PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

And of course, yes, God shows up. We are often 'forced' to recognise a 'god' whose raiment consists of religious trappings, codified regulations, congregational strictures, and doctrinal diatribes. But when He shows up, He asks of us, even requires of us: "will I find faith." Walking in faith is not easy and it is also lonely and personal even in the company of like minded and like hearted believers. Walking together in faith has its benefits and its purposes but for the soul that resides within us, this journey can and is sustained by all that is "enough to turn fists into open hands." That is when we truly are and when we truly receive and are fallen aware of who we are in the Master's heart. I love the pond image as an openness, skyward, in its vast, unfiltered receiving posture, and so take within myself that image as the chalice of the soul that is gold in His handiwork and polished each first light from the first instant of being formed in the secret place. Thanks for sharing and pardon the meditation prompted by your poetic words.

"almost joy, if only I could bear it, "

Speechless, wordless, like being seen

Your words, as ever, a ship's captain taking this mind and spirit to places hard to find, and wholly worth exploring. 

While reading this poem, I was trying to find an appropriate word to describe the poetic processes within it.  It reminds me of an elaborate pageant, unfolding its multiple beauties before an audience; or like a symphony when one watches first, say, the strings, then the woodwinds, etc, as they perform their various parts both as ensembles and in solos.

   Then I thought about the cosmos itself.  The earth spins about its axis, while the moon orbits the earth, and both are orbiting the sun along with all the other planets, some with multiple moons, and innumerable asteroids.  And the sun is traveling around the edge of the local galaxy, which is, itself, moving away from the point of origin.

    Can you imagine one of those Bavarian clocks that have multiple figures that move about with the telling of the time?  That is what this poem is like.  An old friend of mine, a brother Freemason, had been stationed in Germany after the second world war and had acquired an elaborate model railway which, on its platform, made its way through an miniature Bavarian village; in which multiple processes occured after the winding of the key to tighten the spring.  That is what this poem does.  First light brings us ancestors and messengers, and reveals a city of flame and layered worlds (does the city itself contain those worlds? like, say, the city in Sam Delaney's novel, Dahlgren, or Carcosa, in Robert Chamber's collection of stories, The King In Yellow).

      The entrance of Divinity occupies the second and part of the third stanza; and then, with both brilliance and very deft subtlety, the Poet gives a moment of meta-poetry (I love such moments, when Poetry reflects back on itself) where the Poem defines its own processes, and also defines a major aspect of her exisrting collection:  at which the Poet is "polished like / river stone by wonder---almost joy."  This phrase is not only central to the poem before us, it is also highly central to her entire collection.  In my opinion, the fullness of joy is in Heaven; but here, we are given---by the Cosmos, which is the elder sibling to all of us here on earth---a sense of wonder which is "almost joy."  And though that joy is unbearably pleasant and salutary, fists become open hands, thirst becomes inner rain, and pain is a road back home. 

      As the poem concludes, an ordinary pond receives the sky like an offering, a sacrament in a chalice of gold.

      This afternoon, I happened to be reading excerpts from the poems of the French Poet and diplomat, Saint-John Perse.  His Poetry also explores and contemplates processes, shown in their titles:  Winds, Snows, Seamarks, etc.  His poetry has such a high perspective that he does not bother to give us specific locations where these processes take place.  The Winds poem is set in the American West, in the time just prior the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki---but that is all of the specificity provided in such a lofty view and outlook within the poem.  Patriciajj's Poetry is like Perse's---a contemplation of cosmic powers and processes.  Perse's fellow Poet and diplomat, Paul Claudel, called Perse a contemplator.  And I will borrow Claudel's phrase to conclude this comment on Patricia's great poem, and her great collection of poems.  She is a cosmic contemplator.  Although she walks on the earth with all of us, her view and her perspective are both cosmic and contemplative.  Claudel and Perse are her peers:  their Poetry presents aspects of the Cosmos to their readers, as she does for hers.  The same could be said for Pindar, Callimachus, and even Vergil.  This peerage, to which Patriciajj belongs. both by nature and by accomplishment, does not depend on quanity of lines but quality of thought and emotion.  With each poem that she posts---and, especially, this one---Patricia demonstrates her right to claim that peerage.  And the effect of her claim upon that peerage  is her continuing disclosure of the cosmos to readers.  When the day of the completion of her total collection has come, we shall see in it a similarity to Wallace Stevens' work, especially during the latter part of his life, when, in poems like To An Old Philosopher In Rome (a poem about his former college professor) he contemplated---as Patricia does in so many of her poems---"the total grandeur at the end . . . total grandeur of a total edifice."  Though Stevens did not much go beyond that point of the total grandeur, his spiritual descendent, Patriciajj, is disclosing that grandeur to us, poem by poem, line by line, as she assembles for us the total edifice.