::Spezzato::

Ansel & the Thundercloud

From the estimable Letters of Note (don't worry, you guys there, your content is safe; hardly anyone reads this electronic notebook; it is like a harmless old man, flirting with pretty girls at the pub. But I digress from your wonderful letter, which you prefaced like so...)

"In 1936, in the midst of an unrelenting workload and the near-demise of his marriage of 50 years, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams then returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.

Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote the following beautiful letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright."

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood � children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love � more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

(Source: Letters of a Nation; Image: Ansel Adams in Yosemite, California, c.1942, courtesy of ck/ck.)

Ah! Azanzhaya

My book of poetry moved, had some technical troubles, was retitled and adjusted, and may now be found as a PDF... HERE. Let me know what you think. ~*~M.

Timeless Romantic Advice for Young Lovers

(1) "Avoid looking at a boy with your soul in your eyes." (1921, 'Manners & Conduct in School and Out', Deans of Girls in Chicago High Schools).

(2) "If you would have a serene old age never woo a girl who keeps a diary." (1905, 'The Cynic's Rules of Conduct', Chester Field Jr).

(3) "Never have flowers floating � not even orchids. Flowers drown as quickly as people and look desolate like so many Ophelias." (1937, 'Can I Help You?', Viola Tree).

(4) "Women who smoke must drink something stronger than tea." (1855, 'The London Journal').

(5) "It is unwise to invite your psychiatrist to your parties and other social events." (1967, 'Etiquette Etceteras', Sheila Ostrach).

(6) "No young man or young woman can afford to read fiction before they are twenty-five years of age." (1904, 'What a Young Man Ought to Know', Sylvanus Stall).

(7) "Money is never talked of in polite society; it is taken for granted." (1901, 'The Book of Good Manners', Mrs. Burton Kingsland).

This are the best bits of 'Wicked Eitquette', by Sarah Kortum. I found them in the back of a notebook... which I'm writing in again. So, poem-posts soon, unless I break down and update this site instead. What do you think? Needs a lick of paint, perhaps...

Dear Grandmother

for Rhoda

I'm sorry, we thought you were gone
and pain-blind stole from your house
the coffee cup you measure sugar with
a lozenge tin of paper clips
your trowel, a cut handful
of thread left beside the silent
singer, and two more coffee cups
with which you rose full
and thanked the sun each day.
A stone from your garden,
a line from beside each eye.
We thought you were gone and
tried to take you away in things that
you swarmed from suddenly free
as a kicked hive of bees, as vastly
alive as you ever will be.

Wallace Stevens on Ephemerality

"Things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions very often take on a form that is ambiguous or uncertain. It is not possible to attach a single, rational meaning to such things without destroying the imaginative or emotional ambiguity or uncertainty that is inherent in them and that is why poets do not like to explain. That the meanings given by others are sometimes meanings not intended by the poet or that were never present in his mind does not impair them as meanings." [*]

*Morse, Samuel French. "Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate -- Harold Bloom's Vast Accumulation". The Wallace Stevens Journal. Volume 1, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 1977) pp. 99.

Kay Ryan's "Green Behind the Ears"

I was still slightly
fuzzy in shady spots
and the tenderest lime.
It was lovely, as I
look back, but not
at the time. For it is
hard to be green and
take your turn as flesh.
So much freshness
to unlearn.

untitled: from an old notebook

Helllllo? Anyone still reading?

the particular tilted
floodplain of being

each a little lonely
watching our lives

subside along the faultlines
of incomplete dreams, passions

prospects of the mere body
measured through the lens

of the proud eye
and written in sweat

as an epigram
onto the wind

Talisman

Forget yourself � really
walk with your feet
on the goddamned dirt.
Tangle moss in the crowns
of your teeth; lick dung
like gumdrops and draw
draughts off the lips of
the dusty wind. Taste that
smoke. Walk with broken
feathers in each hand, sylph.
Stretch out your arms and live
just off the grit of your shadow.

