Friday, June 19, 2009

passer by, these are words


on my front lawn is a big old cherry tree. it has suffered through harsh winters. it has suffered through plagues of locusts (or some bug), it has suffered through drought. yet it comes back in a sort of withered and eventually leafy form each year. last year for the first time in seven years it flowered and bore fruit. the birds were ecstatic!! i'm going to tuck some images of part of its weathered trunk in with today's post..

i was mentioning yesterday about music and how i love to stumble across music and musicians who really float my boat. so today i'm going to say much the same thing about poets. i admire poets who write as if it really mattered. they can be quiet, simple, state obvious truths elegantly or be flamboyant and earthy and rich and leave nothing to my imagination but if they hit that hard to define and harder to describe sweet spot then - they're in!!!

yves bonnefoy is one such poet. i didn't know much about him - and yet when i read his work i felt that good feeling of "oh yeah i get what you're saying." so i'll share this lovely piece with you today. it makes its place hovering at the interstice between what is and what might be (and who among us is brave enough to decide where that is or might be?)

life.

a measure of the distance between what is and what we wish for is contained in our experiencing of degrees of wistfulness and longing that i characterize as a form of conscious suffering.

if you allow the details of a moment to enter you in all their fullness, the riches of this world become so apparent and overwhelming that feelings of wishing for more, feelings of the inadequacy of what is, actually diminish.

bonnefoy’s writing describes the transitory nature of “here” and “there”, “this” and “that”: thresholds. places where ideas melt, deliquesce one into the other.

passer-by, these are words

passer-by, these are words. but instead of reading
i want you to listen: to this frail
voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
it flits between two sprays of leaves,
carrying the sound of branches that are real
to those that filigree the still unseen.

then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
the endless murmuring of all our shades.
their whisper rises from beneath the stones
to fuse into a single heat with that blind
light you are as yet, who can still gaze.

may your listening be good! silence
is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,
imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage
a name upon a stone:

and so our absent names untangle your alarms.
and for you who move away, pensively,
here becomes there without ceasing to be.


yves bonnefoy

8 comments:

Delwyn said...

Hi Steven

I have read this three times through but still don't grasp it yet...

but I do love;
the branches that are real to those that filigree the still unseen

and

our shades their whispers rise from beneath the stones

these images I easily resonated with and conjured both in place and metaphor

I will read it again tomorrow and let in percolate...

Happy days

Robynn's Ravings said...

I truly enjoyed your comments today on Willow's post and had a good cry over there with her music and words. I continued it as I traveled over here and read your evocative thoughts. Thank you. Blessings.

steven said...

hey robynn thanks for visiting!! willow's created an amazing place to visit. i've learned how to bake cakes, be more present in my blogs, and to look forward to visiting her thoughts every day!! a very lucky boy to be sure!!! have a peaceful day!!! steven

steven said...

hi delwyn, we had a really hot and sunny day today so i got my first sunburn of the season. the kids here have six more sleeps before their school year is done. add one more sleep for me and then i can retire to nice walks, margaritas', swimming in our pool and reading and whatever else enters my mind! oh yes, you asked about a poem. well i think the poem is like the entire entry. it's about that funny space between knowing we are doing something and not. when we are so focussed on one thing that we ignore the other event. for example: "may your listening be good! silence
is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,
imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage
a name upon a stone:" there's much more but it's one of those ambiguous pieces of writing that leaves you with more conjecture than substance and sometimes that's the way i like life!!!!! steven

Delwyn said...

I did read it again earlier this morning and it went somewhere much more readily than last night. I kept getting stuck on the disparate seeming imagery...and this time it coalesced and felt good...and took me in its flow...


Lucky you to be so close to relaxation time...how much use do you get out of a pool?


Happy Days

steven said...

hey delwyn! i'm glad that there was some unravelling of the poem for you but i won't kid you and say that it was easy reading . . . no,no,no!! i am very very lucky to be coming up on so much holiday time but my body and mind and even to some degree my spirit are fairly battered and bruised and the recharge will do me and most who know me a real service! our pool is open from june to late september. it's filled with kids from all over the neighbourhood on most days so we keep lots of extra drinks and freezies and popsicles for them! i barely use it myself because i'v enever been much of a swimmer but i am hoping to change that this summer. steven

Delwyn said...

I hope that its heated!

steven said...

hi delwyn! it is actually. we really need the heat after september - one year we kept it going through october but the cost - it's heated by natural gas - was fairly astronomical so we haven't done that since. it's all a function of the kind of weather we get. sometimes october can be really nice. steven