receipt by which I could redeem them.
I lifted one up by its stem
and thought of how, by increments,



all twenty-four
must have lugged those preassembled bodies here
sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer,
to my drasty stretch of shore.



And, no other explanation being offered for the situation,
I thought that I might understand
how one could argue that the impulse driving them to land
was a sort of evolutionary one—



misguided, yes, redundant, a million years too late,
a needless, maybe rogue and almost campy
demonstration of how history,
even in the world of the invertebrate,



repeats itself—breaker
crashing down on breaker in the Gulf, Gulf War
coming after Gulf War.
O Maker,



there is so much slug inside these shells,
here, at the end of December,
at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember.
Miracles sell well,



but Lord, it can be numbing
to a people who cannot
tell between a second nature and a second thought,
a second chance, or a second coming.



Mike Chasar

A Meditation for Christmas

Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

A Meditation for Christmas

Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!

   Whereon the eternal Lord of all things made,

For us poor mortals, and our endless bliss,

       Came down from heaven, and, in a manger laid

       The first, rich, offerings of our ransom paid:

Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!

Consider what estate of fearful woe

     Had then been ours, had he refused this birth;

From sin to sin tossed vainly to and fro,

       Hell's playthings, o'er a doomed and helpless earth!

       Had he from us witheld his priceless worth.

Consider man's estate of fearful woe!

Consider to what joys he bids thee rise,

     Who comes, himself, life's bitter cup to drain!

Ah! look on this sweet Child, whose innocent eyes

       Ere all be done, shall close in mortal pain,

       That thou at last Love's Kingdom may'st attain:

Consider to what joys he bids thee rise!

Consider all this wonder, O my soul:

     And in thin inmost shrine make music sweet!

Yea, let this world, from furthest pole to pole,

       Join in thy praises this dread birth to greet;

       Kneeling to kiss thy Saviour's infant feet!

Consider all this wonder, O my soul.

Selwyn Image

“Consider all this wonder.” That has been the theme of this year.

Christmas

Unknown

Christmas

I had almost forgotten the singing in the streets,

Snow piled up by the houses, drifting

Underneath the door into the warm room,

Firelight, lamplight, the little lame cat

Dreaming in soft sleep by the hearth, mother dozing,

Waiting for Christmas to come, the boys and me

Trudging over blanket fields waving lanterns to the sky.

I had almost forgotten the smell, the feel of it all,

The coming back home, with girls laughing like stars,

Their cheeks, holly berries, me kissing one,

Silent-tongued, soberly, by the long church wall;

Then back to the kitchen table, supper on the white cloth,

Cheese, bread, the home-made wine;

Symbols of the nights' joy, a holy feast.

And I wonder now, years gone, mother gone,

The boys and girls scattered, drifted away with the snowflakes,

Lamplight done, firelight over,

If the sounds of our singing in the streets are still there,

Those old tunes, still praising;

And now, a life-time of Decembers away from it all,

A branch of remembering holly spears my cheeks,

And I think it may be so;

Yes, I believe it may be so.

Leonard Clark

in Time and Tide, December 1959

Spellbound

Andrew Davidson

Spellbound 

 
 The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go. 
 

  Emily Brontë 

“Nothing dear can move me.” Does anyone else know that frozen feeling?

 That paralyzed state of being? That turned-into-stone sensation?

 

Reluctance

Andrew Wyeth

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods

   And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

   And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

   And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

   Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

   And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

   When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

   No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

   But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man

   Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

   To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

   Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost

A dear family member of mine has recently died. With his passing, it feels as if a season of my life has ended. As if the time of plenty, of warmth is over; and I look around, surprised at the change, even though I expected it. Frost speaks so gracefully, “ I have climbed the hills of view/ And looked at the world, and descended;/I have come by the highway home,/And lo, it is ended.”. That‘s how I feel. And like he says, I don’t want to “bow and accept the end”, not so quickly or easily – no. I want to walk and look while thinking and remembering, I want to soak up all the benefits, all the riches of knowing and loving S, I want to stay here awhile and be still.

Mont Blanc

Oscar Droege

Mont Blanc



I

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters—with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.



II

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—

Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie,

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,

Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came

To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging

To hear—an old and solemn harmony;

Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep

Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep

Which when the voices of the desert fail

Wraps all in its own deep eternity;

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,

Thou art the path of that unresting sound—

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate fantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around;

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,

In the still cave of the witch Poesy,

Seeking among the shadows that pass by

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!



