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Amid the bubbling buzz of exotic itineraries we can sometimes forget that any holiday abroad is itself a relative privilege, and that each town nook and bedsit is no less sublime for being here.
Meditation Beside a Poem
I pruned the rosebush at precisely the right moment and left town for days, having learned once and for all to wait biblically for the time of every thing. When I opened the window, there it was as I’d never seen it before, studded with buds, some already with pale rose peeking out from between sepals, clusters of living jewels. My bad back, my disappointment with the limits of time, the enormous effort to be understood-- all turned to dust before this recurrent miracle. The cyclical, perceptible roses made themselves marvellous. No one can move me from this sudden knowing beyond the edge of reason: mercy is intact. Billowing greed, pummelling fists, high-pitched fury: nothing can hold back the gold of corollas or—believe me—fragrance. Simply because it’s September. Born in 1935, Prado is one of Brazil’s most revered contemporary poets, and yet she rarely steps out and away from her native city of Divinópolis. Her deeply spiritual, if sometimes overtly religious work is a study in the simple devotions of domestic life. It’s telling here that her leaving town warrants so little fanfare on the page; rather, it serves only to bring us back to the rosebush and Prado’s deeper reflection. The poem serves as a gentle reminder, perhaps, that all the stunning wonder in the world is within our reach, here in the quiet hours of our every day.
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As temperatures rise and as we rise to greet another Summer solstice there is, of course, that inevitable push and pull toward the coast; to spread ourselves on to the white sand beaches of Santorini and Malaga, or even meander the rolling hills of Tuscany.
Tropics
In the still morning when you move toward me in sleep for love, I dream of an island where long-stemmed cranes, serious weather vanes, turn slowly on one foot. There the dragonfly folds his mica wings and rides the tall reed close as a handle. The hippo yawns, nods to thick pythons, slack and drowsy, who droop down like untied sashes from the trees. The brash hyenas do not cackle and run but lie with their paws on their heads like dogs. The lazy crow’s caw falls like a sigh. In the field below, the fat moles build their dull passage with an old instinct that needs no light or waking; its slow beat turns the hand in sleep as we turn toward each other in the ripe air of summer, before the change of weather, before the heavy drop of the apples. Here Voigt speaks to the great imaginative power in us all; to reach back into that most sublime corner of our being and make of it a paradise. Even as the poem sets us in bed we’re free, soaring over some enchanted landscape alongside our speaker and given over to another world so far removed from the here and now. Take comfort in your resilience, and in the mind’s ability to bring those white sand beaches home. |
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