Let's Go Kayaking--and Diving!

Mendocino waters: off Van Damme State Beach, CA.  

If you look closely, you can see my clay sea-bull mask at the prow.

Last June's photo: I need an updated version, don't you think?

Fragments From Bacchylides

Though Honor shifts to any shape,
And man's skills cannot be told,
One outranks them all: the mind
Discretion moves to what's at hand.

----------

Yet resilient Theseus
Did not flinch:
Poising tall
On the planked deck,
He dived an arc
To his welcome warm
In the sea's glades.
Minos, bit to the quick . . . .

----------

Works of the gods are wonders
Seaworthy men confirm.

----------

This for the last time:
Profit can crush
Profoundest minds.

----------

One writer picks another's brains--
Call it tradition:
Taking the gates of a new song
Is no small job.

----------

One criterion, one approach
Leads on to man's success:
The soul that sees out
Life in self-delight.
Who hounds his wits
At the heels of crowding cares
And pummels his mind with what's to come,
Drives dead work through the days and nights . . . .
Throttle your heart with sorrow,
All the gladness dies.

----------

. . . when she curves that smooth arm,
And flicks some wine at the saucers--
Just with a neat turn of her wrist--
Our flute-girl serves her bachelors.

----------

Never underhand,
The words that Wisdom
Resonates in man.

----------

The gifts of the Muses,
Goals of a hard campaign,
Do not surrender
To all who handle arms.

----------

*Bacchylides was a Greek poet of the fifth century B.C.  You can find these fragments and more with an appropriate scholarly treatment in . . .

Bacchylides, Complete Poems, 
Translated, with a Note to the New Edition, by Robert Fagles,
With a Foreward by Sir Maurice Bowra,
Introduction and Notes by Adam M. Parry,
Yale University Press: New Haven & London,
1998.

Hektor: sculpture mix, pit-fired.
(The red is from kelp-wrappings before I put the piece into the pit, I'm fairly sure.)

Flames And Ashes

Quick Fiction/Story Fragment found in an old notebook yesterday (and slightly edited today):

FLAMES AND ASHES


How to put this? She'd glow, absolutely glow, after sex. Then, he found that he could bring out that glow just with his words, his attentive listening, his tuning in and drawing her out. At first, he exulted in his success and skills, in her heated responses to his focused intensity. He enjoyed these new shared flames and the joyous visible proof. Later, he found he missed kindling, for him, the hotter joys of bodies and psyches engaged. He missed feeling satiated himself. Too late, he realized that in proving his power to feed her he'd starved himself. But why hadn't she seen that and remedied that for him? Was that even a fair question?


--MD


If you click on the "Fiction" label below, I believe you can see a handful of my other Quick Fiction pieces, among other things, as well.

Mermaid Sighting: June 2012

"In A Long Rage": More Poems By Louise Bogan

I've been reading around  again in Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923- 1968--The Noonday Press: New York, 1968--and I have four more poems I'd like to share.

I've quoted four other poems by Louise Bogan here.

Read aloud, please, and listen:


MAN ALONE


It is yourself you seek
In a long rage,
Scanning through light and darkness
Mirrors, the page,


Where should reflected be
Those eyes and that thick hair,
That passionate look, that laughter.
You should appear


Within the book, or doubled,
Freed, in the silvered glass;
Into all other bodies
Yourself should pass.


The glass does not dissolve;
Like walls the mirrors stand;
The printed page gives back
Words by another hand.


And your infatuate eye
Meets not itself below:
Strangers lie in your arms
As I lie now.




BAROQUE COMMENT


From loud sound and still chance;
From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves;
From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts,
The kelp-disordered beaches;
Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression and death in many forms:


Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas;
Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch;
The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within;
Stone in various shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contrived arch and the buttress;
The named constellations;
Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring;
Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;
Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
Fountains; foreheads, under weather-bleached hair;
The wreath, the oar, the tool,
The prow;
The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.




PACKET OF LETTERS


In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve--
To be approached at times with the frightened tear;
Their cold to be drawn away from, as one, at nightfall,
Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.


There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder.
There, still in the murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.




SOLITARY OBSERVATION BROUGHT
BACK FROM A SOJOURN IN HELL


At midnight tears
Run into your ears.

"The Wake Of The Rudder": Seferis' Argonauts

IV.  ARGONAUTS

And for the soul

If it is to know itself

It is into a soul

That it must look.

The stranger and enemy, we have seen him in the mirror.

They were good lads, the comrades.  They did not grumble

Because of weariness or because of thirst or because of frost.

They had the manner of trees and the manner of waves

That accept the wind and the rain,

Accept the night and the sun,

And in the midst of change they do not change.

