The memory of things lasts, like the afterglow of a brilliant, vanished world, or an image that survives down the centuries, inhering in the blood- memory of a people.
After the storm the world was not the world. Everything was inverted, strange, and yet familiar. A tree at your feet. Like a drunken Li po you wanted to dive into the watery image, the imaginary world. Your hand would lead the way and your heart would follow. Your hand pure, full of sin...
After the storm the light returned, the sky brightened. Hours could be found in a moment. This late flaring of the sun like time regained. The light leaned into a mild blue breeze, touching every surface, becoming universal. It reached the west of Wales, a bay that suddenly lies flat and open to the skies. Like a grave, the pool that gathers leaves and twigs and bits of broken images to itself, it was a time of indistinction. Like Monet's pond, or love, or something.
To walk in the dark with an image in your heart. If faith is below the left nipple then where is a lack of faith?
The dark hunger of a life, a world in the dark pool of your eyes. A storm in a teacup, the tea sipped with infinite calm a thousand miles away.
A woman asked you for a word. You asked what it would be worth. " A picture," she said, a picture of a storm.
'If I have said nothing of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered. But the faces which we try so desperately to recall escape us: it is only for a moment...I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting..a face broadly formed...This tender body varied all the time, like a plant...'
---Yourcenar.
4 comments:
these are very beautiful photos, in which time indeed seems regained... very soft too, almost like a caress, a whisper from beyond the veil of the tangible world...
thank you, Roxana. I was walking around in the rain, looking for the last shards of golden light on the pebbles, or the collection of leaves and twigs in these dark pools of water. the sky was so strange...dark and light at the same time. And I like these pictures because not only are things inverted but they remind me of another place, another time...maybe to that other world which is in some sense more tangible to me-because it exists in my memory?
such a romantic :-P
but, speaking of these simple moments of grace, quietness and clarity, this poem:
The Promise (Jane Hirshfield)
Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,
only a stepping back from the petty.
I gazed at the range of blue mountains,
I drank for the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank.
Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.
Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.
There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.
The dog's tail wagged a little in his dream.
Thanks!! Its so difficult to find good poetry here...will try and pick up some Burnside this summer. Is l. Blaga translated?
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