III

Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd

The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps;

A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously

Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,

Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea

Of fire envelop once this silent snow?

None can reply—all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

So solemn, so serene, that man may be,

But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.



IV

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell

Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,

Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,

The torpor of the year when feeble dreams

Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep

Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound

With which from that detested trance they leap;

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,

And that of him and all that his may be;

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound

Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,

Remote, serene, and inaccessible:

And this, the naked countenance of earth,

On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death, distinct with many a tower

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil

Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

The limits of the dead and living world,

Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place

Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;

Their food and their retreat for ever gone,

So much of life and joy is lost. The race

Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,

And their place is not known. Below, vast caves

Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever

Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,

Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.



V

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy? 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

This is Shelley in full force. He is so awed by Mont Blanc’s presence that an avalanche of thoughts tumbles through his mind. As I read this poem I feel as if I could be standing beside him, observing how he is thunderstruck by the immensity of what he sees, and what he knows is there but cannot see – and hear him ask out loud, “What are you?”, “What are you saying to me?”, “What does all this mean?” He knows that the mountain communicates something. “...this, the naked countenance of earth,/ On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains/ Teach the adverting mind.” Somehow, he feels that the truth - an answer, is within the mountain. “The secret Strength of things/ Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome/ Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!” 

 

I know that awe, that overpowering sense of the immensity of time and the universe hits forcibly when I stand before a mountain. I am flooded with unspoken questions and emotions. What a task Shelley set himself to, to put his thoughts into words!

 "Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood/By all, but which the wise, and great, and good/ Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel."

fr. On a Raised Beach

Bo Bartlett

fr. On a Raised Beach

Listen to me - Truth is not crushed;
It crushes, gorgonizes all else unto itself.
The trouble is to know it when you see it?
You will have no trouble with it when you do.
Do not argue with me. Argue with these stones.
Truth has no trouble in knowing itself.
This is it. The hard fact. The inoppugnable reality,
Here is something for you to digest
Eat this and we'll see what appetite you have left
For a world hereafter.

Hugh MacDiarmid

I have loved this poem for so long. Back when I was in university, I made a mural of it for my wall. Which seems funny now, when so many use the phrase “my truth”, as if truth were a cat. Could truth be a cat? (That would be a great question poem for Neruda to work out.) Is it a thing you own and take care of, or grow, as in a garden or a houseplant? Is truth something you possess? Or, as MacDiarmid suggests, what if truth is like a rock? Itself and nothing else? Solid, set, unchanging? What if truth cannot be possessed? 

 

I hope the latter is correct. If I can possess the truth it is a lacklustre, lame thing, a pathetic not-worth-trusting-in thing. So help me, may truth be BIG, Gigantic, colossal! Let it be enormous, beyond my puny comprehension! If it can be “mine”, subject to my whims, my incoherencies, my ever-changing perceptions, my ignorance and arrogance and well, silliness – God help us all. And if truth is mine – what is yours? Can both exist? At the same time? Must I eradicate you in order to maintain the predominance of “my truth”? 

Truth is not ours. We are Truth’s. 

And yes, it will crush us, if we do not move with it. It will destroy us. You don’t have to argue with me – as MacDiarmid says - “Argue with these stones.” Look around. Does the world dance to our tune? Do trees bend to our bidding? Does the storm calm when you raise your hand? 

Truth does not belong to me. 
 I belong to the truth. And that is no small thing.

Falling Leaves and Early Snow

David Grossmann

Falling Leaves and Early Snow



 In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.


In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.



Kenneth Rexroth
from The Collected Shorter Poems



"The year fades with the white frost."
"Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream."
"Thin blades of cloud."
"We stand in the snowy twilight."

And then!
"An owl cries in the sifting darkness."


An owl cries in the sifting darkness? This is an accuracy of speech so exquisite I want to rave, make an idiot of myself, rant about poetry as an unparalleled instrument of clarity.
If snow is falling, it's like icing sugar being sifted. And it appears as if the darkness is being sifted. That's more than poetry, it's true. And what is falling? The snow or the darkness?

I love this poem. (I try not to say stupid things like that, but I'm stupid!) Every line is an image I know, that I recall from somewhere - an actual experience, a movie scene, a painting? Is there a collective soul? Is there a place where all beautiful memories and images converge? Where you and I remember the same moment, even though we have never met, and live half a world away? Is it possible? I need to think about this.