Sunday Poetry Blogging

Elegy: In Coherent Light

BY ANNE STEVENSON

In memory of two English poets, Matt Simpson and Michael Murphy, d. 2009

Teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap—
Sparrows are plying their chisels in the summer ivy,
Chipping the seconds spark by spark out of the hours.
I read in each whistling chip the sun’s holography.
My brain’s a film, I’m made of timed exposures,
And pounding my ears and eyes with waves of light—
These animate flakes, these pictures I call sight.

But now you’re out of the picture, no one can keep
Coherent sightings of you, except in language.
All the warm rhetoric is wrong. Death isn’t sleep.
Faith in eternal love is love’s indulgence.
I prize what you wrote and meet you in what I write.
We still keep house in a living tenement of words.
Pull down their walls of ivy, and you kill the birds.

****

I love the lines: I prize what you wrote and meet you in what I write. We still keep house in a living tenement of words.

More and more, in this internet world, I meet people in what they write, live with them in the tenement of words we create. And, I like it. Left-brained, too-porous Pisces that I am, it's a good way for me to meet people. And I love this notion of poets, talking to each other through the glass-bead game of their poetry, even across time.

Witchvox, of all places, has up a profound and poetic essay about the role that poetry can play in spiritual practice. It's well worth the read, especially if you think that you don't like poetry.

Picture found here.