Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Four Quotations, Four Allusions

How solid the poems appear to us. Let us go then, you and I. How firm the words, like so many stacked stones. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. Yet at the same time, mysteriously, how utterly fluid. We will arise now and go, you and me and Michelangelo. How like the hollow bones of the dead the poems sleep in my mind. Stones and bones are things with feathers, perched in my soul. What wind could blow them free. What force could wipe them clean, like a blind hand swiping at cobwebs in the dark. Let us loaf and invite our finely feathered souls. How solid they too, the souls, appear. How they draw away and then creep near. And what miles they have to go before they sleep. These infinite miles, these senses of self, how solid they both seem. Are they or are they not / that is the question this poem is posing. They being the words, the souls, the stones, the feathers and minutes and miles. All of it. There is a state of dreaminess I seek beyond here, where everything appears so solid. A place where the hard stones are revealed to be secretly stuffed with feathers. A place where the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind and through the hollow centers of banana trees. It’s fine, in summer, to visit the seashore. So let us go then, you and I, and Shakespeare too, that old chap, and let us host a grand recital and wish all the fine poems into the undulating sea.