fr. On a Raised Beach

Bo Bartlett

fr. On a Raised Beach

Listen to me - Truth is not crushed;
It crushes, gorgonizes all else unto itself.
The trouble is to know it when you see it?
You will have no trouble with it when you do.
Do not argue with me. Argue with these stones.
Truth has no trouble in knowing itself.
This is it. The hard fact. The inoppugnable reality,
Here is something for you to digest
Eat this and we'll see what appetite you have left
For a world hereafter.

Hugh MacDiarmid

I have loved this poem for so long. Back when I was in university, I made a mural of it for my wall. Which seems funny now, when so many use the phrase “my truth”, as if truth were a cat. Could truth be a cat? (That would be a great question poem for Neruda to work out.) Is it a thing you own and take care of, or grow, as in a garden or a houseplant? Is truth something you possess? Or, as MacDiarmid suggests, what if truth is like a rock? Itself and nothing else? Solid, set, unchanging? What if truth cannot be possessed? 

 

I hope the latter is correct. If I can possess the truth it is a lacklustre, lame thing, a pathetic not-worth-trusting-in thing. So help me, may truth be BIG, Gigantic, colossal! Let it be enormous, beyond my puny comprehension! If it can be “mine”, subject to my whims, my incoherencies, my ever-changing perceptions, my ignorance and arrogance and well, silliness – God help us all. And if truth is mine – what is yours? Can both exist? At the same time? Must I eradicate you in order to maintain the predominance of “my truth”? 

Truth is not ours. We are Truth’s. 

And yes, it will crush us, if we do not move with it. It will destroy us. You don’t have to argue with me – as MacDiarmid says - “Argue with these stones.” Look around. Does the world dance to our tune? Do trees bend to our bidding? Does the storm calm when you raise your hand? 

Truth does not belong to me. 
 I belong to the truth. And that is no small thing.

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.)

Stone Speech

Neb

Stone Speech

Crowding this beach
are milkstones, white
teardrops; flints
edged out of flinthood
into smoothness chafe
against grainy ovals,
pitted pieces, nosestones,
stoppers and saddles;
veins of orange
inlay black beads:
chalk-swaddled babyshapes,
tiny fists, facestones
and facestone's brother
skullstone, roundheads
pierced by a single eye,
purple finds, all
rubbing shoulders:
a mob of grindings,
groundlings, scatterings
from a million necklaces
mined under sea-hills, the pebbles
are as various as the people.

Charles Tomlinson

Poetry brings together, connects. Here, Tomlinson uses words that describe humans to describe stones. Noses, faces, skulls, babies, brothers, shoulders, eyes, heads, fists. It makes me wonder - does this show that humans are like stones, or that stones are like humans? Or is it that there is an underlying truth tying both stones and humans together? And if this is "stone speech", what are the stones saying?