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!