May 26, 2012

A half and half morning, half of me want to go back to bed, half of me wants to start now and just do stuff, stuff I have been putting off or stuff I have been wanting to do.  I match the outside, half cloudy, half sunny, half something in between.  Yeah I know . . . too many halves but it really depends on the way you mark the halves, so many ways that there are always more halves than you suspect.  Ladies are out running with their dogs this morning, in neon shorts and white tank tops, dogs, big ones, black and golden brown, just trotting along side, looking at everything.  The cat sped through the yard and up close to the house, then it disappeared down the driveway.

The cane is winning again!  There is a whole forest of little white sprouts, some a foot tall now, lavish and lush growing where Honey had cleared it all out.  It's just amazing stuff, and I am sure y'all are tired of hearing about it but, it's just such a vote for continuing in the face of adversity, of thriving in spite of everything, of the persistence of life that I can't resist it.   Down on Toddville every year someone cuts a whole huge square of that cane down to the ground, and in a month its six feet tall again and turning green.  By the end of summer it looks just as thick and lively as ever.

This morning a poem about . . . poetry, well, and other things.  There are all kinds of silences, even as noisy as our lives are, so many devices with so many sounds, there are times when we have silence inside and out.

Silences
for Elizabeth

1
Poetry is a weapon, and should be used,
though not in the crudity of violence.
It is a prayer before an unknown altar,
a spell to bless the silence.

2
There is a music beyond all this,
beyond all forms of grievance,
where anger lays its muzzle down
into the lap of silence.

3
Or some butterfly script,
fathomed only by the other,
as supple fingers draw
a silent message from the tangible.

John Montague

Poetry as prayer at an unknown altar; a lot of poems seem like that, wanting to send a prayer into the world, a prayer for the noticing of things, for what is in our hearts, and questions in our minds.  So much anger in the world, most headlines scream with it, and for this few days, when I have not been listening to the news, the silence of ignorance has been a blessing, though I know that all that rage and fear and anger is not lying its muzzle in the lap of silence, I am having an indulgence of silence.  Every poem, someone is writing script that the poet and reader share, the messages are between the lines and in the connections, and the poet is someone who starts the connection but neither the poet nor the reader know where it will go, or what meaning will arrive, even after years, new things will be discovered in a poem because a new reader is reading it, you bring new vision to it, a re-vision of it.

Every moment this morning has been a sort of reading between the lines, lines of cloud and sun, of shadow and deeper shadow.  Between the notes of mockingbird and mourning dove there is silence, "the beauty of innuendoes" and in that silence what I hear are my own thoughts pulsing, and then outside the rhythm of cicadas.