They were good lads.  Day after day with downcast eyes,

When we passed the desert island with the Arabian figs,

Towards the setting of the sun, beyond the cape

Of dogs that howl.

If it is to know itself, they used to say,

It is into a soul it must look, they used to say.

And the oars beat on the gold of the sea

In the middle of sunset.

Many the capes we passed, many the islands, the sea

Which brings the other sea, sea-gulls and seals.

There were times wheen unfortunate women with lamentations

Cried out for their children gone,

And others with wild faces looked for Great-Alexander

And glories sunken in the depths of Asia.

We anchored by shores steeped in nocturnal perfumes

Among the singing of birds, waters that left on the hands

The recollection of a great good fortune.

But there was never an end to the journeys.

Their souls became one with the oars and the rowlocks,

With the severe figurehead at the prow,

With the wake of the rudder,

With the water that fractured the image of their faces.

One after another the comrades died

With downcast eyes.  Their oars

Indicate the places where they sleep on the shore.

There is none to remember them, and the word is Justice.

--George Seferis,

From "Mythistorema" 

George Seferis, Poems: Translated from the Greek by Rex Warner,

Little, Brown and Company: Boston and Toronto, 1964

Mask: Triton, sculpture mix, tan and blue glazing, layered.

In the poem above, the voice would seem to be that of Jason, captain of the Argo, leader of these Argonauts.  What roles can we see here? What relationships between this captain and this crew?  And what of the final epitaph?  Or, is that last line only comprehensible in terms of the opening reflections on soul?

Dramatic monologues, after all, offer skewed and resonant visions dependent upon the character and experience of the speaker in the moment of speaking.  Where are you, Jason?  When are you?  Has Medea killed your children yet for the mistakes you (will) make?  Have you lost your gamble for kingship again?  Have you been looking into the mirror too long?  Why "we", really?

And where is Medea in all this?  But that and she may belong to another poem, another musing.

Shelf-Life, Again

Almost A Fish

Reprise: Puck, Sleeping

I've posted photos before of Puck, Sleeping here.

Kelp Level

Lumpy Blue Water (My Favorite)

Detail above; full shot below.     (Sorry about the waterspots.)

Therapeutic Goofery, With Clay

Clay Test

I like texture, like mixing the world undersea with topside attempts with clay.

Sculpture mix; fragment from a sea urchin shell.  

I'm Watching Him Watching You

Now, he's watching me.

Kelp Tattoo Four (+ 1)

I love kelp, love swimming amidst the strands of a single kelp plant and amidst the kelp forests in general.  (As I've mentioned before, I even have a kelp tattoo as a mark of my devotion.)

I love taking photos of kelp, as I was doing here off the Breakwater in Monterey . . .

. . . and then my amphibious Canon Powershot flooded.  Sad story, but at least I got these shots.

Come On Out! The Water's Fine!

Well, it's a bit cold, but come on out.
And, the viz is poor, too, only 6-10 feet tops.
I don't think I can see my fins even, but we've dove in worse.

We'll just need to feel our way on the bottom.

C'mon!

(Thinking of my buddy Keith: RIP, man.)

Kelp Tattoo Three

Kayaking off Cannery Row in Monterey:
detail shot above;
whole shot below.

Time-Travel: A Mere 34 or So

Or, 2 X 17 versus 3 X 17.

I was probably 34 in this shot, and I looked like a child, don't you think? That's Motley as a kitten! She's 17+ now.

Here, I'm 51 now, and you can read the trail of years in the lines and in the gray and white on my head.  I've gotten quite a bit of sun here too, but that's all good, a sign of summer and outdoor activities.  Slather, slather, with the sunscreen.  (6 feet tall and 170 pounds, so that's not so bad; I've dropped 19 pounds since December 30th.  And, I could be in a bit better muscular shape, but that's what summer's for too.)

Just keeping track.

Book review or preview or tempting taste to be posted manana.

My Favorite Tools

Aside from all the books, of course.  And the pencils and pads.  And, the cameras.  And . . . .

Monterey Bay Yesterday: Five Shots

Monterey Harbor and off Cannery Row.

My other amphibious camera--the one I use free diving--flooded, and so no underwater shots . . . yet.

Scylla and Charybdis

Anger and Stupidity, in other words.

Monstrosities that will eat you alive, or swallow you down, or both.

Or, perhaps, as in my own case a little too often for my liking, you become the monster, or the maelstrom---or even both--yourself.

And that's no way to live.


(Birthday reflections: improvements and amends to be made.)

Clayfish Swimming

Clayfish / Globefish: sculpture mix (clay balloon method); blue, seafoam, and green (?) glazes, layered.

Berkeley Mascot: Two Shots

For all my UCB compadres.

Or--forgive me--nuts about Berkeley!