House On a Cliff

House On a Cliff

Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors
The winking signal on the waste of sea.
Indoors the sound of the wind, outdoors the wind.
Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.

Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors
The strong man pained to find his red blood cools,
While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors
The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.

Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors
The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep.
Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross
Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep.

Louis MacNeice

 

What is this drama?

"Indoors the locked heart and the lost key."

 

I seem to have lost the ability to comment.

I'm at sea. Thinking, wondering, and no words come. 

Their Fire

Albert Bierstadt

 

Their Fire

Their fire was small. They fed it only enough

To keep them through the night and to keep them

Together and unafraid

Lying between it and the face of the cliff

Where, at the foot under a hanging stone,

They had made their shelter

For a time, as others had in years so distant

Now, they seemed as thick and soft as the stillness

Standing around their sleep

In which the animals also slept (the beavers

And otters whose doors were deep under the water,

Squirrels in their hollows)

Or walked in the sleep of others (the gray foxes,

The martens and black bears, silent, listening).

Had they too wondered,

Those other makers of fire, how long to linger

In this same place, how many living seasons

It would keep them warm,

Would hold them together at a single hearthstone

While the round year turned the sky, thickened the clouds

Or thinned then, turning

The snow and the rain as it turned the wind, turned leaves

And turned the color of their hair like ermine's fur

And turned the earth?

They held their hands out to that restless fire

As if to shield it, to calm it, and they turned

Their faces to its light.

David Wagoner

I wanted to ignore the circumstances and just have poems. But poetry comes out of what we’re living. And what we’re living is so strange that it’s hard to know what to say or do. But it does feel like each family unit (sometimes that means 1, because 1 is a potential family, and comes from a family, whether blood or water, however fractured or subtracted from) is sitting by its fire, ruminating over the past, wondering about the future. We are self-absorbed at this moment, so I like how this poem brings nature back into the scene. I’m so glad to see for myself the cherry trees blossoming, or the Northern Flickers as they drum loudly on any metal available – the season is Spring and it is expanding and blossoming. It reminds me that we will too. I keep my loved ones close, and turn my face to the light. Warm my hands at the fire. What tomorrow brings is tomorrow’s problem. We’re "together now, and unafraid".

 

Mont Blanc

Oscar Droege

Mont Blanc



I

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters—with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.



II

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—

Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie,

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,

Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came

To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging

To hear—an old and solemn harmony;

Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep

Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep

Which when the voices of the desert fail

Wraps all in its own deep eternity;

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,

Thou art the path of that unresting sound—

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate fantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around;

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,

In the still cave of the witch Poesy,

Seeking among the shadows that pass by

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!



III

Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd

The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps;

A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously

Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,

Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea

Of fire envelop once this silent snow?

None can reply—all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

So solemn, so serene, that man may be,

But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.



IV

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell

Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,

Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,

The torpor of the year when feeble dreams

Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep

Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound

With which from that detested trance they leap;

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,

And that of him and all that his may be;

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound

Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,

Remote, serene, and inaccessible:

And this, the naked countenance of earth,

On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death, distinct with many a tower

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil

Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

The limits of the dead and living world,

Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place

Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;

Their food and their retreat for ever gone,

So much of life and joy is lost. The race

Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,

And their place is not known. Below, vast caves

Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever

Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,

Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.



V

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy? 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

This is Shelley in full force. He is so awed by Mont Blanc’s presence that an avalanche of thoughts tumbles through his mind. As I read this poem I feel as if I could be standing beside him, observing how he is thunderstruck by the immensity of what he sees, and what he knows is there but cannot see – and hear him ask out loud, “What are you?”, “What are you saying to me?”, “What does all this mean?” He knows that the mountain communicates something. “...this, the naked countenance of earth,/ On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains/ Teach the adverting mind.” Somehow, he feels that the truth - an answer, is within the mountain. “The secret Strength of things/ Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome/ Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!” 

