Tuesday
Feb182014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 at 04:44AM
=0=0=0=
F a c e T i m e
Folly Beach
Charleston, South Carolina
=0=0=0=
Grief was to go out, away
From this bedside of cliffs and shells,
Awakings in mornings to white-ragged manes
Hoisting themselves up over rocks
And the white mother of foam sped
In a thickened broth curdled white
Back to the throngs of the oncoming rigors.
Grief was just in the having
Of so much heart pulse gone out and away
Into absence and the spent shadow
Of what ran from our fingers as ripples
Of shadow over the sand and what eluded
In a bending of mirrors the tipped tints and reflections
And was just so much running down the packed sands'
Mile-wide blondness of bird-tracked floor.
Was to behold in leaving, as if for the first time,
The fair-weathered crown of the mole
And the light chained to the grass-scattered peak.
Between the gates of the bullet-round rocks
Was to pluck up by the roots the salt hay
Where the seaweed lay wine red
And the foam was combed with gushed red
Was to leave carrying sealed in some envelope
Commandments instructing through leagues down
Where all must be seen through the hidden,
Through shade upon shade, down through layers,
Where all must be seen suspended in the stilled inner scene,
And the word must guard the deed and the inner word
Must not spill its center of smoke
Or break out from the windows of music
Playing deep in the night no one may arrive to
While you come back to your life
In a strange grace of gratitude,
Loving the least and most meagre
Of the held to, the unchosen given,
For here stand the encircling premises
By which don't they leap from, the distances?
And even as in the beat of the running foam
The enhalting power of the thing
Crowding the mind, pouring over the eyes?
Is it in the poignancy of tests
That we strike fire at the source,
At farewell that we clasp what we know,
And as if it were dying, run to embrace
Our life lying out there, misadventured, abstruse,
In the great wedge of light beamed forth --
Like messengers sallying out
To your "I see! I see!" bearing a scroll
On which the word is almost decipherable.
~Jean Garrigue (1914-1972)~
=0=0=0=
=0=0=0=
Reader Comments