O Copernicus! You were so quiet up there in your castle and even when you came down to treat the ills of the children the fishermen and priests, humble shy, you would rarely say what you eventually had to say. Were the roads to Gdansk Chelmo and Krakow so brutal? How often did the Baltic freeze? Did the memory of light and olive trees in Bologna and Padua change your mind? At times did you lose your way and see beasts we shall never again see? O Copernicus! We can never be the center of the Universe no matter how hard we may try to be with god’s eyes twinkling through pinpricks in the eggshell limits of his imaginary firmament. You and the Turks knew this. There was an elegance to Ptolemy nonetheless and the church’s forced indulgences, but then you found the correct sequences angles and numbers and once again affirmed in tables of absolute proof our inalienable right and necessity to worship our truer heart sun, sonne, slonce, sole, solis, O Copernicus!
On the Nature of Poetry “ … but it is the world, Father, that I do not understand” --W.S. Merwin There have been so many pronunciations, so many songs and even more birds. I was in that field of sparrows at the end of this island and even I could not name the place. Some of my fellow travelers found the oldest rocks cut and polished by more distant arrivals. We wanted to carry the news we wanted to be a well of echoes we wanted the rivers to dive and thunder through unknown caverns, lava tubes, glacial caves. Would someone name this thing later, when it was no longer necessary just to keep it safe from annihilation? The earth and its concerns turn with or without it. We have no real capacity to grasp how it first blossomed in our ear, from our throats trembling over the standing stones. Giants lived there, clearly they left their vibrato in the libraries of the mesas and slot canyons. I was in that field of sparrows and still no solution came to me no words for what only exists in an alchemy of words. It is why we ask these questions and pretend we can know what those extinct Giants failed to say when they sang it into the cliffs and eruptions in their unintelligible tongue. What is it we wish to transmute? Where do we wish to arrive? What seas in our dreams and what beasts, not quite imaginary, rise in those opaque coves from disappearing corals to tell such secrets through the incessant tidal sways, what riddles under the magnificent midnight moon are we still trying to break?
Sometimes Sometimes winter nights are so clear gestures that surround the world, open and the sliver of the moon tells a story of hands and remembrances so fresh you don’t ever wish to return, and that rose the rose of the skin over your scaffold of being cannot be denied anything that makes you question the sentience of night trees or even silent winter cranes over snow rising, rising and falling once again. Looking up I saw where we turned among the spirals of heavenly bodies and pointed for my son shivering there so he could see it too. So much is right even all these troubles even our troubles. The cold makes what you see so precise, the ice glows in the dark a long way out a long long way out.
Poetry from Compendium:The Kitchen Sink is best read using an ipad, laptop or desktop. Iphones compromise line endings and stanza integrity.
Excellent, the last one, last stanza got me right in the heart 💘