BERNEVAL

Lunar meditations that have me shivering at the modest repetition of the word “more” and thrilled that intimations of mortality provide occasions for such eloquence along the slippery spine of syntax.

Because, once looked at lit
By the cold reflections of the dead
Risen extinct but irresistible,
Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,
Nor the full moon more quick to chill.

James Merrill. “Voices from the Other World” in The Country of A Thousand Years of Peace.

And so for day 291
01.10.2007

The “Instructions to My Mother” become by poem’s end directives to the reader implying some reflection on their own aging. We are invited to avoid pondering about decay and focus on a fine patina.

And never tell me
I’m ‘getting grey,’
but that I am wise in skin,
sturdy-minded in bone and
beautywise in the ways of old women.
Never immune to flattery

Marilyn Dumont. A Really Good Brown Girl.

And so for day 290
30.09.2007

Home is always borrowed.

As nomads camp where others camped before,
As mice find winter digs under the stair,
As this year’s swallows build their summer nest
Among the raftered nurseries of the past;
As mosses lodge in crevices of stone-
We too lodge in lodgings not our own.

From “Two Entries in the Annals of Wayfaring” by Richard Tillinghast.

And so for day 286
26.09.2007

In a specimen book produced by Gaspearau Press for National Poetry month, I found some selections from Ross Leckie’s Gravity’s Plumb Line including the poem “Apples”. I like the description of windfalls as

perfections that paradise couldn’t hold.

which in Leckie’s poem is the continuation of a simile (the apples “are strewn / across the ground like the fallen angels, / perfections that paradise couldn’t hold.”

In my mind the many apples meld into the one and I misremember the line as “perfection that paradise couldn’t keep” — conflating paradise with the garden by way of a French recollection of the “Paradis terrestre”.

And so for day 284
24.09.2007