Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, poem, poetry, spider, Walt Whitman on May 31, 2019| Leave a Comment »
When you wrote of the spider
launching through vacant space,
reeling from one sphere of meaning
to another, you didn’t know then
that you wrote that poem for me.
Two centuries later, this woman
reads about the bridges we are all
trying to form, and Walt, damned
if that wasn’t filament coming out
through your electric fingers.
https://poets.org/poem/noiseless-patient-spider
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged duality, heron, Meredith Nemerov, miracle, painting, tanka sequence, Walt Whitman on October 29, 2011| 1 Comment »
To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle.
—Walt Whitman
Balanced against morning frost
I do not see
the great blue heron
wading in the river
so I put it there
*
Meredith mentions
a student who insists
on painting
into the foreground
a rock
*
“All she needs is a darker color,”
Meredith says, “and a value
like a triangle
and the canvas
would be full of light”
*
You do not have
to be talented—even
my three year old girl
knows how to paint
something that makes her smile
*
It is not a painting,
this life, still
there was a heron here not
long ago, standing in frost
it was so beautiful
*
Here and not here,
light and dark,
so many years spent
debating the two—this morning
I see it, the river chimed in frost