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Tuesday, December 28, 2004 |
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Today's cold and gray is saved from being dismal by the gusting winds left over from yesterday's unsettled movements. These make musics around this weird house. I wonder sometimes whether the odd person who "designed" it did so knowing he was building a scary clarinet. The structure was designed on the fly, and stands here in the middle of nowhere like an improvised jazz solo, only rusticated. Certainly as THC-influenced, but that's another subject for another day. Ten minutes past midnight night before last--ten minutes into my birthday, in other words--I was just getting a toehold on sleep when some words and a picture leaked into what remained of my waking awareness. It was an image, a line of poetry with its concomitant illustration, and it was so vivid and so beautiful and unexpected I wrestled myself awake to write it down, astounded. Images come to me very rarely, and never anything like this. When I was working on feature assignments in my newspaper past paragraphs, leads, direction would come in this way, flooding in at that transition place from one consciousness to another. This is the first time such a thing has happened in relation to my poemizing. And it wasn't to do with anything currently in progress but was truly the proverbial bolt from the blue, and the best birthday present I ever got. I still don't know what to do with it. It is such a magnificent line I can't even begin to think how to develop a poem around it, and I'm tempted to simply twist it into haiku and be done with it. It wants to be more, though; the remainder may follow eventually. This is what comes, maybe, of hanging around "in the vicinity of lightning," as William Stafford said.
Before sleeping last night I came up with a list of things I want to write about today and perhaps tomorrow. I'd better get to it. |
