Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Thursday 14 April 2011

Lucy in the Sky: A Wind from the Bottom of the World


.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z6GgkqRlaG0/TWB_vVyq8DI/AAAAAAAAA1U/JI0zMj_po-o/s1600/wind.jpg

Lago Puelo, Chubut Province, Argentina: photo by Lucy in the Sky, 2007





No es afuera;
el viento sopla feroz

dentro del corazón.


.


Outside, inside, all one place;
fierce, the winds that blow
within the heart.







Lucy in the Sky: An Unceasing Wind that Blows through This Night, from Locos por naufragar, 19 February 2011 (translated by TC)

11 comments:

TC said...

Lucy in the Sky is the blogging name of a very talented poet and photographer whose work has been featured here more than once; see, for example: Ocean (Lucy in the Sky).

I thought of Lucy when looking at the teacher on the steps of the one-room mountain schoolhouse pictured here.

Lucy is a teacher of English, in Patagonia, a place even more beautiful and faraway than the distant hills of old Kentucky.

Julia said...

Bravo!
(to both of you)

manik sharma said...

it blew me away....
tom,
one of the most beautiful posts ever to appear here....it never hits a rock..the rock is me...i'm blowing with it....thank you for this

Anonymous said...

A beautifully made photograph. The place looks very much like the Lofoten Islands in north Norway. Very Wagnerian, for me in such a landscape the Norse myths suddenly became very vivid. None of my pictures turned out like this one, though. Strange to think it's at both ends of the earth.

Artur.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Tom. You have made my day. It is always an honor to be part of this welcoming space in the blogosphere and to reach other souls. THANK YOU, from the bottom of my windy heart =)

TC said...

So happy to hear that people have enjoyed being transported by Lucy's camera eye into the ancient, mythically storied and very cold, deep lake in the sky which actually happens to be located right at her back door.

It would be a dream to go there after one dies, or even better, before.

Artur, I do see the northern reflection of that world in this shot of Steinsfjorden in Lofoten.

It provides grand aethereal pleasure to visit such places, if only in imagination.

Lucy is a modest person and would never make such claims for herself, but I would agree with the reader of her blog who told her that in one of her photos of Lago Lácar, it was possible to see the workings of the fingers of God.

(God would indeed be fortunate to have such gifted fingers, one must say.)

TC said...

Uh-oh, I have boldly dropped Lucy's celestial photo into the wrong lake.

She has now gently but helpfully informed me that the shot on this post is not of Lago Lácar, the heavenly lake located right at her back door, but of Lago Puelo, further south in the Province of Chubut, and that the photo was taken four years ago on a visit.

"A magical place indeed," she says. And we do believe that.

A bit of better late-than-never catch-up research reveals that the name Puelo seems to have its origin in the aboriginal Mapuche expression puel-có (puel = east, co = water), meaning something like "Water at the East", since in fact the lake drains towards the Pacific Ocean on the east, via the lakes and rivers of Chile.

We now learn too that the shores of the lake are home to, among other interesting wild creatures, the pudú, the huemul, the red fox, the cougar, and the coipo. Among birds, the huala, the pato vapor volador, the bandurria, the pitío and the zorzal patagónico. And the cold waters of the lake, which reach to a depth of 180 m., are swum by native fish never before considered by this blogger, e.g. the perca, the peladilla and the puyén grande.

The first settlers of the region were hunter-gatherers who lived in the Andean steppe and employed stone tools to hunt guanacos.

The lake area has protected status as a national park. There are cave paintings within the park, apparently showing representations of paths leading deep into the surrounding rain forest.

(What an experience it would be to try to follow those paths back into the interior of everything. Would the Mapuche people who still live there, close to the beginning of everything, allow this, I wonder?)

TC said...

(But the fingers of God mentioned above, those were last seen playing upon Lago Lácar, as viewed from the road to Bariloche, if I am not again mistaken... which as anyone who is reading this will know is always a possibility.)

Elmo St. Rose said...

Patagonia

TC said...

Yes, there is all the exhilaration of the pristine possibility of the imagination packed into that single lovely, exotic word.

Let's make a date to get together and make a trip on down there in the afterlife, Elmo. Another world.

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

So nice to find Lucy in the Sky's poem and view of this "parallel place" here ----

4.16

pale blue whiteness of sky above sunlit
white peak, sunlit green plane of ridge
in foreground, sound of birds on branch

continuum, a parallel place
moved along curve to

point on axis determined by
time, of event, that

triangular peak against grey-white sky,
shadowed green of ridge across from it