Question VII

 

 

 

Albrecht Durer

VII.

 

What is it that upsets the volcanoes

that spit fire, cold and rage?

Why wasn't Christopher Columbus

able to discover Spain?

How many questions does a cat have?

Do tears not yet spilled

wait in small lakes?

Or are they invisible rivers

that run toward sadness?

 

Pablo Neruda

 

 

These questions! - when I first came across these, something broke in my brain. It wasn't until I read these poems that I understood what poetry does, or what the possibilities  truly were. In all my years of reading poems, I hadn't seen it. And I don't even know if I can put into words what I am beginning to learn.

At first, the questions seemed child-like and beautiful, but not particularly poetic or deep. Where is the rhythm, the wordplay, for instance? Where is the development of metaphor? But my curiosity was piqued. I read more.

I wrote about this before -( LXXII), and I still hold to those thoughts, but since  then they have grown. Something else is happening in the words - something more than mere childlike wondering. For instance, in that question, "How many questions does a cat have?" 

 
That's not naive wondering, it's questioning whether I have been wrong about the world I live in. We are very "scientific" about the things around us. We have tested things on certain levels, and have come to conclusions. But what if we got it wrong? What if we made a specific answer cover too large an area? Or too small?

What if we have skewed our vision of reality so much that we have lost the path and are now traveling down some self-invented by-way leading only into more distortion?


Neruda's question poems cracked open a treasure box for me. When I look at the cat, I see what I have been told is there, and forget that I have agency in seeing, that I need to take up my eyes and use them in a fresh way. 

 

Science is too small explain a cat.


What I am learning is that poetry is thinking and seeing, or something that is both - seeking? (I just noticed that when I patch those two words together, "seeking" is what get.) Seeking the fuller truth of things. Seeking the possibilities. Cracking out of smallthink.

Does a cat ask questions?
Obviously.

Now what we need is a poet to hear them. 

 

 

 

 

Nerves

 

Martin Lewis

                                                 

Nerves

You have noticed the curious increased exasperation

Of human nerves these late years? Not only in Europe,

Where reasons exist, but universal; a rope or a net

Is being hauled in, a tension screwed higher;

Few minds now are quite sane; nearly every person 

Seems to be listening for a crash, listening...

And wishing for it, with a kind of enraged

Sensibility.

                   Or is it that we really feel

A gathering in the air of something that hates

Humanity, and in that storm-light see

Ourselves with too much pity and the others too clearly?

Well, this is February, nineteen-three-nine.

We count the months now, we shall count the days.

It seems time that we find something outside our

Own nerves to lean on.

Robinson Jeffers

 

I read this with amazement. The date this poem was written!! 

It could be describing today.

 

 

 

On a Boat

Barry Moser

On a Boat, Awake at Night

Faint wind rustles reeds and cattails;

I open the hatch, expecting rain -- moon floods the lake.

Boatmen and water birds dream the same dream;

a big fish splashes off like a frightened fox.

It's late -- men and creatures forget each other

while my shadow and I amuse ourselves alone.

Dark tides creep over the flats -- I pity the cold mud-worms;

the setting moon, caught in a willow, lights a dangling spider.

Life passes swiftly, hedged by sorrow;

how long before you've lost it -- a scene like this?

Cocks crow, bells ring, a hundred birds scatter;

drums pound from the bow, shout answers shout.

Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101) (translated by Burton Watson)

 

 

 

This scene, described in such specific detail, comes alive. I am there, seeing and hearing these things, thinking these thoughts. 

 

It's magic. 

 

And then I look at the dates! Really? 

 

1037-1101? 

 

It could be this minute! 

 

What is the name for this? Time travel + mind meld + the ability to repeat this experience every time we want?

 

If you know of a word for it, tell me please!

 

The Waggon-Maker

 

Carl Larsson

The Waggon-Maker

I have made tales in verse, but this man made

Waggons of elm to last a hundred years;

The blacksmith forged the rims and iron gears,

His was the magic that the wood obeyed.

Each deft device that country wisdom bade,

Or farmers' practice needed, he preserved.

