Friday, 15 July 2011

Cool


.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Stamnos_women_bath_Staatliche_Antikensammlungen_2411.jpg

Group of Polygnotos: Three young women bathing: Side B from an Attic red-figure stamnos, c. 440-430 BC: image by Bibi Saint-Pol, 2010 (Staatliche Antikensammlungen)



This morning
post storm sky
the world got a good wash

now the sea green
depths conceal a cold
and clean heaven

your austerity flags
coming out of the bath
shivering




at

7 comments:

  1. Barry Taylor15 July 2011 at 01:42

    Tom - This has a really clean immediacy, and a great sense of pressure lifting. Love the austerity dripping away with the water. Cool, definitely.

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  2. TC15 July 2011 at 03:46

    Thanks Barry. Perhaps it was something about one's pedestrian observance of the higher rites of the evening of Bastille Day in the Epicurean quarter of Rome that made one remember the bracing Athenian virtue of a good wash. (Or anyway of being permitted courteous attendance upon same.)

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  3. Ed Baker15 July 2011 at 05:26

    I can just Imagine what oils were stored in those
    stamnoses....
    far beyond their cleansing "bath"

    post storm
    weshouldlivesolong that we can/do re:claim
    some modicum of Original Innocence

    images on a vase ...cannot be separate from the ...

    want/need/demand ?

    (not too keen on that word "heaven" though you do lower-case it into its as it is an abstraction by not capitalizing the H...

    I mean, those 10,000 gods and goddesses that resided on (or around) Mount Olympus were ALSO

    firmly grounded in The Earth (in Mother Earth) in Gaia.

    check out image on page 140 of Stone Girl E-pic
    &
    et ceteras

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  4. STEPHEN RATCLIFFE15 July 2011 at 06:37

    Tom,

    "Three young women" indeed -- what a Grecian Urn! More post storm sky here this morning, cold and grey (rather than clean) heaven overhead. . . .

    7.15

    grey whiteness of fog against invisible
    top of ridge, birds calling from branch
    in foreground, sound of wave in channel

    motion relative to material,
    compared to that same

    coincidence of points, then
    two or more, moreover

    cloudless blue sky reflected in channel,
    fog on the horizon to the left of point

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  5. Joe Safdie15 July 2011 at 18:33

    Tom, are you really in the Epicurean quarter of Rome? I've been reading Ovid non-stop all summer -- partly as an outgrowth of the Barbara Everett essay on Marvell you'd recommended a few months back -- and there's a lot to say about his exile, his difference from Virgil, and Augustinian politics. Later.

    Meanwhile, in the unlikely prospect you really are there, check out a small restaurant called Restaurante 31 near the Spanish Steps (which you transmitted so well in your Keats poems . . .)

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  6. Anonymous16 July 2011 at 04:01

    The poem (and stamnos) were fine enough, but seeing the comments while preparing to compose my own added degrees and new sightlines to my partial field of vision.

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  7. TC16 July 2011 at 05:49

    Well, er, when in Rome... at 3.58 AM this morning we had a 3.6 temblor that made the chilled statuary anxious, amidst the fog.

    ReplyDelete