Robert Graves: Sharpness, Olives, Cure

THE SHARP RIDGE

Since now I dare not ask
Any gift from you, or gentle task,
Or lover's promise--nor yet refuse
Whatever I can give and you dare choose--
Have pity on us both: choose well
On this sharp ridge dividing death from hell.


UNDER THE OLIVES

We never would have loved had love not struck
Swifter than reason, and despite reason:
Under the olives, our hands interlocked,
We both fell silent:
Each listened for the other's answering
Sigh of unreasonableness --
Innocent, gentle, bold, enduring, proud.

THE CURE

No lover ever found a cure for love
Except so cruel a thrust under the heart
(By her own hand delivered)
His wound was nine long years in healing,
Purulent with dead hope,
And ached yet longer at the moon's changes . . .
More tolerable the infection than its cure.

--Robert Graves

Robert Graves: "A Spirit in Grace"

GRACE NOTES

It was not the words, nor the melody,
Not the beat, nor the pace;
It was that slow suspension of our breathing
As we watched your face,
And the grace-notes, unrecordable on the clef,
Sung only by a spirit in grace.

--Robert Graves

Fall Begins

 Tumbler (Pictish): sculpture mix; pit-fired
. . . years and years ago on Ocean Beach.

Live model: 20-minute gestural exercise.

Salvage Work

 Fisherman's Blues II: sculpture mix: blue slip & clear glaze; twine; twig; copper fishhooks.

"The Sea In The Head": Two More From Kennelly's "Islandman"

When will we permit the sea in the head

To flow as it will?

The moon has laws but no theories.

It sends out a cold, golden call

And hangs in suspense for the answer

We fear to give.

I would release the sea in the head.

I would let it live,

Pour through the brain's darkest caves,

Out through the eyes,

Touching the distant skin of other 

Minds and bodies.

Who will say which is more real --

My hands on the sea,

The strange flesh or the hurt roar

That is part of me?

Who will say which is more felt --

Loneliness

Or the desolation written on stones

When the sea withdraws?

I have learned to live both night and day

Uncertain of day and night.

This beautiful island is poised forever

In a dubious light.

--Brendan Kennelly,

Two poems from his "Islandman," a book or sequence of poems that  I've pointed to and quoted from before here and here.

Borrowed, with respect, from this volume:

Brendan Kennelly, Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
Bloodaxe Books: Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992.

Late Afternoon Bay Jaunt

Fatality Knocks

"Dead people and dead thoughts and supposedly dead moments are never, ever truly dead, and they shape every moment of our lives.  We discount them, and that makes them mighty."

--from Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl: A Memoir