Eleanor Swanson -2
Reading RunesOlder ones are written on scraps
of yellowed paper folded like letters that will never be mailed. Some recent ones have been written in the kitchen and bear unsavory, unrecognizable stains. Some are dumb in the sense they will never speak again, and in the other sense—full of false grandeur, silly notions, abstract weightless ideas, wrong words. On many unfinished poems the hopeful poet has written copious notes to herself about how the poem must be revised: add a word here, this is a terrible title. What does it mean? Here is the key stanza. Why is it buried in the middle of the poem? Some of the notes are questions, but the poet is scolding the unfinished poem as well. Most of these works-in-progress will always be in progress, because the poet doesn’t have the sense to know when to stop. Those writers who stop in the middle of a line presage a failure of nerve or breath or pure ennui. The words, the gaps, quenched flame—all must be read like runes. I Love You, Says the Heart
We can come to terms with things that can’t be seen,
and reconcile ourselves to the fact that this need not be tied to a belief in the supernatural. Who stands behind the door that has just closed? And from the shards of broken pottery on the asphalt-- can you reconstruct what the jar looked like? Or was it a vase? The air, that phantasmagoric tease, isn’t to be confused with the wind, intimately raking back our hair or insolently bending trees to its will. Who wears the shoes with the pattern of radio waves on their sole? And who has seen radio waves? The difference between things that can be measured, but never seen, and things that will never be seen can be understood. This recognition will lessen our frustration and cause us to love shadows even if we sometimes fear darkness. This isn’t a how-to manual; No metaphysical claims are being made but absences are being described. Absences that resonate with their own importance-- what the roots of a tree look like, or a seed swelling in spring-warmed earth, what people wear under their skin, what is really inside the book, under the child’s bed. The message carried by the unopened letter you burned. What does a quark look like? It's not meaningful to speak of optical properties of subatomic particles, especially components of nucleons. So that means they’ll never be seen, merely believed in, theorized about. Or the universe itself—can it be seen? The universe is a fist, opening and closing like a pulsing heart I love you, says the heart, but you will never look upon me.
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SketchA river scene forms slowly in the sketchbook.
Today the artist experiments with watercolor. He has an audience who murmur about the sketch, imagining what river the artist will have depicted when the painting is finished. They imagine, as he paints, the flowing rivers of the world. As he paints their thoughts become busy with images of their own. They imagine the Li, a tributary of the Yangtze. The Loire. The Colorado. The Nile. The Ganges. The Irrawaddy. The Amazon; the thinkers are beguiled by what they believe they will see as details emerge with each brushstroke. They dream while awake of hippo pods, ancient temples, funeral ghats, the Valley of Kings, mountains, grand chateaus, the planet alive with each flowing river, each with its own capacious heart. The painter paints light. Light and shadow, warm reflected light, sky light, direct light. He himself has drifted into the flowing waters of a dream, tangled in half-formed images. The uber-river flows silently through his mind. The Astronomy BookI took the astronomy book from the shelf--
the one I bought on our first anniversary to teach my husband the stars. Light rolled off the slick pages. The gray italic print of formulas galactic dust impressed there. I thumbed through suns and solar systems, remembering the point of my search: some star I wanted to pluck out of the book to bring on darkness and the glitter of the moon, further spreading the farmer’s brash white floodlights over the rutted fields. Outside together, I follow your arm, raised toward the sky, pointing out, a star, as you tell your colorful story of its discovery, and how it must have winked out millennia ago. You sent shivers up my spine as I thought of interstellar dust and matter adrift. You school me-- from hottest to coldest, the seven main groups of stellar spectra—OBAFGKI. Oh be a fine girl, kiss me. And I did, standing under the faint light of millions of stars. Dark PhotographShe finds the photograph, 5 x 7,
black and white and gray, depicting three figures in complete silhouette. Not a detail of their faces, their features or their clothing can be made out, though the one in the middle a bit shorter than the other can be seen to have long wavy hair, and the one on the left, hands on hips, elbows forming triangles the crepuscular light shows through, wears a cap, bill turned sideways. Little can be known of the one on the right, round alien-shaped head melded with the top of what might be a spruce tree. Above a faint horizon line, a gray background can be seen, suggesting mountains or smoke from a fire billowing out of control. Who are these people and what happened when the fire, if it was a fire, drew closer? Even studying the photograph deeply, under magnification, reveals no more than this. Three people, outdoors, whose lives are in danger |
