“Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream….” ~ Jennifer Grotz
I too was bent on it, eager to jump
out of the pockmarked skillet and into
the heated cauldron of marriage— Hurry,
hurry, said the wind, all the while boring
escape hatches in the tall reeds. Hurry
said the lilac, and the jeweled hummingbird
that revved the throttle on its small engine.
Oh, I let them sing their songs of scorching
and I rushed to drink the wine. And oh,
my fingers bled from threading silk
into the needle, from slipping on
my rings of twine. The dish of nectar
tilts from the brittle branches, and the weeds
remain the feathery vagabonds they are… Now
I try to learn the gold-slow rhythms of afternoons,
the thrift of hours from the longer bones of time.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Always a Story
- Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting
- Letter to Implacable Things
- Landscape, with Cave and Lovers
- Miniatures
- Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here
- Ghazal with a Few Variations
- Letter to Silence
- Landscape, with Returning Things
- Postcard to Grey
- Not Yet There
- Letter to the Street Where I Grew Up (City Camp Alley, Baguio City)
- Between
- Parable of Sound
- Letter to Providence
- Glint
- The Beloved Asks
- Letter to Longing
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Twenty Questions
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Interlude
- Villanelle of the Red Maple
- Letter to Leaving or Staying
- Salutation
- Letter to Love
- Letter to Fortune
- Territories
- Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
- Dear season of hesitant but clearing light,
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Singing Bowl
- [temporarily removed by author]
- Risen
- Refrain
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Dear heart, I take up my tasks again:
- Anniversary
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Risk
- Vocalise
- Tremolo
- Interior Landscape, with Roman Shades and Lovers
- Bird Looking One Way, Then Another
- Gypsy Heart
- Landscape with Carillon
- Letter to Ardor
- Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn
- Marks
- Landscape, with Sunlight and Bits of Clay
- Slaying the Beast
- Measures
- In a Hotel Lobby, near Midnight
- Landscape with Shades of Red
- Between the Acts
- Letter to Duty
- Letter to Nostalgia
- You
- Song of Work
- Balm
- Landscape, with Wind and Tulip Tree
- From the Leaves of the Night Notebook
- Letter to What Must be Borne
- Redolence
- Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter
- Night-leaf Tarot
- Trauermantel
- Foretelling
- Aubade, with Sparrow
- Reverie
- Mineral Song
- Layers
- Prayer
- Proof
- Landscape as Elegy for the Unspent
Wow. That last couplet especially, that’s magnificent.
I love the semi-veer, not *quite* saying “out of the frying pan into the fire” :-) I end up puzzling over the cauldron. Is it better to be in a cauldron than a fry pan? Yes. No. You don’t drown in skillet, but you don’t spatter in a cauldron.
He is in haste to live, and hies himself to feel (Pushkin? I think? Lermontov used it for an epigraph.)
Dale, that is a lovely quote… let me know its provenance when you verify it.
I misremembered: it’s the epigraph to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. That’s the form I saw it in (I have no Russian, alas!) It’s from his friend Prince Vyazemsky. The translation I’ve seen just casually searching now has “To live it rushes and makes haste to feel.” No idea what the antecedent of “it” is.
There is an exposed truth here, all lovely, especially, “the longer bones of time”.
Now /I try to learn the gold-slow rhythms of afternoons,/ the thrift of hours from the longer bones of time.
RHYTHMS AT SUNDOWN
On my hammock, on afternoons like this,
I have the whole sky for a taut canvas.
It is easy enough to paint a landscape
rolling on clouds that transform quickly.
That mass of cumulus moving toward
the hillocks of Nara is my father’s face.
I can see my Chloe in a furious pirouette
among those swirling cirrus. A ballerina.
Are clouds the sum of all our memories?
Do they shape the fears that we run from?
Or have I just run aground, no wind
on my sail, no seascapes nor harbours?
On afternoons like this, on my hammock,
I cull the pictures I have collected, a collage
of dispersing dwindling drawings on skies
that darken at sundown drowning them all.
What have I rushed for, hieing to a country
of old men? These are empty spaces of empty
hours, a dull ache that stands for a leftover life
marking rhythms of time on a swaying hammock.
—Albert B. Casuga
06-15-11
Magical.
I’m joining a chorus: I like the last couplet a great deal. I love “gold-slow rhythms of afternoons / the thrift of hours” — love the ambiguity of “thrift” here — it seems to go slowly and fast — sounds like “swift” but the meaning is slow and fast.