spring!

Daffodils, oil/canvas

This painting, which is quite large, has become apart from me; I cannot remember my imprints upon it.  Still, exuberant, with joy it is; "It takes my place" here!  

Here is a wonderful poem, a paean of spring, by Tomas Transtromer, Morning Birds .

The translation is by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will.  Such ordinary-seeming views: this poem takes my breath away.

I wake my car.

Its windshield is covered with pollen.

I put on my sunglasses

and the song of the birds darkens.

While another man buys a newspaper

in the railroad station

near a large freight car

which is entirely red with rust

and stands flickering in the sun.

No emptiness anywhere here.

Straight across the spring warmth a cold corridor

where someone comes hurrying

to say that they are slandering him

all the way up to the Director.

Through a back door in the landscape comes the magpie

black and white, Hel's bird.

And the blackbird moving crisscross

until everything becomes a charcoal drawing,

except for the white sheets on the clothesline:

a Palestrina choir.

No emptiness anywhere here.

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows

while I myself shrink.

It is growing, it takes my place.

It pushes me out of its way.

It throws me out of the nest.

sun movement

The first lines of a Tomas Transtromer poem:

The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down

The sun soaking through the smog!  (The rest of the poem is below.)
Yesterday I came across another sun-sky-movement passage, this time in a very early page of Wallace Stegner's novel, Crossing to Safety.  The narrator has just left his wife to sleep longer and stepped out for a walk in the woods surrounding a cottage they have traveled to the night before.  It is early morning, "keen air, gray light, gray lake below, gray sky through the hemlocks whose tops reach well above the porch."  He walks a bit down a dirt road alongside of a hill:

     Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars.

Wonderful, that "drowned."
Each of these two passage is contained in a fine bit of writing wherein the sun exchanges further with the writer (and us).  Here below is Transtromer's poem,  Looking Through the Ground and the rest of Stegner's paragraph, on page six of the Modern Library paperback edition of his book.  Enjoy!

Looking Through the Ground

The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down

to my deep-down eyes that are resting
deep under the city looking up

seeing the city from below: streets, foundations--
like aerial photos of a city in war

the wrong way around--a mole photo:
silent squares in somber colors.

The decisions are taken there.  No telling
bones of the dead from bones of the living.

The sunlight's volume is turned up,
it floods into flight cabins and peapods.

translated by Robin Fulton
_________________

     Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars.  Its edges are piled with hills.  Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.

Lake of the earth

The lake is a window into the earth.  
Ohmygosh: these words-become-image take my breath away.
Here is the entire poem from where these words come, The Half-Finished Heaven, by Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton:

THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN


Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.


The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a drink.


And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.


Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.


Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.


The endless ground under us.


The water is shining among the trees.


The lake is a window into the earth.

Lake Michigan, oil/gessoed board

Stillness

Here is a poem by Tomas Transtromer, entitled From March '79.  The translator is John F. Deane.


Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.


Today is our leap year day.  Tomorrow is March.  Yesterday was an election day in our state; therefore, we were getting many phone calls and many phone messages with machine voices asking us to vote for Mitt or for Rick.  Phone calls that were not phone calls, words that were not words, machine voices using our first names.  Today the telephone was quiet.  And I came across the poem here, above.
The drawing below is quite large.  This is a detail:  maybe a bit of wildness there.

Tomas Transtromer's SONG

I told Gretchen I had read a poem at lunchtime that transported me-- with images, movements, a crashing horse on the sea, gulls like ragged sailcloth.  Gosh.  Gretchen said I should put it on the blog:  yes.

Here are the first six stanzas of Tomas Transtromer's Song.  The translation, from the Swedish, is by Robert Hass in his book of poems, Time and Materials.  Vainomoinen is the mythic singer of the songs of the great Finnish epic, The Kalevala.  You can read the entire poem at this link:  SONG  .

SONG

Dressed in the ragged sailcloth of dead ships,
Flecked gray with the smokes of outlawed coasts,
The white flock swelled, the swarms of gulls cried out:


Alarm!  Alarm!  There's something overboard.
They crowded tight to form a signal flag
That, fluttering, reads:  Look sharp!  There's booty here!


So the gulls steered across the water-widths,
Blue pastures striding in the waves' white foam,
A streak of phosphor straightway to the sun.


But Vainomoinen on his ancient journeys
Sparkles on sea swells in the ancient light,
His horse's hooves so swift they're hardly wet.


And back of him the green forest of his songs:
The oak tree poised to leap a thousand years,
A great mill turned by birdsong, and the wind


Imprisons each of the trees in its own roar.
Immense pinecones glimmer in the moonlight
When the sentinel pine ignites and flares.


A great mill turned by birdsong!  Wow.