First up: the first bold gesture of spring.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
looking up and down
During a period of unabating creative malaise (a.k.a. the end of the semester), I find myself looking for bits of beauty wherever I can find them. Before I leave this city, I hope to discover just a hint of something beguiling beneath the grime --
First up: the first bold gesture of spring.
First up: the first bold gesture of spring.
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2 comments:
Lovely, Anne. Have you been to the Rodin Museum? It's behind a concrete wall on the Ben Franklin Parkway (north side, a few blocks down from the art museum). It was my favorite place in Center City when I lived there.
annie, this photo reminds me of a poem i wrote, specifically the line, "Cherry trees hang heavy with fruit, they blossom into unbreakable threads of snow." here it is in its entirety. hope it's not too overwhelming...!
To the water that knows my name,
the bellowing hollows of the waves in the night,
the pulse of my body which laps the shore,
I can go beneath like all the water that goes beneath
and watch as West Bay ages
in the tenacious atmosphere of mourning.
It covers me with its wing of a wave
and weathers me.
To the water that knows my name,
the north winds that avail you,
the water-made body which I've become,
I sit at your shore at sundown,
Old Mission and Omena,
and follow the arm of the lighthouse
as it reaches over you.
We grow as we learn from you.
Cherry trees hang heavy with fruit,
they blossom into unbreakable
threads of snow.
The water rolls within me and without me,
I've dropped my clothes so many times
on the sand and soaked in the shallows
of its mettle arms; the sky,
where in the midst of summer it lives,
makes me burn like Petoskey stones
on a Michigan night.
To the water that knows my name,
I come to ask you where you gathered
my name, to gather myself at its most
deserting moments, when nothing comes
and when nothing goes.
It harbors in me, filling the age-old rifts in me,
diluted as the Northport streets,
it wills to make me full.
I never knew the water until it knew me.
It has gilded me, my mouth is full of the bay
when I speak, it beads on my skin,
I almost drown in its pervasion.
I return to it, knowing that I pine for it,
again and again. Then this water,
I find, is such a solitary region,
where there is no one but the waves at my back,
on one but this north wind that often weeps,
there is no one but the turbid blue
that I find in my eyes as well.
Everything comes to me in waves,
either in turmoil or in the repose
that already existed, and grabs hold
with great claws, soaks me and soaks me evermore.
Around me this heavy water swells, through the
harvest of July cherry trees, the waning
and the slow waxing of the summer moon,
this heavy water swells.
To the water that knows my name,
for so long I have known you and know the
depths to which you will go for me.
I can feel you in West Bay, I'll humbly admit
I've known you in the East, the color
of the water changes every time
I restlessly arrive in the Omena Bay,
I've witnessed your burning at Cathead
and you thunder off the shores of Leland.
I move you like a lightning flash and
I move within you, strangely inseparable,
my head in your heart, spilling over me like
a thin, slow thread of honey.
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