The Skylark

Steven Outram

The Skylark

A song alone

comes down - and of the skylark

the last trace is gone.

Ampu

from "An Introduction to Haiku: an anthology of poems and poets from Basho to Shiki" by Harold G. Henderson

 Haiku only seems simple. I know almost nothing about the tradition, but from the little that I’ve read I’ve learned that most significant thing of all - I know almost nothing. In the sense that there are worlds of expression to explore yet. For one thing, that a poem’s art might be in what is not said, or what is there but not said – that’s more what I mean. And the Japanese poets are dedicated students of this. It’s not merely distillation of a thought, it’s getting to that level of writing where each word is a door swinging open to a new place. When it comes to poetry, how many words are enough? Is it possible that what our words have lost is a sense of silence, of falling into depths beyond words? When I read this haiku – a translation, it’s important to remember (a thousand subtleties have been lost) – I hear so many different notes. Loss, loneliness, the song (what is that song - what does it signify?), the element of nature, nature as a foil for human destinies, the qualities of the skylark – the symbolic nature of the bird. And this is without knowing any of the cultural language code being employed. I know so little. I know beauty, though, when I hear it. 

On the Island

Andrew Wyeth, "Starfish"

On the Island

After a night of wind we are surprised

by the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea

and leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore

this way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass

among the low whittled bushes, listening

to crickets, to the whisk of the small waves,

the rattling back of stones. “Observation,”

our Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science.

Look all around you. Some beaches

may be quite barren except for things washed up.”

A buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb

cloudy but unbroken. For an hour

my daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck.

She sings the song she’s just invented:

Everybody knows when the old days come.

Although it is October, today falls into the shape

of summer, that sense of languid promise

in which we are offered another

and then another spell of flawless weather.

It is the weather of Sundays,

the weather of memory, and I can see

myself sitting on a porch looking

out at water, the discreet shores

of a lake. Three or four white pines

were enough of a mystery, how they shook

and whispered, how at night I felt them

leaning against my window, like the beginning

of a story in which children must walk

deeper and deeper into a dark forest,

and are afraid, yet calm, unaware

of the arrangements made for them to survive.

My daughter counts her shells and stones,

my wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise

an old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky

to the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they

fold around rocks humped up out of the sea.

I can turn the wheel and blur it all

into a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light.

“A steady push of wind,” we read in the book,

“gives water its rolling, rising and falling motion.

As the sea moves up and down, the wave itself

moves forward. As it nears the shore friction

from the bottom causes it to rise higher

until it tips forward in an arc and breaks.”

On the table in front of the house

is the day’s collection: sea-glass

and starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle—

some to be taken home, arranged in a box,

laid on a shelf, later rediscovered, later

thrown away, casually, without regret,

and some of it, even now, to be discarded,

like the lesser stones, and the pale

chipped shells which are so alike

we can agree that saving one or two will be enough.

Lawrence Raab

 
 

“The weather of memory”. This is a poem of reflection, of looking forward, looking back, saving and discarding, life moments coming and going like waves washing in and out…  The writing seems easy and effortless, but the more times I read it, the more art I find. “Observation”. Yes, exactly. Observing the poem. Maybe the poem also is, for us, something to be found and collected together with others, taken home – certainly I am arranging them here, on a kind of shelf. Poems like reminders of thoughts, of days, poems to be treasured and displayed. That is my goal for this blog, I would say.( But one or two are not enough.)