Archive for the ‘Lauds’ Category
Music for Airports : 2-2
Sunday, April 5th, 2009Could you marry grist
and ground, and does not
the former emerge from
the latter? Climb
some woolly mammoth
of meaning on the wrist;
burned and engraved
on our hearts. When I met
the Architect, I scribbled across
His blueprints with a Number
two pencil; That I’d color his court
houses with Crayons. Poor and bare-
naked trees clothed with Green
in leaf; Seems so sudden!
Or, is my heart so hard as to not see?
Spring forth, if weathering is past! Eat
some lukewarm pourage or inhale
meals of steam. Even the mange
shed skin. Tears.
“No more tears!” whispers the Lamb,
“No more fears!” the Lion roars.
So we settle in our plights,
Separate as they came, some Mammoth
of Meaning burned and engraved
upon our hearts.
Scare-crows or Mare-lows
Thursday, February 5th, 2009Saw the Strawman in
Summer’s Volcano baking–
Magma on our wrists.
Our Language Scizzors the Enormity
Monday, October 6th, 2008 [I'm up before the finches, just after Lauds, and during a simple sipping of coffee.]
One thing the first Monday of each month means is that The New Yorker sends forth its publishable Poetry&Fiction into the interwebs for the enjoyment and evaluation of the masses. Excitement over the publication usually sees me staying up late first Sunday evenings to read through the new pieces [they are published at 12 AM ET], unable to wait a dawn later for new quixoticquerying.
The thing I noticed upon reading my very first Billy Collins poem [I guess over a year ago now] is that my written voice is not as gregarious as improvement might make it. Often here, the content of a piece determines its form [and yet most of the time the Form teaches me something of the Substance], but at least, I’ll hope I’ve made some sort of move from the abstract shroudiness my Xanga [that time of my life] embodied.
Anyway, opening the New Yorker RSS feed this morning I stumbled upon a piece by Albert Goldbarth – one from whom I hadn’t read previously – wherein he brings to light what Work’s to be done with Word [or our inability to complete it], while optimistically admitting that sometimes we must push a device invented especially for such a Project.
THE WAY
The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what
we do, in some ways it’s entirely what
we do—and so the devastating roseof a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé
of another’s being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The wayour language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walkto Crewkerne—then the nearest town—
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in counting.
streaming: lauda, anima mea, Dominum
Sunday, September 14th, 2008It’s been seven dayfulls since I last wrote.
Even now the Vigils have passed, Saturday
night, “O come thou Dayspring!” Ike blew away
expectations – but brought Expectancy – the seer
of Fall, brushing crisp bluster ’bout our neckbones;
Pnuematic shower of Self-ishness1, in not
seeing ourSelf2 as as You see [Us], or as we should
see You. Leaving things unDone, things of
the not-Ought. Kingdom subject? I won’t be-
lieve/have like I am any for All. But are
[We] in Your [pl.] Imago.
Domine, Deus Meus!
In te, Domine, speravi!
I believe in the communion of the Saints,
together, rising with [as] the Dawn.3
Else
- ↑1 “The root of all evils is selfishness, just as, conversely, the root of all virtues is love!”
- ↑2 “The eye that sees all external objects sees neither itself nor its defects, so the opponents of truth see everything except their own faults. When we look into a glass the eye sees itself and its defects, so by living in the fellowship of the Word-made-flesh.”
- ↑3 Hail gladd’ning!