]]> [final draft of an old poem]

In a Belfast Arcade

I saw a black boy
in deerskin and headdress.
He wore moccasins on his feet,
beads about his brow.

Young and working
for the wild west, he was
hired for his dark skin,
in another's for a while.

This was his break.
Spurred by the moment,
he trod among Saturday strollers.
Shoppers stared at the Indian boy.

How they became him,
his skins, fringes and feathers
like foreign letters for the sacred
or absurd. Magic was bound

to him, however cheaply.
He had no time to lose. He strode
through, easily now, then danced
a conjurer's dance away, smiling.

rendezvous

every time we run
into each other, it turns
out you're beautiful

hi, pretty lady,
you say, and I'm too awestruck
to interrogate

for irony, since
you were beautiful straddling
my upside-down bike

that day, smudged by grease
as you built the blue-gleam frame
I could ride and ride

or the stormy night
we came in rain-wet by chance
to the same hotel

but especially
the day we met and I did
not see you at all

Up & Down

In the end, I've learned to write
like a waterbird breaking
off water into flight, after hours cowering
at the tread of invisible beasts,
amidst decoys, false-calls. Nothing more
to be done, I burst from the reeds, finally flew
straight into the buckshot and was taken
powerfully, gathered lovingly, rendered down.

Neon Green

[first draft]

my old teacher told me

I was young once, hitched
all the way to New York City
as a boy from West Virginia

heart leaning lump-like
rough white clay toward truth
he felt uncolored, unexplored

my old teacher told me

I travelled east with a guitar
to New York City's zen center
and on the steps I met a monk

and a green lotus-posed statue
of the buddha burning green green
so neon searing that he asked, Why?

It turned green when the bomb hit
Nagasaki, and has been so ever since
said he, then laughed and laughed

and I've never learned another lesson since.

Non-Artsy Entry

Do you read this anymore? I've been kept away myself lately: by grad school, visits and illnesses, living overseas and travelling a lot. I'm writing one sort of book, and then I'll be writing another.

How are you?

I know comments are still broken. My webmaster forgot to tell me how to log in. I really only asked once. Email mo.evans over at gmail in the meantime, if you'd like to say hello, or send post to Castle Chester / 34 Marine Pde. / Whitehead, co. Antrim, UK / BT389QN. I tend to write letters.

I've penned plenty of poems while in Ireland, and I'll eventually get around to sorting and posting them. Until then, expect intermittent scribblings, just like the good old days.

Thanks, stranger!

μικρόςσκοπεῖν

This summer I dreamed
and spoke to you in dreams
not really there, leaning towards
the sleeping real you as a seedling
towards a dream sun, that is, the only
one we know of; the spectre of our own
begetting and begot, all we forgot somewhere
in the space between telescope and slide, the one
that holds the cells that write your fate, the light in your
eyes. Too late, I met you. We spoke few words close together
and stitched this lifetime through a dark facade of waiting to see.

Unsent Letters

pour la photographe

[Lunaria]

Do you have your glasses on; do they touch your face and leave
a faint mark, self-portrait as tender as toothbites on the wrist
of someone with whom you only intended to say goodbye?
Does the light glancing off them move towards or away?

[Dracaena]

With the insistence of palm fronds,
I am a smooth, flat, pliant thing, wound up
to such an extent of tension, to such a hard point
that my mind is neither giving nor receiving, neither
space nor substance. My mind is a mould for a tool.

[Palmata]

Some of this dulse bears calciferous patterns, like stone honeycombs; others, neon green nipples, indiscernibly floral or faunal. I lose myself consuming long tatters; I knit them through my teeth and down the gullet, warts and all, wondering how such things let me live off them, as you do � simple, necessary, and redemptive even of the general ambivalence of life.

[Thuja]

The air of forests in the north
is always cold as heavy cloth

laid over the clay of one's own
heart in the cautious studio of time,

to gauge the capacity of the animal
you will become once kilned into

hard imperviousness, then forced
to utter human words that crack

the mask of all your wilderness
into pocketable pieces of lore.