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