So, I wrote most of this last night, but the day had been so hot and long, I found my nose fallen to my keyboard around the fifth sentence and took myself to bed. So here is the post I meant to post last night. Clouds now and then Giving us relief From moon viewing. Eleven-thirty Monday night: the moon, two nights off full; beneath the kurrajong, crickets pinprick the foreground; late gulls fly over, lost, despairing, high; and the coal loader down the road clangs the distance and blows it this way, a mechanical kind of weather. But sitting here, on the deck out the back of my friend Steves house in East Mayfield, is like sitting with my feet in an ocean of night—a steel sea washing against a smeltered shore. I have the house to myself, and Im reading The Way of Silence amid all this indefatigable clangour, a slender book of (b/w of course) photographs and a selection poetry and prose of Basho, which I stole from Steves shelves earlier. Basho was a man for the moon: all that time alone on the road, the ground his bed most nights. And hed have loved tonights. Its white as a lit wick in a hurricane lamp and brighter. Earlier when I looked up, the moon was floating in a ring way too big for it, a halo tainted by a long weekends back-burning across the lake. And the sky then was an estuary of cloud; or if not an estuary, then the mottles on the rump of a generals grey; or if not that, then the cloud was a salmon, with one thought on its mind, to swim upstream and jump into the mouth of the bear.The sky has disappeared now—into the mouth of that bear, maybe—and left nothing but the moon, jumping out of its skin trying to grow full. At midnight Under the bright moon, A secret worm Digs into a chestnut. And two more bits of prose from Basho, to be done with this urban pastoral/haibun. My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination. And What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of trure understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self, which is poetry. Our everlasting self, which is poetry. I like that. Poetry as a way, as the Self. And the girders clang at the rail yard, and the crickets, those dead poets, bang on about the afterlife underground.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 09:53:31 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015