Daily Bread
Idyll
Abrubtly
Taking Charge
Heron II
Steadfast
The Composition
Witness
Eye Mask
Flowers of Sophia
Venerable Optimist
Whisper
From Sands of the Well:
Rage and Relenting
Secret Diversions
Concordance
What Harbinger
A gull far-off rises and falls, arc of a breath, two sparrows pause on the telephone wire, chirp a brief interchange, fly back to the ground, the bus picks up one passenger and zooms on up the hill, across the water the four poplars conceal their tremor, feet together, arms pressed to their sides, behind them the banked conifers dark and steep; my peartree drops a brown pear from its inaccessible height into the bramble and ivy tangle, grey sky whitens a little, now one can see vague forms of cloud pencilled lightly across it. This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.
The neighbor's Black Labrador, his owners out at work, unconscious anyone is watching him, rises again and again on hind legs to bend with his paws the figtree's curving branches and reach the sweet figs with his black lips.
The last warm day, I caught,
almost unnoticing,
that high shrilling like thin
wires of spun silver, glint
of wheeling flight - some small tribe
leaving.
That night
the moon was full; by morning
autumn had come.
Here comes the moon, bright rim slicing importantly through windrows of grey thistledown cloud just losing their sundown flush.
Elegantly gray, the blue heron
rises from perfect stillness on wide wings,
flies a few beats
sideways,
trails his feet in the lake,
and rises again to circle
from marker to marker (the posts
that show where the bottom shelves downward)
choosing:
and lands on the floating dock where the gulls cluster -
a tall prince come down from the castle to walk,
proud and awkward, in the market square,
while squat villagers
break off their deals
and look askance.
Tattooed in black and gold, lichened nymphs, sentinels faithful to their garden wall, face the impertinent back of a new villa, their view of the lake usurped.
(Woman at the Harpsichord,
Emmanuel de Witte, 1617-1692
Musee des Beaux Arts, Montreal)...
Two rooms away, seen through the open door,
the servant-maid raises her head to listen,
times the strokes of her broom to the music's crisp
golden wavelets. Autumn sun
and shadows well-defined overlay the floortiles,
antiphonal transverse strips over squares
of white and black. Filtered through little panes
in long and lofty windows, the light
hints at green in its morning pallor. But red,
red is the lord of color here: the draperies,
bedside carpet, ceiling-beams, elaborate
hanging lamp, a chair, all these and more
are a glowing Indian red; and red above all,
with its canopy, valance, ample curtains,
the big four-poster. Up and dressed, the young wife,
(white cap and dimly auburn skirts, red jacket
basqued with ermine-tips) is playing
the harpsichord, beginning the day with delight,
while snug, still, in the bed's half-dark reclines
the young husband, leaning his head on one hand,
intently, blissfully, watching and listening.
A human scene: apex of civilized joy, attained
in Holland, the autumn of 1660, never surpassed, probably
never to be matched.
But if
the same scene had been painted differently -
not only with other colors but from another
distance, perspectives differently disposed, more curves,
less play of severe rectangles; if it had been
a composition that lacked this austere
counterpoint of forms which evoke,
in brave resplendent red, the very
twang and trill and wiry
ground bass of the notes ringing forth
under her fingers; if it had been
reduced to anecdote - we'd never have known
that once, in eternity,
this peaceful joy had blessed an autumnal morning.
Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence.
In this dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all.
Flax, chicory, scabious - flowers with ugly names, they grow in waste ground, sidewalk edges, fumes, grime, trash. Each kind has a delicate form, distinctive; it would be pleasant to draw them. All are a dreamy blue, a gentle mysterious blue, wise beyond comprehension.
He saw the dark as a ragged garment spread out to air. Through its rents and moth-holes the silver light came pouring.
Today the white mist that is weather is mixed with the sallow tint of the mist that is smog. And from it, through it, breathes a vast whisper: the mountain.
Hail, richocheting off stone and cement, angrily
sprinkling its rock-salt among fallen
blossoms on earth's
half-awakened darkness,
enters
the folds of sturdy camellias
as if to seek
refuge in those phyllo-layers of immaculate soft red,
a place in which
to come to rest,
to melt.
Where a fold of fog briefly lifts by the headland, it reveals a shoal of wave-glitterings imitating fish as the ocean plays unobserved.
Brown bird, irresolute as a dry leaf, swerved in flight just as my thought changed course, as if I heard a new motif enter a music I'd not till then attended to.
Glitter of grey oarstrokes over the waveless, dark, secretive water. A boat is moving toward me slowly, but who is rowing and what it brings I can't yet see.