A heartfulness of mind
A mindfulness of heart
Where?
Some sense of time passing
Love in the dark
Some sense of life passing
Time in the dark
Can't see to write
Words
In notebook
By flashlight
Ground fog in East Frisia: photo by Matthias Süßen, 2003
Pine trees in mist: Hasegawa Tohaku (1539-1610), 16th c. (Tokyo National Museum)
Tom, beautiful. There is, in my addled brain, a movement in the artwork from present photographic reality to historic past, like tracing a river back to its (artistic) source.
ReplyDeleteSeems I'm lost and no doubt will be walking, head first, into a scratchy pine any minute. All this fog!
And a memory, perhaps, recaptured in the poem? Very nice. (I wrote a poem in a little notepad I keep by the bed, in the middle of the night without the light, a while back, so as not to wake up Laurie, and discovered I hadn't turned the page since the last one and ended up with an unreadable palimpsest, which I am very proud of).
Retreat!
Don
I had been saving this for a bit -- until I really needed it, I guess -- and am very glad I did. It's splendid in the ways Don says. I would love to see his palimpsest. Curtis
ReplyDeleteDon,
ReplyDeleteNow that you've admitted it, I'm going to have to confess that the entirety of my own latterday poetic "output" (including this piece and the one beneath) has occurred under exactly those same circumstances.
Curtis,
ReplyDeleteThere are actually postmodern poets who publish facsimiles of their palimpsests.
(Thrill a minute!)
Curtis:
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I'd never have the courage - we would discover two bad poems, one atop the other. It is so much more romantic (Tom, I never thought PM - now that I have, I'll try not to think it again) a notion that there are two little immortal pieces, lost forever.
Tom, I have discovered that my handwriting in the dark is generally much more readable than it is normally which doesn't say much about my mental quietude and emotional stability.
It is quite nice to know that there is fine company at 3am, albeit we are all alone together ... and now that I think of all those thousand hands reaching for all those shades again, it may be time to go back to sleep.
Don
How post-modern of them. Curtis
ReplyDeleteTom,
ReplyDelete"Some sense of time passing" toward the longest night of the year -- in Denmark, East Frisia, mist in japan, even over there in the dark in Berkeley, and here. . .
12.19
light coming into sky above still black
ridge, waning white moon next to branch
in foreground, wave sounding in channel
regard for subject in terms
of color, one another
that some time, sound there
something else, which
orange edge of fog against sunlit ridge,
wingspan of pelican gliding to the left
Tom, hi.
ReplyDeleteI'm writing a (kinda) review of BASEBALL 35 years late for a baseball website. Any way I could ask you a few questions about it?
If so, please email me: baumann[dot]baumann[at]gmail[dot]com
Steve,
ReplyDeleteThanks for that fleeting glimpse of the orange end of fog against sunlit ridge -- an illumination.
"Scary?"
ReplyDeleteFog, so
beautiful
and yet so
where
do we go from here
thanks,Tom, for the flash of light
Thanks, Vassilis.
ReplyDeleteAs a matter of fact the "D" batteries in the bedside torch are (like the sad sack in the sack) down to a feeble glimmer. And so, as we come to the shortest (also perhaps coldest) night of the year, the rhetorical question "Where?" seems to multiply in its interrogative reverberations.
That last image Tom (Tohaku) is stunning. So much life in that ink.
ReplyDeleteThe delicacy, the suggestion, the evocation of what might be there...
ReplyDeleteBeautiful poem Tom. And beautiful follow up comments. Joy to read.
ReplyDeletewinter fog-
i assume
everything
Was it Dostoyevsky who said, In the fog everything is assumed but nothing is permitted?
ReplyDelete