Monday, 21 July 2025

Swimming After Thoughts


Ana Teresa Fernandez




Swimming After Thoughts 

In Memoriam: Robert Penn Warren
 

Across the blackened pond and back again,
he's swimming in an ether all his own;

lap after lap, he finds the groove
no champion of motion would approve,

since time and distance hardly cross his mind
except as something someone else might find

of interest. He swims and turns, making
his way through frogspawn, lily pads, and shaking

reeds, a slow and lofty lolling stroke
that cunningly preserves what's left to stoke

his engines further, like a steamwheel plunging
through its loop of light. He knows that lunging

only breaks the arc of his full reach.
He pulls the long, slow oar of speech,

addressing camber-backed and copper fish;
the minnows darken like ungathered wishes,

flash and fade - ideas in a haze of hopes
ungathered into syntax, sounding tropes.

The waterbugs pluck circles round his ears
while, overhead, a black hawk veers

to reappraise his slithering neck and frogs
take sides on what or who he is: a log

or lanky, milk-white beast. He goes on swimming,
trolling in the green-dark glistening

silence and subtending mud where things
begin, where thoughts amass in broken rings

and surface, break to light, the brokered sound
of lost beginnings - fished for, found.
 

Jay Parini 
 
 
 "Swimming is a wonderful way of writing. Your body is totally occupied, there's nothing else and your mind goes blank." 
 
Robert Penn Warren
 

"In the green-dark glistening silence..."
 
I wanted to write something in praise of this most excellent poem, but the images and rhythms and words are so beautiful that I just want to read it, and be quiet.
 


Monday, 7 July 2025

Through Morning Mist


 




Through morning mist, preceded by its moo,
The lowing cow looms slowly into view.

Issa


fr. A Net of Fireflies
translated by Harold Stewart


See?
There's a poem for everything.