.
Winter Landscape: Charles Burchfield, 1918 (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.)
time is a captive
Nothing but the leaning of the trees
in the wind, the traffic
passing
though we could lie together in the dark
our eyes would flash
like swords
between stars
or cats
between the police
and the people
who cheat us of our dreams
Trees: Charles Burchfield, 1920 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh)
9 comments:
More Charles Burchfield
Struck by your title, Tom, which got me thinking about Marcel Proust.
I can't seem to stop reading his book. I keep getting drawn back - I feel the 3rd time coming on very strongly.
Don
Don,
Fortuitous timing. With this -- and I mean with the images, in conjunction with the words -- I was maybe feeling my way back into that same period.
The Novembers of Proust... or of Pierre Reverdy, say, if he were to have been somehow impossibly translated or transplanted to the Erie Corridor, c. 1918-1920.
Tom, somehow I think the November skies over Erie aren't all that different from Paris, from just the right angle. Don
Don,
True that.
I spent one entire November (1959) in that place, looking (mostly in vain) for exactly that angle.
Well, Cleveland... but one of my roommates came from Erie.
All one town, all one cloud.
A great poem dotted with the innocence of a child (or two). It is with the stance of a philosopher that you start off writing -
time is a captive
and wind down to the pure naivety of a child with such grace and air. Like a certain ballerina descending stairs ... outside a Church in France filled with marble saints.
Wonderful ..
Ah, Aditya, my poet, I'm always born again in your words...
... for an instant. And then I can't help imagining a banana peel on those marble steps. Oops!
Reality.
November.
(Extremely cold no-traffic late night here on the big street beneath the ancient redwood tree, a great sage with dripping boughs.)
5 minutes to let the reality sink in. Yes Tom. I understand .. how illicit poems can be. O .. to ease my idiosyncrasies but !
(Extremely cold no-traffic late night here on the big street beneath the ancient redwood tree, a great sage with dripping boughs.)
Red light blinks
nobody on road
Tom runs himself over.
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