Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Arc


.

File:Pahoeoe fountain original.jpg




Out of a hollow somnambulism
the fountain of sparks throws up its brilliant
stand of bougainvillea
arco de cielo rojo
against the night sky

Red sky arc
pales in significance
above the vents
to an underworld
that doesn't signify




File:Milky Way IR Spitzer.jpg


Pahoehoe fountain issuing from western end of a series of spatter cones and vents, south of Pu'u Kahaualea, Hawaii: photo by Jim D. Griggs, 1983 (USGS)
Stars crowded into the core of Milky Way galaxy: photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech), 2006 (NASA)

8 comments:

  1. Curtis Roberts20 July 2010 at 04:54

    The Pahoehoe fountain looks like a recumbent elephant.

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  2. Arco

    La fuente Pahoehoe se inclina
    como un elefante en decúbito
    ante el terror del hampa hermosa

    ReplyDelete
  3. Curtis Roberts20 July 2010 at 11:59

    That's excellent!

    ReplyDelete
  4. With the juxtaposition of the pictures (and what pictures) and wonder full words, my mind instantly conjured up both Yosano Akiko and Bashō and their poems on the Milky Way ...


    The rough sea—
    Extending toward Sado Isle,
    The Milky Way.
    Bashō



    The river of stars
    begins to part high
    in the Milky Way while
    through the curtains of our bed,
    I lie awake and watch
    Yosano Akiko


    The Bashō especially seems relevant with its correspondences, but even the Yosano gives the sense of relative proportion I get from the poem and photos.

    Beautiful, Tom.

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  5. Curtis, Don, thanks.

    And to think that in the days of Basho there was no Hubble.

    (The imagination could fill in a lot, one imagines.)

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  6. And finally I realize blogger has eaten a comment of mine. ... This took me back to the Big Island of Hawaii, where all of this can be seen in the same day, the core of the Earth pouring into the ocean and on top of the island's tallest peek you can see the sky the way the first humans saw the sky, what the new earth is being born into.

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  7. Otto, you are fortunate to have experienced what some may go a lifetime without.

    Blogger is a capricious grey-skinned dwarf living deep in the core of an inactive volcano. It has no mind and a voracious appetite.

    ReplyDelete