Photo by ecstaticist
A couple of weeks ago I did a post with a poem from This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years (revised edition) by Robert Bly and mentioned I would be getting back to it.
Back we are - here's another poem from that collection which I like very much.
Writing Again
Oval
Faces crowding at the window!
I turn away,
Disturbed—
When I write of moral things,
The clouds boil
Blackly!
By day's end
A room of restless people,
Lifting and putting down small things.
Well that is how I've spent this day.
And what good will it do me in the grave?
~ Robert Bly
Not unlike the part of the poem, "Women We Love Whom We Never See Again," I quoted previously, the opening here feels like we are in the other place, the land of dream, of archetype, of the subconscious.
And what of the title?
I suppose there are a lot of ways to read that last line, that question, and I would suggest that some of them are positive. But I'll leave that to you, the reader - is it something that feels negative, positive, indifferent? Just a conjurer's trick, or something more?
For me, the answer is in the first stanza.
The Month of the Grape Harvest by René Magritte (click to enlarge)
faces of devils
faces of foxes...
spring breeze
Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue
Study for The Month of the Grape Harvest (click to enlarge)
best,
Don
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