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Wednesday 30 December 2009

The Song of the Drowned Ghost in the Pool


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File:Carcharhinus longimanus 1.jpg




The song of the drowned ghost in the pool's
heard as an admission that the soul's
three thousand years bereft in you.
Toy ships or pilot fish are floating memories.
And as the song drifts and echoes down
through the still translucent glass
like water, a helmsman compels
these memories on, filling out
Ulysses' bellying
and fluttering sails.





Shivering sail killendes Segel.gif





Oceanic white tip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus) with pilot fish (Naucrates ductor)
: photo by Peter Koelbl, 2006
A shivering sail: photo by Segler1982, 2007


9 comments:

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,
Scary photo, then a great poem, then a cool photo -- a pleasure to read what you're putting up here, see these photos with them. Kind of like a song, words plus the music (I'm thinking of Campion here, who wrote both and was the only one 'in his day' to do so), only here it's words plus the view (picture), the words your 'transcription' of the picture.

Here's something that (coincidentally) also has a view, and viewer ---

12.30

grey whiteness of clouds above shadowed
ridge, song sparrow calling from branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

would not be said, the fact
meaning is determined

where it touches the viewer,
calm, closure of view

white cloud in pale blue sky on horizon,
shadowed canyon of ridge across channel

Anonymous said...

is it the season for memories, vessels,ghosts and time?

wierdo(its my birthday WW

wierdo 
dipping in the bright flow hence
i reach back to you writer crossing
the river on the misty steamer planking
to fulton we slice and dip through the spirit mist
and i pluck a gift for myself for this 
and the glimpse of my place in it. 
   

Mariana Soffer said...

Some of the most beautiful sounds of silence poetically described.
Great post tom, my friend

TC said...

For Thomas Campion

a song, words plus the music
meaning is determined

where it touches the viewer,
dipping in the bright flow hence

calm, closure of view
white cloud in pale blue sky

memories, vessels, ghosts
slice and dip through the spirit

river, hence
silence -- the most beautiful sounds

on the misty planking

Anonymous said...

Scary Photo...but a great poem ..Wow...

TC said...

Welcome to you, Nimz, thanks for visiting.

Enjoyed your very positive 2010 post, it caused this blogger's weathered old heart to crack a smile.

Sorry about that shark, I hadn't perhaps taken into account it might induce a healthy shudder or two.

(But I sussed to the possibility when I saw the comment, above, by Stephen, who is a surfer, and therefore probably views sharks from a more... realistic, would that be the word? ... perspective.)

Anonymous said...

from Whitman; "crossing brooklyn ferry"

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others 
will see them, 
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the 
falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 



It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not, 
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many 
generations hence, 
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, 
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, 
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the 
bright flow, I was refresh'd, 
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift 
current, I stood yet was hurried, 
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the 
thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd. 

TC said...

Zev,

How beautiful this passage, with its wonderful inevitability determined largely by the perfectly simple final verb, "I look'd..."

And here, it sounds as though Walt might have been just a bit prescient, inkling a time like now when, we'd like to believe ("global village idiots" as, in your term, we all to some degree now are),

"It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not..."

Anonymous said...

I sometimes have difficulties in detecting your poems...do you put your name under them?
I would like to send you my poetry book "Lluvia" ...