1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.
2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.
3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”
4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.
5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.
6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.
7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
I was hoping to post a poem by a Welsh poet today but I stumbled across this poem by Galway Kinnell and it stuck. It's not that I haven't read some new-to-me wonderful poems by Welsh writers this afternoon and evening. Owen Sheers, who was recommended to me by not one, but two separate people during the course of casual conversation today, has moved me to tears several times in one slim book of verse. I finally had to stop reading because I was too overwhelmed and he deserves more attention than I can give him at 10:30 pm-- sorry Owen. Perhaps tomorrow when I stick close to Gladstone's and focus on reading and writing.
I think the Kinnell poem struck me because I like to believe I've learned that I am to be flames but lately I've had a hard time even pretending to be a flickering spark. I was hoping something in my interior landscape would shift being in the Welsh landscape once again and I'd find myself opening up but so far that hasn't happened. Granted, it's only been about 36 hours. Maybe there are subterranean shifts happening, a fracking process I can't sense causing imperceptible fissures and one of these days-- hopefully before next Tuesday, I'll awake and think, "A ha! Today is the day I can just be." I feel like I want to force or rush that process but I realize that it's just that-- a process.
Before I left home, I re-read my notes from a phone conversation I had with poet Ruth Bidgood last time I was in Wales. As I mentioned in a previous post, one thing we talked about was the symbiotic relationship between photography and poetry. Ruth said that sometimes a landscape has a lesson for us that we can't quite grasp at the time and only discover later, from a distance. Her photographs, she said, help her capture whatever that ineffable quality was that she was feeling and aid in the discovery process later on. I find the same thing happens with me. My poetry falls into two categories--- poems that come out of an experience of meditation or prayer (as I've written about before) or poems written about a place that I've often captured in a photograph and returned to in order to help translate a memory.
Today as I was wandering around Chester I realized I was taking photographs as a matter of rote, primarily for information and documentation rather than inspiration and appreciation. I can't say any of the images below will inspire a poem in the future, nevertheless, here are a few images of my journey thus far . . .
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| Ruins, Basingwerk Abbye |
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| More of abbey ruins |
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| Roman Wall surrounding Chester |
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| The hydrangeas are still blooming in the remembrance garden at Chester Cathedral! |
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| Christmas Market- Chester Don't worry Campo Santo Stefano in Venice, your Christmas market still has my heart. |
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| Plant based diet on a sabbatical-- mulled wine and wild boar burger for lunch . . . |
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| and coconut lime cupcake and mint tea a bit later at the Mad Hatter Tea Room in Chester. Can you tell I didn't eat anything but a piece of toast yesterday? I made up for it today. |
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