Two Campers in Cloud Country

 

Terry Watkinson

 

 

Two Campers in Cloud Country

(Rock Lake, Canada)

 

In this country there is neither measure nor balance
To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,
The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds.

No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention,
No word make them carry water or fire the kindling
Like local trolls in the spell of a superior being.

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens:  one wants a vacation
Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;
Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses.

It took three days driving north to find a cloud
The polite skies over Boston couldn't possibly accommodate.
Here on the last frontier of the big, brash spirit

The horizons are too far off to be chummy as uncles;
The colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance.
Each day concludes in a huge splurge of vermilions

And night arrives in one gigantic step.
It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.
These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.
In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for.
I lean to you, numb as a fossil.  Tell me I'm here.

The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.
Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;
The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs.

Around our tent the old simplicities sough
Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.
We'll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn.

 

Sylvia Plath

 

 "It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little."

It's interesting - that sometimes we humans long to be lost in the bigness of something else. That we want to feel small. Its a dangerous smallness, though, when you are lost in Nature, seeing that Nature likes to eat us.  I like how Plath describes the lack of measure and balance, their lostness in the rocks and clouds begins to effect them, even to erasing their sense of selfhood. Nature is soaking them up, absorbing them.

Campers beware! 

Mirror

Francine Van Hove

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful -
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns back to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back and I reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath


This poem is the opposite perspective of Robert Grave's "The Face In the Mirror" (posted Oct.29, 2016) in which a man looks at himself in a mirror. Here the mirror talks back. It reminds me of of Alice in Wonderland's "Through the Looking Glass", where Lewis Carroll questions what the world "over there" is all about and why everything is reversed in it. It's the old question of image vs. identity. Plath is a brilliantly sharp writer, and "Mirror" has teeth, which might not be what you want in a poem, but it's useful, and poetry should be useful. The mirror describes itself, "Silver and exact/no preconceptions/unmisted by love or dislike..", the sense is there of a dispassionate faithfulness to truth (with a dash of malevolence!). The mirror knows that it is important to the woman but it has no feeling for her (as it seems to for the wall). And for all it says it is "only truthful", it lies, it does not "see". It is not an eye, it is entirely blind. It is a reflector, a surface. It wants something, too. It wants to be worshiped, "a little four-cornered god". It pretends to have depths because it wants to swallow and drown. And the woman searches it for what she really is. There's the bite right there. 



 

Conversation Among the Ruins

William Heath Robinson

Conversation Among the Ruins

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk

With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit

And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net

Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.

Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak

Above the appealing ruin; in bleak light

Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight

Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;

While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit

Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,

Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:

which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

Sylvia Plath 

Things are not always good. I don't think anyone has ever written as well about marital clashes as Sylvia Plath has. How she describes her world as a beautifully arranged, fabulous place that has now come to utter ruin. Over-dramatic? Probably. But I can attest - that is exactly how it feels. 


 

Raymond Booth

                                                                

Mushrooms 

 

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

Sylvia Plath 

Obviously we need a poem about mushrooms. You remember this one, I'm sure.