ael

woke up with these meaningless words still fresh on my tongue:

The star dwells in the night
the night dwells in the star
the forest unfurls itself in the world
the world itself in the forest

multitude of beasts march together in creation
as solitary humans march alone to death.

Hands that would heal
sought my dark face
in the times of snow
the raven of my heart is lost
like to like, eye to fire
the medieval chant
so it is, the wounds on your hands
fail
will not heal.

Not for the first time this week, something strange happened. I turned to anton's blog and found exactly what I was looking for when I meant 'medieval chant'. How spooky is that! Anyway, it was:

The soul by grasping the similarity of things, returns to itself [ad se ipsam rerum similitudines trahens aggregat] and this is the cause of the fact that the mind itself, which grasps the universals, is composed of every substance and every being that it represents to itself.
----Hugo of St. Victor - Didascalicon

Well, from heals to eels:

'the female lives like this for years, in ponds and streams, and then, one day in autumn she stops and eats nothing more. her colour changes to black, or nearly black, her nose becomes sharper, her eyes large. Moving at night, resting by day, sometimes crossing meadows and fields she travels downstream to the sea..once in their life, and once only, they go to the sea..no one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went.
---Salter.

I

The strange part if his head. The strangely ripened
Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles
For some large containment. Lobed glands
Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.
This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.
Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,
The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,
Undershot predatory. And the iris, dirty gold
Distilled only enough to be different
From the olive lode of her body,
The grained and woven blacks. And ringed larger
With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye
Behind her eye, paler, blinder,
Inward. Her buffalo hump
Begins the amazement of her progress.
Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin- concession
To fish-life- secretes itself
Flush with her concealing suit: under it
The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel
As her belly is, a dulled pearl.
Strangest, the thumb- print skin, the rubberised weave
Of her insulation. Her whole body
Damascened with identity. This is she
Suspends the Sargasso
In her inmost hope. Her life is a cell
Sealed from event, her patience
Global and furthered with love
By the bending starts as if she
Were earth’s sole initiate. Alone
In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,
The nun of water.

II

Where does the river come from?
And the eel, the night-mind of water-
The river within the river and opposite-
The night-nerve of water?

Not from the earth’s remembering mire
Not from the air’s whim
Not from the brimming sun. Where from?

From the bottom of the nothing pool
Sargasso of God
Out of the empty spirals of stars

A glimmering person

Ted Hughes