The Little Tree

It’s raining hard today.
The day is more like night,
the spring is more like fall,
and in the yard a driving wind lays waste
to the little tree that, seeming not to, stands
steady and firm; it seems among the plants
like a too-green adolescent grown too tall.
You watch it. It may be
your pity stirs for all of those white flowers
the north wind strips from it; and they are fruit,
sweet preserves we set
aside for winter, those fallen flowers spread
across the grass. And your vast maternity
aches for them, all.

-Umberto Saba, 1988

I'm back in Tromsø. I've been trying to think of something to write about this, but I've mostly failed. It's nice to be here, though. The city has changed in small ways, but it's been fairly easy to fall back into life here after a two month gap. I think it's fall already--most of the greens are tinged red, the weather is cool, it's raining a lot. I found only one bilberry, on my first full day back. I ate it. It's gone. That's the end of that story.

Poetry, a Natural Thing

Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. “They came up
----and died
just like they do every year
----on the rocks.”

----The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
----to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

This beauty is an inner persistence
----toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
----a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world
----primordial bellowings
from which the youngest world might spring,

salmon not in the well where the
----hazelnut falls
but at the falls battling, inarticulate,
----blindly making it.

This is one picture apt for the mind.

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year’s extravagant antlers
----lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
----new antler-buds,
----the same,

“a little heavy, a little contrived”,

his only beauty to be
----all moose.

-Robert Duncan, 1960

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

-Margaret Atwood, 1995

This Most Perfect Hill

On this most perfect hill
with these most perfect dogs
are these most perfect people
and this most perfect fog

In this most perfect fog
that is the middle of the sea
inside the perfect middle of
the things inside that swing

In this most perfect rhyme
that takes up what it sees,
with perfect shelter from the
rain as perfect as can be,

In this most perfect day
at the apex of the sun
runs this most perfect
frog song that is roiling
from the mud

In these most perfect habits
of the waving of the trees,
through this imperfect language
rides a perfect brilliancy.

-Lisa Jarnot, 2003