Marine Surface, Low Overcast

 

 

Marine Surface, Low Overcast 

 

Out of churned aureoles

this buttermilk, this

herringbone of albatross,

floss of mercury,

deshabille of spun

aluminum, furred with a veloute

of looking-glass,

 

a stuff so single

it might almost be lifted,

folded over, crawled underneath

or slid between, as nakedness-

caressing sheets, or donned

and worn, the train-borne

trapping of an unrepeatable

occasion,

 

this wind-silver

rumpling as of oatfields,

a suede of meadow,

a nub, a nap, a mane of lustre

lithe as the slide

of muscle in its

sheath of skin,

 

laminae of living tissue,

mysteries of flex,

affinities of texture,

subtleties of touch, of pressure

and release, the suppleness

of long and intimate

association,

 

new synchronies of fingertip,

of breath, of sequence,

entities that still can rouse,

can stir or solder,

whip to a froth, or force

to march in strictly

hierarchical formation

 

down galleries of sheen, of flux,

cathedral domes that seem to hover

overturned and shaken like a basin

to the noise of voices,

from a rustle to the jostle

of such rush-hour

conglomerations

 

no loom, no spinneret, no forge, no factor,

no process whatsoever, patent

applied or not applied for,

no five-year formula, no fabric

for which pure imagining,

except thus prompted,

can invent the equal.

 

Amy Clampitt 

 

When it comes to description - if there were a Hall of Fame - Amy Clampitt 

would deserve a place there. 

 

"floss of mercury" 

"deshabille of spun aluminum" 

"down galleries of sheen"...

 

  

Can these descriptions ever be equaled? 

 

 

 

 

Introductions

Balthasar van der Ast

Introductions

Some of what we love

we stumble upon—

a purse of gold thrown on the road,

a poem, a friend, a great song.

And more

discloses itself to us—

a well among green hazels,

a nut thicket—

when we are worn out searching

for something quite different.

And more

comes to us, carried

as carefully

as a bright cup of water,

as new bread.

Moya Cannon

How many of the things we love have been stumbled upon, run into, or been shown us by a friend? How many times while walking have we come around a bend to a view so unexpectedly gorgeous - a tree with leaves on fire or a corner pocket of woods crowded with Queen Anne's Lace? What about the day Mung Bean and I were talking in the schoolyard and happened to look up at what I've never seen before or since - a rainbow ring around the sun?

 

So many beautiful things have found me.

 

The cobalt feather of a Stellar Jay, a Golden Cowrie shell, a piece of worm-eaten wood that looks like a miniature landscape - that's not even getting into the books that have jumped at me, or the poems, or how a painting gripped me by the neck as my eye ran over a wall...

 

Hello, gifts.

 

Glad to meet you.

 

Horseman in Rain

Unknown

Horseman in Rain

Primordial waters: clover and oat striving, water-walls,
a meshing of cords in the net of the night,
in the barbarous weave of the damp, dropping water,
a rending of water-drops, lamenting successions,
diagonal rage, cutting heaven.
Steeped in aromas, smashing the water, interposing
the roan of their gloss, like a foliage, between boulder water.
The horses gallop in water,
their vapor attending, in a lunatic milk,
a stampede of doves that hardens, like water.
Not day, but a cistern
of obdurate weather, green agitations,
where hooves join a landscape of haste
with the lapse of the rain and the bestial aroma of horses.
Blankets and pommels, clustering cloak-furs,
seedfalls of darkness
ablaze on the haunches of brimstone
that beat the considering jungle.


                         Beyond and beyond and beyond
And beyond and beyond and beyond and beyoooooond:
the horsemen demolish the rain, the horsemen
pass under the bittering hazelnut, the rain
weaves unperishing wheat in a shimmer of lustres.
Here is water's effulgence, confusion of lightning,
to spill on the leaf, here, from the noise of the gallop,
the water goes wounded to earth, without flight. 
The bridle reins dampen; branch-covered archways,
footfalls of footfalls, an herbage of darkness
in splintering starshapes, moonlike, icelike, a cyclone of horses
riddled with points like an icicle prism -
and born out of furor, the innocent fingers brim over,
the apple encompassing terror
and the terrible banners of empire, are smitten.
Pablo Neruda (translated by Ben Belitt)

What just happened?!!

What was that?

A kind of list? Of how water can fall or be smashed or be spilled, how it weaves and shimmers and spits - or this, "here is water's effulgence" (effulgence, what a great word - "a brilliant radiance, a shining forth")? I haven't come across many lists with the action and movement in this one. The horses galloping, stampeding, hooves flying - the smell and the sound of them - wonderful! This is the magic of Neruda.



 

Everything Changes

Alexey Kravchenko

Everything Changes

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again.

What has happened. The water

You once poured into the wine cannot be 

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with you final breath.

Bertolt Brecht

translated by John Willett

fr. Poem For the Day: Two

Edited by Retta Bowen, Nick Temple, Stephanie Weinrich, and Nicholas Albery

“Everything changes.” and then he changes everything around. He proves his point. The first stanza starts on a positive note, but leaves us with a word of warning – yes, everything changes, but what you’ve done can’t be undone. And then he switches it! Yes, the past is fixed, but everything changes. Things can be different. You can begin again. Even at the last moment. (I find it interesting that he uses the image of water and wine, as if to recall the first miracle of Jesus.)

So which is it? It’s such a subtle shift in attitude - like the view from one window to the next. But sometimes an inch is enough. Sometimes a different slant of light reveals an entirely new vista, shows an open road we had not seen before. We can start again. We too can be changed.

the beautiful changes

Morna Rhys

The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Richard Wilbur

“The beautiful changes”.  Such an intertwining of meaning! (Like the twisting of many threads into one.) Is it saying that changes are beautiful, or that that change is what makes for beauty, or that beauty changes us - or all of those things in turn? I don't grasp this poem fully or even half-ly, but I like it. (For one thing, Queen Anne's Lace is my favourite flower, and walking through a field of them, as I can in this poem, is something I want to do a lot of.) It's the line, "The beautiful changes as a forest is changed/By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it." that makes me pause. Is Wilbur saying that Beauty changes the person (or animal or thing or whatever) who has contact with it? And that if I (a kind of chameleon, yes,  mantis? well, maybe) spend time in the forest (or any beautiful place like it) long enough to become "in tune" with it, not only does it change me, but I change it, "deepen" it, as it were? Is that what he means? And then, "Your hands hold roses always in a way that says they are not only yours." And what is "a second finding"? It sounds like an offering, the way the roses are held, a sharing, or a transferring. And this mention of how the beautiful "sunder(s)/Things and thing's selves for a second finding" - could that be saying that there is a kind of merging that happens with us and the beautiful? A joining and deepening of both otherwise separate things? (This is straining my brain a bit.) 

This is what I take from it, right or wrong:
The lovely image of walking through a field of Queen Ann's Lace and the flowers swaying and moving as I pass.
Your hands full of roses. And the idea that touching or holding or being within beauty changes me. And the crazy thought that I add to it, too, that this wonder I feel is a kind of sharing between myself and Beauty. 
And, of course, that poetry is beautiful, and changes me.