He wrought the subtle contours, straight and curved

Only by eye, and instinct of the trade.

No weakness, no offense in any part,

It stood the strain in mired fields and roads

In all a century's struggle for its bread;

Bearing, perhaps, eight thousand heavy loads,

Beautiful always as a work of art,

Homing the bride, and harvest, and men dead.

John Masefield

A perfect poem. How every word fits snug in its place!  - I feel an intertwining of the writer and his subject. In his appreciation of the carpenter's craft, there is an equal echo in his own. 

The way he writes, "I have made tales in verse, but this man made..." and then describes the wisdom of the woodworker and blacksmith, how they use a knowledge passed down to them through time, and with this create something useful and beautiful to last a hundred years.

That sense of Time! And wisdom passed down! And that "only by eye" and instinct! This is an artist recognizing another's artistry.

It gives me chills. 

There is something gorgeous in the meeting of arts.

A recognition of the highest purposes? Beauty and Truth, or Beauty and Usefulness?

Together, they are a powerhouse, an explosion, a celebration.

I walk away from the poem wishing I had a part in that Beauty-work.

The Thrush's Nest

Bruno Liljefors

The Thrush's Nest

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

John Clare
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

John Clare, bird enthusiast, bird poet.

"I drank the sound with joy."

And that's the impression I get - that Clare was a man who needed nature to bring him

out of himself, to lift him up. The birds fed his soul.  

 

I can relate. 

 

 

 

 

Forty Shades of Green

Susan Ogilvy

Forty Shades of Green

 
A Crown/Dulux/Farrow and Ball Poem


I

Tunsgate Green

Green Ground

Cooking Apple Green

Churlish Green

Saxon Green

Folly Green

Minster Green

Vert de Terre

Card Room Green

Breakfast Room Green


II

Teresa’s Green

Soft Fauna

Woodland Pearl

Jungle Fever

Peppermint Beach

Amazon Jungle

Soft Moss

Lime Zest

Kiwi Burst

Willow Creek


III

Grecian Garland

Forest Falls

Paradise Green

Grecian Spa

Minted Glory

Deep Ivy

Woodland Fern

Tarragon Glory

Apple Mist

Soft Lime


IV

Cool Aqua

Wind Chime

Olive Tropics

Lunch Date

Soft Khaki

Chartreuse Mix

Dragonfly

Bamboo Leaf

Soft Duck Egg

Emerald Delight

Frank Ormsby

 

 

Because its Spring!

The beginning of The Green. 

 

 

 

Taxman

Adriaen van Ostade

Taxman

Seven scythes leaned at the wall.

Beard upon golden beard

The last barley load

Swayed through the yard.

The girls uncorked the ale.

Fiddle and feet moved together.

Then between stubble and heather

A horseman rode.

George Mackay Brown 

 

I love the image this poem paints - after all the the hard work, the sweat of the season, the worry over the weather, finally, the harvest is in! 

It's done!

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and the sweet moment of completion inspires

dancing, drinking, feasting ----

 

 

until a familiar figure rises in the distance...

 

 

 

Funny/not funny, right?

 

 

 

Words

 

 

Agnelo Bronzino

Words

 

Always the arriving winds of words

Pour like Atlantic gales over these ears,

These reefs, these foils and fenders, these shrinking

And sea-scalded edges of the brainland.

Rebutted and rebounding, on they post

Past my remembrance, falling all unplanned.

But some day out of the darkness they'll come forth,

Arrowed and narrowed into my tongue's tip,

And speak for me -- their most astonished host.

 

W.R. Rodgers

The image of words as a wind, a storm, as waves hitting the "sea-scalded edges of the brainland" is so perfectly fitting.

Ceaseless, loud, battering - this is a familiar, daily experience.

The thought that some day this gale might turn, might come from me instead of at me,

I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

Top of the Stove

 

Hubert Shuptrine

 

Top of the Stove

And then she would lift her griddle
tool from the kindling bin, hooking one
end through a hole in the cast-iron disk
to pry it up with a turn of her wrist.

