Monday, November 24, 2014

Dawn Chorus

Every morning since the time changed
I have woken to the dawn chorus
And even before it sounded, I dreamed of it
Loud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucous

And once I rose and twitched the curtains apart
Expecting the birds to be pressing in fright
Against the pane like passengers
But the garden was empty and it was night

Not a slither of light at the horizon
Still the birds were bawling through the mists
Terrible, invisible
A million small evangelists

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smoldering coal
Their throats singed and swollen with song
In dissonance as befits the dark world
Where only travelers and the sleepless belong

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by Sasha Dugdale, 2011

Monday, November 17, 2014

Lost Luggage

"Dr. Magherini insists certain men and women are susceptible to
swooning in the presence of great art, especially when far from home."
New York Times International Edition



Today in a palace disguised
as a museum, disguised myself
as a tourist, I entered a crucifixion scene
as part of the crowd and woke with the smell
of ancient sweat in my nostrils,
a bloody membrane over my eyes
as if I were seeing the world through
a crimson handkerchief -
they tell me I fainted.

Although I am in transit from my life,
I packed stray bits of it to take along - a comb
with relics of my graying hair, snapshots
of my own recent dead, books as thumbed
as this Bible chained to the hotel bedpost, whose verses
I read to put myself to sleep. At night
in different beds I dream of home,
but in the morning the dreams
are gone like so much lost luggage.

I know there are landscapes waiting
to be entered: forests shaded in leaf green
where winged children play on pipes;
the blue translucent scales of water in seascapes.
And on every wall are faces, gazing
through an undertow of brush strokes.
Meanwhile, framed in the evening windows
of yet another city, the woman reflected
is merely myself, the halo

of light a streetlamp shining on my head.
But ghosts clothed in tempora
follow me everywhere,
as if art itself were a purpling shadow
whose territory I must step back into,
a place where I can hide myself
over and over again, where what is lost
may be found, though always
in another language and untranslatable.

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by Linda Pastan,1991

Monday, November 10, 2014

The Bend

Around the bend of a phrase
you return, it's dawn in a book, it's
a garden, one can
see everything, the dew, a butterfly
on a leaf and it's you
who rises suddenly amid the pages
and the book grows more lovely
because it's you
and you've not grown old, you walk
slowly to the door.

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by Claude Esteban

Monday, November 3, 2014

The Farmer and the Sea

The sea always arriving,
hissing in pebbles, is breaking
its edge where the landsman
squats on his rock. The dark
of the earth is familiar to him,
close mystery of his source
and end, always flowering
in the light and always
fading. But the dark of the sea
is perfect and strange,
the absence of any place,
immensity on the loose.
Still, he sees it is another
keeper of the land, caretaker,
shaking the earth, breaking it,
clicking the pieces, but somewhere
holding deep fields yet to rise,
shedding its richness on them
silently as snow, keeper and maker
of places wholly dark. And in him
something dark applauds.

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by Wendell Berry, 2011