The Winding and Unwinding

THE WINDING AND UNWINDING

The shape of your thought
Entices me
Quite as much as
The thought of your shape.

Clay-minded,
Bloody-brained,
Fickle as a stick in water:
I swim towards you.

I reach for you
Again and again and again
In thought, in force,
Not withholding aught
Save what wyrd demands
From each of us.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide,
Again releasing,
Again embracing,
Tasting and chasing,
Like river-otters sliding
Down the sloped bank.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide:
The rounded lift and heft,
The nipple’s assertion,
The twinned-blood rising
Like the swift pull
Of the river’s pulse
And penetration --
Flowing,
Falling,
Following –-

That shared current
Streaming just past the shore,
Stranding us between
Just enough
And quite enough.
___

Coda:
Laughing lips sip --
Swallow -- another draft.
Glasses, glances,
Clash and chime,
Toasting the new year.

Harken to the hearty
Admonition:
Draft, not drift.

--Matthew Duckworth

Quest

Abalone float and diver.

Crab-Hunter

JP on Tomales Bay.

Tennyson: "The Kraken" and "Sonnet"

Two sonnets from Tennyson:

THE KRAKEN
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
          --Tennyson



SONNET
She took the dappled partridge flecked with blood,
And in her hand the drooping pheasant bare,
And by his feet she held the woolly hare,
And like a master painting where she stood,
Looked some new goddess of an English wood.
Nor could I find an imperfection there,
Nor blame the wanton act that showed so fair--
To me whatever freak she plays is good.
Hers is the fairest Life that breathes with breath,
And their still plumes and azure eyelids closed
Made quiet Death so beautiful to see
That Death lent grace to Life and Life to Death
And in one image Life and Death reposed,
To make my love an Immortality.
          --Tennyson

I've always been intrigued by these two poems.   The first offers an apocalyptic vision of a mythic undersea beast that ends only in destruction.  A poem of natural wonder, of marine sublimity, ends in an expression of revelatory faith at the end of times.  Rapturous, for sure.  The second is, to my mind, a moving still-life, intriguing in itself, and yet the title emphasizes form, emphasizes the dynamic relationship of a very English, very constrained poetic structure and the seemingly unpoetic (that is, seemingly unself-conscious) scene it describes via that structure.  

I mean, "Sonnet" is obviously self-conscious, but not obviously self-conscious about its own structure.  What do I mean?  I may be making too much of the title being poetically self-reflexive.  

What would Emily Bronte or her Heathcliff say about such a poem?

Vercingetorix: Two Views

Vercingetorix: 

sculpture mix; sea-foam glaze, too thinly applied.

Or, The Apple Man.

Berberick: Hunting, Hunted

Still, even in those unlighted times when I'd shut my eyes tightly to the skald leygr, I remembered the teachings of my old friend, of Stane Saewulf's son.  One of the things he taught me was this:

"Men and Dwarfs, we are all riddles," he said.  "We are puzzles to our friends, puzzles to ourselves.  Who finds joy in riddling, pleasure in the patient stalking of the hidden truth, that man knows how to live."

But what do you think happens, my Sif, when truth becomes the hunter, man becomes the hunted?  To me, it seems that the man stalked by a truth becomes a brother to the wolf-haunted moon.

--Nancy Varian Berberick, from Shadow of the Seventh Moon

Berberick's narrator is Garroc, dwarf, soldier and skald.  Berberick's tale is a historical fantasy set in 7th-century Britain, amidst the wars of Saxons and Britains and Welsh, a tale paying tribute to Old English poetry and poets.  Garroc is one of the last generation of dwarfs, a race now cursed with infertility and thereby extinction for attempting to steal the goddess Idun's apples of immortality.  In the passage above, Garroc's reflections have a more personal flavor, a more specific context, and yet the lines on riddling, on hunting and being hunted, ring true in this life, for life in general.  

One can know too too much.  Or, to put it another way, the man (or dwarf) hunted by a truth may need to flee, may need to stand, and who outside that pursuit can truly judge?   Or, whatever the judgment, the passage speaks both to the joy of the hunt and to the desperation, the haunting, of being hunted by a truth.  Garroc is haunted by a pack of truths in the tale, until . . . .  

I'll repeat my favorite portion of the passage: "Who finds joy in riddling, pleasure in the patient stalking of the hidden truth, that man knows how to live."  

And woman, too.  

Berberick's adopting the older style of pronoun use to match the older times, the older English, in which she has set her tale.  Sif, Garroc's human foster-daughter, is a respected character, Garroc's confidant and our narrative conduit.

Hunter

Egret: Monterey Bay near Cannery Row, Monterey, CA.

My Mother Taught Me To Hunt

She did, indeed. "What did you learn in school today, Matthew?" she started asking when I was five. She made me feel I should learn things, so I pursued learning, sometimes relentlessly. Learning something (or, better, multiple "things" ) to bring home and share became proof of my prowess: a string of trout for the pan after a day of fishing for knowledge. And, she listened to my answers for so many years that I think about reporting what I've "caught" at the end of each day, still, even now.

(We didn't get along all the time, but those were absolute gifts.)

When I think of her, I now often think of the ending to Ted Kooser's poem "Mother":

But the iris I moved from your house

now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots

green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,

as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.

Were it not for the way you taught me to look

at the world, to see the life at play in everything,

I would have to be lonely forever.

The poem's ending catches my sense of debt, of appreciation, and while I don't think I ever feared the spectre of loneliness the way the poem's speaker seems to have done, perhaps the gifts of seeking knowledge, of seeking life, and of reporting it, of sharing it, have protected me in their own way.

My mother died on a Friday, December 5th, back in 1997.

You should have quit smoking the day I turned eleven, Mom, the way you promised you would; I quit sneaking sips of beer that day, just as I said I would, and I didn't start again until years later when it became quite clear you weren't going to keep your part of our bargain. I know you had your reasons, but I'm still angry about that. Can you blame me?

Rest in peace, Mom. You need it, and you deserve it.

Your son,

Matthew David