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Monday 19 December 2011

Retreat

.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/Langaa_egeskov_rimfrost.jpg/1280px-Langaa_egeskov_rimfrost.jpg

Oak (Quercus robur) forest shaped by grazing animals at Langå, Denmark -- a very cold day with frosting mist in January: photo by Malene Thyssen, 27 January, 2006






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






http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Nebelostfriesland.jpg

Ground fog in East Frisia: photo by Matthias Süßen, 2003

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Hasegawa_Tohaku%2C_Pine_Trees.jpg/1024px-Hasegawa_Tohaku%2C_Pine_Trees.jpg

Pine trees in mist: Hasegawa Tohaku (1539-1610), 16th c. (Tokyo National Museum)

15 comments:

Issa's Untidy Hut said...

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.

Seems 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

ACravan said...

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

TC said...

Don,

Now 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.

TC said...

Curtis,

There are actually postmodern poets who publish facsimiles of their palimpsests.

(Thrill a minute!)

Issa's Untidy Hut said...

Curtis:

I'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

ACravan said...

How post-modern of them. Curtis

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

"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

Robert J. said...

Tom, hi.

I'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

TC said...

Steve,

Thanks for that fleeting glimpse of the orange end of fog against sunlit ridge -- an illumination.

vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras) said...

"Scary?"


Fog, so

beautiful

and yet so


where

do we go from here


thanks,Tom, for the flash of light

TC said...

Thanks, Vassilis.

As 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.

. said...

That last image Tom (Tohaku) is stunning. So much life in that ink.

TC said...

The delicacy, the suggestion, the evocation of what might be there...

aditya said...

Beautiful poem Tom. And beautiful follow up comments. Joy to read.

winter fog-

i assume

everything

TC said...

Was it Dostoyevsky who said, In the fog everything is assumed but nothing is permitted?