Our faces pinked over to watch coal
chunks churn and fizz. This was before
I had language to say so, the flatiron
hot all day by the kettle, fragrance

of coffee and coal smoke over
the kitchen in a mist. What did I know?
Now they've gone. Language remains.
I hear her voice like a lick of flame

to a bone-cold day. Careful, she says.
I hold my head close to see what she means.

David Baker

 

 

"This was before I had language..."

 

Here, a poem that fits me like an envelope.

I am grieving the deaths of my mother and father. 

They passed away last year, only days apart.

They raised us kids on a homestead in the Back of Nowhere.

So the sounds and smells surrounding a wood stove are the sounds and smells of my childhood.

 

The painting of the empty chair by the stove - it says it all.

 

 

"They've gone." 

 

But how blessed I was then, how blessed I am still, to have had them.

 

 

To Night

To Night

So thou art come again, old black-winged night,
Like an huge bird, between us and the sun,
Hiding, with out-stretched form, the genial light;
And still, beneath thine icy bosom's dun
And cloudy plumage, hatching fog-breathed blight
And embryo storms, and crabbéd frosts, that shun
Day's warm caress. The owls from ivied loop
Are shrieking homage, as thou cowerest high;
Like sable crow pausing in eager stoop
On the dim world thou gluttest thy clouded eye,
Silently waiting latest time's fell whoop,
When thou shalt quit thine eyrie in the sky,
To pounce upon the world with eager claw,
And tomb time, death, and substance in thy maw.


Thomas Lovell Beddoes
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

As an example of taking a simile to its limits, this is wonderful.

That weary "so thou art come again...." , as if Night is an annoying kill-joy who keeps ruining the party soon becomes much more ominous - an evil bird-spirit hatching blight, storms and frost, a predator, waiting silently to destroy.

And the words! The words!

 

Genial - dun - plumage - blight - embryo - crabbed - shun - caress - homage - sable - stoop - gluttest - fell - whoop - eyrie - pounce - maw

 

 

The poem may be in strict sonnet form, but the words are wild!

 

 

Bavarian Gentians

 

Bavarian Gentians

 

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness,
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding
darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

 

 D. H. Lawrence

 

I see Lawrence in this poem, on the edge of Winter, sitting by his gentian, thinking of the world turning into the dark season, meditating on its blueness.

That deep blue - that dark!

 

"Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!

let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower..."

It's a fantasy of blue - it's like a prayer.

Down into frost and darkness  - 

down into death's country with a flower of hope for a guide?

 

Is this what they used to call Alchemy? 

To carry a dark flower into the blackness where it becomes a light?

"Lead me then, lead me the way."

 

 

Even in the darkest place life is not extinguished.

from Contradictions: Tracking Poems

Gwen Raverat

from Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1.

Look:        this is January      the worst onslaught
is ahead of us         Don't be lured
by these soft grey afternoons      these sunsets cut
from pink and violet tissue-paper      by the thought
the days are lengthening
Don't let the solstice fool you;
our lives will always be
a stew of contradictions
the worst moments of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly still      and our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life.


18.
The problem, unstated till now, is how
to live in a damaged body
in a world where pain is meant to be gagged
uncured      un-grieved over      The problem is
to connect, without hysteria, the pain
of any one's body with the pain of the body's world
For it is the body's world
filled with creatures      filled with dread
mishapen so      yet the best we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I long to live on this earth
walking her boundaries      never counting the cost


Adrienne Rich

 

"This battering, blunt-edged life."

That phrase certainly feels true today.

And how do I live it? How reconcile my struggle and the struggle of others, how "connect" even to broken things and selves?

And that last line --

"Never counting the cost"

That's what I really want.

To live full-out, in spite of all the beat-downs.

 

 

Spider

 

 

Spider

Teacher of Swedenborg and St. John of the Cross,

First anchorite, mysterious builder --

From the dark corner of my room

His destination

The distant northern star. . .

As he weaves, as he spreads his webs,

He is singing.

I'm certain of it,

He is singing.

Charles Simic

I can't say more about this than it already says - 

Singing!