[Image: one of several in what I’ve been calling “The Odd Glove Project.” (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Back in March or April, I started photographing a new category of roadside litter: single, unpaired surgical gloves. That I’d find any surgical gloves was, of course, not so surprising under the circumstances; the surprise came from their… well, their very unpairedness. I found enough such photographs, in just a few weeks, that I dumped them into a new Instagram account of their own. I don’t add new samples to the portfolio very often, but oh yes: they’re still accumulating.]
From whiskey river (italicized lines):
Mother Night
When you wake at three AM you don’t think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children’s
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn’t arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber’s
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, “Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines,” fried me two eggs, then said,
“If you want to understand mortality look at birds.”
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.
(Jim Harrison [source])
…and:
The Poet Compares Human Nature to the Ocean from Which We Came
The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
it can lie down like silk breathing
or toss havoc shoreward; it can givegifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can
sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,and so, no doubt, can you, and you.
(Mary Oliver [source])
…and:
Cold Wind
I like those old movies where tires and wheels run backwards on horse-drawn carriages pursued by indians, or Model As driven by thugs leaning out windows with tommy guns ablaze. Of late I feel a cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to the outback I once knew so well where there were too many mosquitoes, blackflies, curious bears, flowering berry trees of sugar plum and chokeberry, and where sodden and hot with salty sweat I’d slide into a cold river and drift along until I floated against a warm sandbar, thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our 10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall back into their arms again.
(Jim Harrison [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Buckroe, After the Season, 1942
Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads
At last we came into the unleashed wind;
The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end
Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread.Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves
Flung yellow foam and sucked at disheveled sand.
Small fish stank in the sun, and nervous droves
Of cloud hastened their shadows over bay and land.Beyond the NO DUMPING sign in its surf of cans
And the rotting boat with nettles to the rails,
The horse dung garlanded with jeweling flies
And papers blown like a fleet of shipless sails,We pushed into an overworld of wind and light
Where sky unfettered ran wild from earth to noon,
And the tethered heart broke loose and rose like a kite
From sands that borrowed diamonds from the sun.We were empty and pure as shells that air-drenched hour,
Heedless as waves that swell at the shore and fall,
Pliant as sea-grass, the rapt inheritors
Of a land without memory, where tide erases all.
(Virginia Hamilton Adair [source])
…and:
Port of Aerial Embarkation
There is no widening distance at the shore—
The sea revolving slowly from the piers—
But the one border of our take-off roar
And we are mounted on the hemispheres.Above the waning moon whose almanac
We wait to finish continents away,
The Northern stars already call us back,
And silence folds like maps on all we say.Under the sky, a stadium tensed to cry
The ringside savage thrumming of the fights,
We watch our engines, taut and trained for sky,
Arranged on fields of concrete flowered with lights.Day after day we fondle and repeat
A jeweler’s adjustment on a screw;
Or wander past the bulletins to meet
And wander back to watch the sky be blue.Somehow we see ourselves in photographs
Held in our hands to show us back our pride
When, aging, we recall in epitaphs
The faces just behind and to each side.The nights keep perfect silence. In the dark
You feel the faces soften into sleep,
Or tense upon the fraught and falling arc
Of fear a boy had buried not too deep.Finally we stand by and consciously
Measure the double sense of all our talk,
And, everyman his dramatist, anxiously
Corrects his role, his gesture, and his walk.
(John Ciardi [source])
…and:
The texture of [Shakespeare’s] imagination favored certain rhythms and patterns. “The bank and shoal of time” is one of his treasured rhythms: the one and two of three. When you think about it, that’s a convoluted way to build a metaphor. In “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” for instance, items owned by an unstable human archer (slings, arrows) imply the calamitous actions they’re capable of. And then the phrase says: “Okay, now swap fortune for archer.” A listener hears the first part, allows the items to conjure up the man, pictures the archer, then is surprised by the appearance of something abstract—fortune—which has now acquired familiar and scary human characteristics. All that in a phrase heard fleetingly, and yet our brains follow the trajectory of the imagery without a sweat, and we’re powerfully moved by it. Shakespeare has managed to endow a superstitious force with a ferocity we have seen, or perhaps even possessed.
(Diane Ackerman [source])
Leave a Reply