 

I know that awe, that overpowering sense of the immensity of time and the universe hits forcibly when I stand before a mountain. I am flooded with unspoken questions and emotions. What a task Shelley set himself to, to put his thoughts into words!

 "Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal/Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood/By all, but which the wise, and great, and good/ Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel."

Caterpillar Song

The Caterpillar Of Phalaena Pini.

Caterpillar Song

Summer and leaves filled me

With a green drowse, now full

Of sleep I must turn

Leaflike, the fine thread

Comes from my lower lip

And fastens to a leaf, I am

Weaving around my fullness

A closing, a slow shuttling

To touch there and there

Where I will dream

All my hearts withering

And changing to a half-remembered

One in the air who quivers

Among leaves, who will know

Night after night by this

Night I spin around us how

Already it stirs

From sleep inside me, gathers

The leaves I have left

In me, how we begin

Together, it grows huge eyes

For me, and we wait

Behind them, it is growing

Shut wings, we wait between them

Night by night after this

Night spun around us, we know

Now is the time to soften

The way ahead for us, it opens,

The wet, shut wings come slowly

Out, they open, the veins

Fill them, they harden

And belong to us, we see

The night with all our eyes

At once, we move our wings

Apart among leaves, the one

Leaf with eyes to open

The night, not falling now

But rising and flying.

David Wagoner

"There where I will dream." How often do we imagine what it's like to wrap up in a chrysalis and change into a moth? To think of being like a caterpillar, feeding on green, growing, "changing to a half-remembered one" (as if there's a seed of something within, something I once was meant to be, and something from my future drawing me), spinning the Night around me. How the caterpillar feeds on leaves, and in time becomes a leaf-like creature, but one "rising and flying" rather than falling and dying. And the element of night? The unknown, hidden world only dimly grasped, where patterns weave us, in our sleep, in our dreams, into something new.

"Shut wings, we wait between them."

And what will we become?

 

Night Sounds

Brent Cotton

Night Sounds


And now the dark comes on, all full of chitter noise.

Birds huggermugger crowd the trees,

the air thick with their vesper cries,

and bats, snub seven-pointed kites,

skitter across the lake, swing out,

squeak, chirp, dip, and skim on skates

of air, and the fat frogs wake and prink

wide-lipped, noisy as ducks, drunk

on the bloozy black, gloating chink-chunk.



And now on the narrow beach we defend ourselves from  dark.

The cooking done, we build our firework

bright and hot and less for outlook

than for magic, and lie in our blankets

while night nickers around us. Crickets

chorus hallelujahs; paws, quiet

and quick as raindrops, play on the stones

expertly soft, run past and are gone;

fish pulse in the lake; the frogs hoarsen.



Now every voice of the hour -- the known,

the supposed, the strange,

the mindless, the witted, the never seen --

sing, thrum, impinge, and rearrange

endlessly; and debarred from sleep we wait

for the birds, importantly silent,

for the crease of first eye-licking light,

for the sun, lost long ago and sweet.

By the lake, locked black away and tight,

we lie, day creatures, overhearing night.



Maxine Kumin

“And now the dark comes on”, a change takes place, mysterious nocturnal creatures invade our once familiar daylight world.  Kumin prefaces each stage with "and now", "and now", "now". It's as if we are the audience for a performance of  the night orchestra. Under cover of darkness it sings, thrums, nickers, chirps, squeaks, prinks  - and every hour has a voice, a part in the chorus. Notice how the people build their fire "less for outlook than for magic", I love that. Isn't that what we build fires for mostly while camping, or evenings in the back yard - sure, we need warmth and food and light, but we also need magic. This poem reminds me of the drama of darkness, how it gives us mystery and music and a sense of familiar things becoming strange, of the known changing form and becoming new. Sometimes we don't recognize the wonder in front of us until we observe it from a different point of view. Sometimes we need the dark to show us what we have never seen.