This flower is yellow-orange, but you cannot see its color now. Likewise you cannot see, in the few cobbles along the bottom and the left edge of the photo, that summer S finished stone-edged beds for flowers around our home here near the wood..
He had to sit on a low stool to work at it and he wound up hurting his back. When we ran out of stone, our daughter would bring us cobbles from her stone-pile in the bucket of her small tractor. We bought the lilies from the nursery that grows great beds of them that you can see from the highway. The nurseryman also posts Christian messages on a signboard by the road. The people that work there are very nice; they help you pick out just the right colors and types to extend the blooming season. For me--all of this is in that photo--along with the blacks and the whites.
I met the poet Carol Snow at a writer's workshop taught by Leslie Scalapino. (This photo was taken at that time.) Here is a poem from Carol's first book, FOR, University of California Press, 2000. I have seen this pool and these fish, but my poem would have been completely different, as would yours,---should you have written one. You can also sense just how much felt life and thought went into the making and contemplation of this pond.
Reading
by the pond, the immediate---
breath---and then the text, and then the pond.
*
Thought, an intermediate
murmuring---which would be sound (which displaces
sound) but accompanies
sight---
*
watching the goldfish
(why)---the body passive,
small eye movements (as though in a dream)
*
Quiet breaths
in a still place. "Each next"
taking up a little of the spill.
*
Many
thoughts, gone.
And the varied
sights, intimate
with these thoughts---
(Carol Snow, from FOR, pages 39-40)
Look at all the glorious space in this poem! Look at the arrangement, the asterisks and punctuation. Then go sit somewhere quiet in your yard or womwhere else with special resonance for you, and write something, perhaps even a haiku. Good night.
He had to sit on a low stool to work at it and he wound up hurting his back. When we ran out of stone, our daughter would bring us cobbles from her stone-pile in the bucket of her small tractor. We bought the lilies from the nursery that grows great beds of them that you can see from the highway. The nurseryman also posts Christian messages on a signboard by the road. The people that work there are very nice; they help you pick out just the right colors and types to extend the blooming season. For me--all of this is in that photo--along with the blacks and the whites.
I met the poet Carol Snow at a writer's workshop taught by Leslie Scalapino. (This photo was taken at that time.) Here is a poem from Carol's first book, FOR, University of California Press, 2000. I have seen this pool and these fish, but my poem would have been completely different, as would yours,---should you have written one. You can also sense just how much felt life and thought went into the making and contemplation of this pond.
BY THE POND
Reading
by the pond, the immediate---
breath---and then the text, and then the pond.
*
Thought, an intermediate
murmuring---which would be sound (which displaces
sound) but accompanies
sight---
*
watching the goldfish
(why)---the body passive,
small eye movements (as though in a dream)
*
Quiet breaths
in a still place. "Each next"
taking up a little of the spill.
*
Many
thoughts, gone.
And the varied
sights, intimate
with these thoughts---
(Carol Snow, from FOR, pages 39-40)
Look at all the glorious space in this poem! Look at the arrangement, the asterisks and punctuation. Then go sit somewhere quiet in your yard or womwhere else with special resonance for you, and write something, perhaps even a haiku. Good night.
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