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Thursday 21 January 2010

The Helmsman


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File:Krunkwerke - IMG 4515 (by-sa).jpg




It is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things.

-- Heraclitus,
Fragments


Gunmetal cloud light darkening to black and then
The sky cracks open and ninepins scatter again
In the celestial bowling alley, echoing
From Point Pinos to Point Lobos to Point Arena
A rumble and flash in time to write across the hills
Another strike rolled by Zeus, great god
Almighty, dash for cover before that hardball blue
Hail now hitting and bouncing off the wall
Of plexiglass above the storefront arcade seeks
You out and finds you





Thunderstorm, Toronto: photo by John R. Southern, 2003

3 comments:

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Nice, Heraclitus and lightening! Heard something big break/fall last night (1:15), maybe the cypress branch?
Can see the ridge this morning, clouds lifting (but still raining) . . . . something here for you --

1.21

grey whiteness of cloud above blackness
of ridge, motion of shadowed green leaf
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

if the eye hears and speaks,
form and content from

firm factual ground, object
itself, “seeing it as”

grey-white clouds reflected in channel,
cormorant flapping across toward point


ps. did you see the poems from New York (1.14 - 1.17), "buildings" and "walls" instead of "channel" and "ridge"?

TC said...

Stephen,

We have been hearing some big things groaning and breaking also.

Possibly objects, possibly organisms.

From breakages proceed disorganization of systems.

Anyway I was in fact dashing, with a dashing limp-hobble, under that arcade, for protection from those actual literal projectiles from the sky... which were bouncing off that plexiglass like the arrows of the slinky blue CGI indigenes bouncing off the windshields of those CGI gunships in that mammoth boring video game for adults, Avatar.

And yes I have been to New York with you, virtually speaking.

My response to your 1.17:

It is a wonderful tribute to the persistence of your method that the datum surrenders to it without argument even as the landscape shifts. Bravo.

But poetry remains glad you have come home to the original ground of the composition, that base upon which all variation is founded and to which, as if inevitably (can human things ever really be inevitable?), things must and do return... in order to go on.

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,
Thanks so much for this, good to know that someone is looking/reading/thinking . And yes, good to return to the home front, where today's date is a palindrome (01.22.10) and "the rain it raineth every day" ---

1.22

grey whiteness of cloud above blackness
of ridge, motion of shadowed wet branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

simultaneous contrast, that
was a subject in line

something that shows itself,
only a word, thinking

grey whiteness of clouds next to point,
shadowed slope of ridge across channel