
A sense of place: Photo of a lonely stretch of West Texas road by Larry Landolfi
Longtimers of the Jitterbug cult may have noticed that yours truly is drawn to poets, novelists, artists and photographers who have a strong sense of place and nature and solitude, if not a sense of raw beauty and all things earthy. And oh yeah–poets who make us think about life its own self in new and inspiring and challenging ways.
Among the poets and nature writers that appeal thusly to me, that would include the likes of Wendell Berry–the gentlemen farmer of Kentucky; Annie Dillard–whose sublime book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” transformed even the ugliest of insects and beasts into creatures of raw beauty that we could see so vividly with her word pictures; and Robert Frost–who made his New England landscape a landscape that we could all love and appreciate through his poetry.
Even my main man the mystic Mr. Merton–as I call my main man Thomas Merton who takes up a big part of my library–made us see the whole of God’s raw and beautiful creation, not to mention God’s love for us and His will for justice and peace and purity of hearts–from the vantage point of his monastery and his lonely hermitage outside Louisville.
I like the all-too-neglected poetry of the another New Englander, Robert Francis, a minister’s son who lived in a cabin he built himself. He had the misfortune of being overshadowed by the aforementioned giant of American Poets Robert Frost.
But Francis was a good and mighty good poet (click here for bio)
who wrote some good stuff of the sort I like so much with the qualities of nature, solitude, earthiness, bittersweet beauty and a sense of place–like that which follows:
“Remind Me of Apples”
When the cicada celebrates the heat,
Intoning that tomorrow and today
Are only yesterday with the same dust
To dust on plantain and on roadside yarrow—
Remind me, someone, of the apples coming,
Cold in the dew of deep October grass,
A prophecy of snow in their white flesh.
In the long haze of dog days, or by night
When thunder growls and prowls but will not go
Or come, I lose the memory of apples.
Name me the names, the goldens, russets, sweets,
Pippin and blue pearmain and seek-no-further
And the lost apples on forgotten farms
And the wild pasture apples of no name.
——————–
“Statement”
I follow Plato only with my mind.
Pure beauty strikes me as a little thin,
A little cold, however beautiful.
I am in love with what is mixed, impure,
doubtful and dark and hard to disencumber.
I want a beauty I must dig for, search for.
Pure beauty is beginning and not end.
Begin with sun and drop from sun to cloud,
From cloud to tree, from tree to earth itself,
And deeper yet down to the earth-dark root.
I am in love with what resists my loving,
With what I have to labor to make live.
————————–
Dark Sonnets
I
A formless shadow from a far-off light.
Then in the sand the sound of moving feet—
And we have passed each other in the night
On any sandy, dark, deserted street.
Whether you turned your head trying to peer
At me, also a shadow and a sound,
I cannot tell. Or whether out of fear
You passed, then after passing looked around
How can I say, I who could only see
Against the night something a deeper black?
This, this is the one dark certainty:
There was no touch, no word, no turning back.
One certainty: the sound of moving feet
And shadows passing in a sandy street.
II
We are the lonely ones, the narrow-bedded.
Our last “good nights” are interchanged below.
Then up cold stairs alone—the odd, the unwedded.
What do we know of night? What do we know?
What do we know except that night is blindness,
That on a bed one sleeps, or lies awake,
That after too long waking sleep is kindness,
That for the unsleeping, day will sometime break?
Oh, we know more. We can tell you how wind sounded
On windy nights, and how the writhing rain
Hissed on the roof, mice gnawed, and something pounded
Over our head—or under the counterpane.
We are the lonely ones. When we are dead
We’ll be well suited to a narrow bed.
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