I wrote this last month and wanted to share it. It's been a long quite winter in regards to poetry, after such a flurry in the summer and early fall. Lots of painting though. :)
Weight
I know you want to do something true, honest.
That you want to make beautiful things, as real as a boot
falling from a chair,
or a bullet of resin embracing a pinecone, or a vase being
filled with water,
but I would ask you
to wait, to not try and be
a vase filling up with water, to not
try and be resin sticking to a finger, to not
try and make a boot be supple.
To float a bit, to be at ease
with not-waiting.
Don’t worry. The
words will come.
And the words will give you weight.
Worth its wait ... in gold :-)
ReplyDelete"I know you want to do something true, honest.
That you want to make beautiful things ..."
It has been said that we know best what we ourselves have made, a boot or a chair, an artifact in language, occasionally a "well-wrought urn" ... The allusion to a reading of Keats isn't accidental ... Out of a meditation on an ancient object, he shapes a poem as a monument to artistry: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" ...
Does the equation describe an impossible stasis beyond our making? ... This also a question worth its weight in gold, at least poetically:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
...
Yeats, Byzantium
长歌楚天碧
唐 柳宗元
Eternal songs under a clear blue sky
(Tang) Liu Zongyuan