Still, how beautiful and perfect
each raindrop looks— pearls strung
in that radial pattern, artful across
the web. Easy enough to think
each raindrop a pearl, a rhinestone
broken loose from a silken thread. And
the web’s an easy metaphor, just think.
Someone paces, paints, or writes all night.
Then something loosens: a sigh snaps the threads
that held the shapes, that filled and colored
in the light. Sleepless, write or paint all night:
then revise at dawn; wreck, rewrite. Begin
all over again— what filled those shapes? Color
that beguiled with absolute certainty of itself.
Revising at dawn, amid the wreckage of beginnings,
you find it’s hard to remember how love looked
except beguiling, so absolutely sure of itself.
Think radial patterns, think lines that artfully cross
with all you need, want to, remember. You know how hard to look
at what’s unfinished; proclaim it beautiful or perfect, still.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Your last six lines say it all. Like remnants of the snapped spiderweb, how can they be pieced together again so they would look perfect? Pearls disappear with the fallen raindrops. But a work of love, though unfinished, would look beautiful, still. Bravo, Luisa.
VISIONS AND REVISIONS
Endless visions and revisions
will follow every work of art,
its end is also its beginning.
A cat straining to catch its tail
to earn its master’s delight?
But that’s not the metaphor.
When the last image attaches
itself to a final web of moving
yet still pictures on a canvas,
when the impasto of colours
have shaped the unuttered
angst trembling on the easel,
when sounds have moulded
sense into a riot of language,
creation is done, work begins.
Will the poem sing brightly?
Will the painting now speak?
When are they truly finished?
He shaped a man out of clay
and thought him imperfect,
he needed her to be complete.
How hard it must be for Him
to watch them destroy what
grows out of their love and loin.
Yet he was proclaimed good
and perfect among the trees
and the mud dried out of Eden.
How hurtful it must be for one
to start from the wreckage
of what began from ardent love.
—Albert B. Casuga
08-08-11
Also posted at:
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/08/visions-and-revisions.html