Apologia

Tuesday, 11 Jul 06, poems

Working with poems. No time for news. Sorry. Here’s a teaser: one of the many salvageable fragments from the archive. I had already reworked it several times. It needed only a title. I had called it “Assiniboine,” linking it to the place of its conception. The name contributed nothing; it kept the epigram closed and private. A more abstract title opens it out, and may keep it from disappearing back into the reject stack.

Descents

An after-rain drips off the larch;
rills of snowmelt streak a boss,
while diving from a rainbow’s arch
an eagle strikes the coup de grace.

(This is now revised from an earlier posted draft.)

At the wilderness lodge below Mount Assiniboine, Tim and I also worked out this little poem that he published long ago. I shall type from memory, so some detail may be off.

Bedrock

Though I endure the shore –
Moorish villas
bougainvillaeas –
surely I love you more

by waterfalls than fountains
for our friendship
came of hardship
wandering the mountains.

That little thing was fiendishly difficult to devise. I was working in a much easier form last night: blank verse, suited for a large poem based on psalms. But I’m holding the new work for loftier venues than the weblog.