afieldnotebook

I like to work in the darkroom after dark, but that means I've been keeping odd hours lately. Tonight I walked back from the art building at midnight in five inches of fresh snow, and it got all in my shoes, and I hardly saw a soul.

So tonight's poem is late, and, to add insult to injury, I'm not sure how to capitalize the title.

After Drinking All Night With A Friend, We Go Out In A Boat At Dawn To See Who Can Write The Best Poem

These pines, these fall oaks, these rocks,
This water dark and touched by wind--
I am like you, you dark boat,
Drifting over water fed by cool springs.

Beneath the waters, since I was a boy,
I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures,
Not gold, or strange stones, but the true
Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota.

This morning, also, drifting in the dawn wind,
I sense my hands, and my shoes, and this ink--
Drifting, as all of this body drifts,
Above the clouds of the flesh and the stone.

A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass,
A few oars weathered by the snow and the heat,
So we drift toward shore, over cold waters,
No longer caring if we drift or go straight.

-Robert Bly, 1962