Tyger

 ...Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountain

far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight

going home. All this means something

something absolute: whenever I start

to explain it, I forget words altogether.

-- from Drinking Wine by T'ao Ch'ien (365 – 427), who lived on Thatch-Hut mountain.

An etymological analysis of the pictograph for Thatch-Hut, writes David Hinton, reveals a simple roof at the top, a dish with a pedestal at the bottom, above it a kitchen vessel, and the symbol for something else:

And what dwells in this household [and within the pictograph representing it] shares the mountain's nature, for it too eludes our words and concepts. It's a tiger, which ancients revered for the spontaneous power of its movements, the clarity and immediacy of its mind. It's a tiger that lives in the everyday world of our human dwellings...

Oyster

Roughly the size of a rather large pebble, the oyster is more gnarled in appearance, less uniform in color, and brilliantly whitish. It is a world categorically closed in upon itself. And yet it can be opened: that takes gripping it in a folded rag, plying a nickel and dull-edged knife, chipping away at it over and over. Probing fingers get cut on it, nails get broken. It's a rough job. The pounding you give it scars the envelope with white rings, a sort of halo.
Within, one finds a world of possibilities for food and drink: beneath a mother-of pearl firmament (strictly speaking), the skies above settle in on the skies below, leaving only a rock-pool, a viscous green sack that ebbs and flows before the eyes and nose, fringed with a border of darkish lace.
On rare occasion the perfect formula pearls up in its nacreous throat, and we take it at once for our adornment.

-- from The Nature of Things by Francis Ponge, translated by Lee Fahnestock

The Dead

Don Paterson's version of one of the Sonnets to Orpheus by Raine Maria Rilke:

The Dead

Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom.
Though they speak with more than just the season's tongue –
the colours that they blaze from the dark loam
all have something of a jealous tang

of the dead about them. What do we know of their part
in this, those secret brothers of the harrow,
invigorating the soil – oiling the dirt
so liberally with their essence, their black marrow?

But here's the question: are the flower and fruit
held out to us in love, or merely thrust
up at us, their masters, like a fist?

Or are they lords, asleep among the roots,
granting to us in their great largesse
this hybrid thing – part brute force, part mute kiss?

A state of ghosthood

Rilke's Orpheus:

is a book about death and the lyric, how we are a product of two realms: the here and the not-here, the temporal and the a-temporal (or the eternal) because we have foreknowledge of our own deaths. [1] So essentially we're in a state of ghosthood, which is unusual for a mammal so how do you deal with that? Well, the way we deal with it is by singing across the gap and listening to the echoes that come back from the realm.

-- Don Paterson in interview

Note

[1]  Scot Atran's phrase for this state is "the tragedy of cognition"

Poetical fauna of California

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the sea-wind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness

-- from Rock and Hawk by Robinson Jeffers.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

-- from All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan.

Both quoted in After the Goldrush - the Poetry of California presented by Dana Gioia.

Glory

The temple bell stops
But I still hear the sound
Coming out of the flowers

-- Basho

Windgrass

Following a post earlier today, some poetical personification from Alice Oswald:

Dense Silky Bent 

Also there is an old man dressed in a rustling softness
with long washed hair and a little beard cut square
often to be seen at dawn performing stretches to the sun
and doesn't care who watches, stares straight through anyone
with baleful, buzzard-on-a-fencepost vision.
When he leans to the side and breathes in lout and out
with accompanying swearwords, he seems small and sour
like a lost lover withered to a straw.
But when he forward-bends and his loose shirt
flops on his blinking eyes and swishes in the dirt
sometimes we kick him from behind, he doesn't mind,
just springs up green again and stares at the sun.

Man-Moth

...But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges

from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks

and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.

He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,

proving the sky quite useless for protection.

He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

                     Up the façades,

his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him

he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage

to push his small head through that round clean opening

and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.

(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although

he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt...

-- Elizabeth Bishop

'After The Alphabets'

by W. S. Merwin:

I am trying to decipher the language of insects
they are the tongues of the future
their vocabularies describe buildings as food
they can instruct of dark water and the veins of trees
they can convey what they do not know
and what is known at a distance
and what nobody knows
they have terms for making music with the legs
they can recount changing in a sleep like death
they can sing with wings
the speakers are their own meaning in a grammar without horizons
they are wholly articulate
they are never important they are everything
 

(Kei Miller talks about this poem, and more.)

'As though she lived on song...'

In celebration of 'John Clare day', lines from The Nightingale's Nest:

...melody seems hid in every flower,
That blossoms near thy home. These harebells all
Seem bowing with the beautiful in song ;
And gaping cuckoo-flower, with spotted leaves,
Seems blushing of the singing it has heard.
How curious is the nest ; no other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots : dead oaken leaves
Are placed without, and velvet moss within,
And little scraps of grass, and, scant and spare,
What scarcely seem materials, down and hair...

The Open

The enigmatic 'angel' of Rilke's [Duino] elegies is not a Christian spirit, a harbinger of heaven. The angel is a creature in which the transformation of the visible into the invisible, of earth into consciousness, is already complete. Potentially, the poet – or perhaps the poem itself – is the angel. The mode of being to which Rilke aspired in poetry was that which he called the 'open' (one of the terms borrowed from Heidegger)...Like the Romantics, Rilke was in search of a way of thinking and living which reconciles instrumental rationality with openness to the 'the open'. This involves him in the acceptance of finitude and of mortality, but also in a letting-go akin to the experience he underwent in the garden of Schloss Duino in 1912 when, reclining against a tree, he felt himself entered by 'the open'. He seemed to become nature itself, to share his being with tree and singing bird as inner and outer were gathered together into a single 'uninterrupted space.'

