Recommended Reading: Greenberg's "Four Fish"

Practice Session: "A Hazy Vision"

A HAZY VISION

Foot, bare; hand, inked;
Tongue, Latin and Greek;
Books, piled; treasure, child;
Fountain, Irish; wishes, so fair;
Song, sublime; wildness, rhymed --

Her measure, untapped;
And the course, unmapped.

--MD


An exercise in verse; an exercise in vision.
Composed/posted 12/23/12;
Revised 1/10/13.

Moya Cannon: "The Hidden Rhythms of the Wood"

SYMPATHETIC VIBRATION

          for Kathleen

'You never strike a note,
you always take the note.'

Did it take her many
of her eighty quiet passionate years
to earn that knowledge,
or was it given.

Music, the dark tender secret of it,
is locked into the wood of every tree.
Yearly, it betrays its presence
in minute fistfuls of uncrumpling green.

No stroke or blade can release the music
which is salve to ease the world's wounds,
which tells and, modulating, retells
the story of our own groping roots,
of the deep sky from which they retreat
and, in retreating, reach -- 
the tree's great symphony of leaf.

No stroke or blade can bring us that release
but sometimes, where wildness has not been stilled,
hands, informed by years of patient love, 
can come to know the hidden rhythms of the wood,
can touch bow to gut
and take the note,
as the heart yields and yields
and sings.

--Moya Cannon
from Oar

Wild Parrots!

On Friday morning as I drove under the 80 overpass on that street by the cop-shop heading to the 280 freeway, I heard some parrots, the wild parrots of San Francisco . . . and yet I forgot to tell my students in the class in which we'll be reading Mark Bittner's book on those exact birds. I was also slightly late to and somewhat off-balance in both classes. Friday was one of those days . . . .