Refracted Light

"I have a gloomy premonition...that we will soon look back on this troubled moment as a golden time of freedom and license to act and speculate. One feels the sinews of the tiger, an ascetic, "moral" and authoritarian reign of piety and iron."
-------Robert Lowell

Yet there are mornings when
Even in midwinter, sunlight
Flares, and a rare stillness
Lies upon roof and garden-
Each object eldritch bright,
The sea scarred but at peace.
------Derek Mahon.

Dwelling in divided beings:
From stone to tree, and the myriad flowers.
Passing through sadness and the curvature of time.
But this dance of the soul fades into insignificance
Before the kindling of the loved one's face,
the darkening of ours in the mirror.
----b.

Why do you want to know why you are sad, why you sigh? Sometimes you hum a tune without the words. Drink up or weep, dear soul. Do one or the other. Or both. It was not given to us to know. And we, the weary ones, have inherited only fragments and faded photos. Keep them safe, in locked boxes. For yearning makes the heart grow deeper.

Triste:

Some faces are beautiful, all the more so for not being perfect. Not quite ordinary either, but something that is neither one nor the other, utterly distinct and a true reflection of their being. Always well-set, fully formed, but always open to change with a simple smile.

Nomadic thought which only has "stations", orienting points, where the journey, the wandering, and bewilderment and wonder are more important....

The profile is everything, "an imagination reared on the silhouette of the forest tree against the sky."

The Death of Ivan Illych.
The wonderful way in which an essential characteristic of a human being's life is rendered in the most elementary of gestures-the hesitation before the mirror, the turning-up of the upper lip, the quivering of the hands, the twisting of the neck away from the gaze of a loved one. Death makes the most basic things, those which we never remember, look like the most important ones.

Adulthood: to see a tree and think "table".
Childhood: to see a table and wonder what is meant by the word "legs".
To think and to wonder...logic and poetry.


I felt what the Aztec felt,
lying in wait for time's
uncertain return through
the cracks in the horizon.
---E. Bishop.

Robert Hughes on Surrealism.
The action of the dreaming mind in paint: It valued the accidental, the involuntary, the unsought shape...the image that rose unbidden from a chaos of marks. But unrelenting spontaneity is chaos.

Nomadic space is not made up of "places", permanences of fixed abodes, storehouses of memory, or objects of contemplation, but is constituted by a number of points of reference, a set of relations, orientations: the whistling song of the sand, the brilliance of the stars and her pathways, the undulations of snow and sand that follow hidden lines, the sudden emergence of a trace of life amidst infinite barrenness; a spirit that can never be 'housed' , but that blows where it will. A blade of grass that inches its way into the open signals that hope can survive in the human heart even in the most extreme circumstances. Love is never lost, only forgotten, only sought after along the tracks of a desert...

And yet, and yet, we return to the city. The sun was low in the sky and refracted in the window. He could see his own reflection, and through that, flickering in the glass, the reflection of what was ahead... coming back to the city is always nicer, in a way, because you travel in the same direction as the river.(Peter Cameron)

Once you are a prisoner, you never escape being a prisoner.
---Ronald Searle.

The poet edges open the door to what is confined to the past; just enough to catch a momentary glimpse of that lost life, of all that awaits him....