-- from The Song of the Earth by Jonathan Bate

(Image: NIH-3T3 connective tissue cells co-transduced with 5 fluorescent proteins. Dr. Daniela Malide/National Institutes of Health/Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Via boston.com)

'Unwet, ...breather of unbreathable...'

Man’s life is warm, glad, sad, ’twixt loves and graves
Boundless in hope, honored with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.

-- lines from Leigh Hunt's The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit quoted by Billy Collins

'That beauty exists at all in a damaged world is to be celebrated'

"Linguistic disobedience" might be achieved in many ways: by speaking out of turn, by disrupting syntax and "meaning", and by offering comparisons between disparate things. It might be a case of the poem acting as "witness", a recording of what's normally "unseen", ignored or denied. It can be subtle -- using allusion and slight shifts from convention -- and it can be volatile -- from agitprop to rants.

An activist ecological poem might offer a glimpse of deep natural beauty that is nonetheless necessarily "disrupted" by the highly disturbing reality of species loss, deforestation or, say, the ecological implications of buying the latest flat-screen television technology. That beauty exists at all in a damaged world is to be celebrated, but our appreciation of it comes so often at a cost that we don't always register. We must be conscious of its vulnerability.

-- from John Kinsella on Keeping poetry outside the comfort zone.

'Just this'

When I think of the patience I have had

back in the dark before I remember

or knew it was night until the light came

all at once at the speed it was born to

with all the time in the world to fly through

not concerned about ever arriving

and then the gathering of the first stars

unhurried in their flowering spaces

and far into the story of the planets

cooling slowly and the ages of rain

then the seas starting to bear memory

the gaze of the first cell at its waking

how did this little haste begin this little time

at any time this reading by lightning

scarcely a word this nothing this heaven

-- W.S. Merwin

The eel

...firebrand, whiplash, shot

bolt of the earth's desire,

aimed, by these dried-up gullies and river-beds,

at the dark paradise of her spawning;

she is the green spirit looking for life

in the tight jaw of drought and desolation,

she is the spark which says

that all begins where all appears to end,

here, with this charred, half-buried stick

the quick rainbow

a twin to your own bright eyes:

shining out

among a generation mired in mud -

can you not see

that she is your sister?

-- a passage from Robin Robertson's version from Eugenio Montale's poem. [1]

Apparently there are more than fifty translations of this poem in English. Some analysis and food for thought via The Imaginary Museum.

To make a pedantic and unpoetic point, Montale was wrong to write that eels in Italian waters come from the Baltic (L’anguilla, la sirena/dei mari freddi che lascia il Baltico/per giungere ai nostri mari...). They come from the Sargasso. If the poem was first published as late as 1956 he should have known that.

More importantly, after millennia of abundance the European eel is, as of 2008, critically endangered.


Footnote

[1] Swithering (2006). Robertson's next book is Leaving St Kilda.

A wasteland

Kirszenstein trades her kingfisher skull for a tinned peach.

-- Simon Armitage in a grim mood

Bird poems

Tim Dee and Simon Armitage choose ten.

I like this by Basho:

My eyes following
until the bird was lost at sea
found a small island

'Trilobite in the Wenlock Shales'

Under the hazels I entered again into boyhood
Over a hurrying water.
The church clock dropped the quarters nearby
And from a little school
Children hallooed like enchanted animals
But I was watching a water that shipped the wild apples
With all the time in the world
Patient as a fisher bird
In the hazel light to learn to be a finder
Of life, its mark, on a black stone
Opened like a butterfly, a soul that water,
Swaling and swaling, had let be seen.

-- David Constantine (via AG)

Rising from the deep

...It took both my hands to turn the wheel
Light cut the door; I put my weight to it
and took a small step down into the world
that was identical and wholly other.

When they ask me what I saw, they all expect
Some blissed-out excuse for my not saying,
but I know what I saw: I saw in everything
the germ and genius of its own ascent,

The fire of its increase; I saw the earth
put forth the trees, like a woman her dark hair;
I saw the sun's sun and the river's river,
I saw the whole abundant overflow;

I saw my own mind surge into the world
and close it all inside one human tear;
I saw how every man-made thing will turn
its lonely face up to us like a child's;

I saw that time is love, and time requires
of everything its full expenditure
that love might be conserved; and the I saw
that love is not what we mean by the word.

For some idea of it, choose a point
in the middle of a waterfall, and stare
for as long as you can stand. Now look around
see how every rock and tree flows upwards?

So the whole world blooms continually
within its true and hidden element,
a sea, a beautiful and lucid sea
through which it pilots, rising without end.

-- from Bathysphere by Don Paterson

The disinherited

Our gods had horns on their heads, or moons, or sealy fins, or the beaks of eagles. We called them All-Knowing, we called them Shining One. We knew we were not orphans. We smelled the earth and rolled in it; its juices ran down our chins.

--from Time capsule found on a dead planet by Margaret Atwood.

A Kwakwaka'wakw girl wearing abalone earrings and a cedar bark cloak circa 1914.

Kwakwaka'wakw spirits take many forms.