“I do not know whether to be joy-white with my spirit | Or rent-gray with the blown remnants of my mind.” ~ Maxwell Bodenheim, from “A Man to a Dead Woman”

“Icebound River” (c1915, oil on canvas)
by Charles Rosen

                   

Two for Tuesday:  Seemingly Alone

“Evening” (1930, oil on canvas)
by Oluf Høst

Peaches in November

On the peach’s wide sieve of branches
the buds crouch already in whitish caterpillar fur.

All winter they must hold tight, as the supple
limbs are strained wide by the snow’s weight,

as the ice coats them and turns them to glinting
small lights that splinter the sun to prickles.

Must hold tight against the wet warm tongue
of the thaw that lolls off the Gulf Stream

smelling of seaweed and the South, as if
not spring visited but summer in January.

Hold tight against the early March sun
with the wild tulips already opening

against the brown earth like painted mouths
when the ice will return as a thief

to take what has too widely trusted.
The news they carry can only be told once

to the bees each year. The bud is the idea
of sweetness, of savor, of round heft

waiting to build itself. As the winter
clamps down they hibernate in fur,

little polar bears on red twigs
dreaming of turning one sun into many.

~ August Kleinzhahler

                   

“Night in Saint-Cloud” (1892, oil on paper)
by Edvard Munch

                   

The Unknown Self

So much of what delights and troubles you

Happens on a surface

You take for ground.

Your mind thinks your life alone,

Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,

Yet it seems that a little below your heart

There houses in you an unknown self

Who prefers the patterns of the dark

And is not persuaded by the eye’s affection

Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience

With all your unfolding expression,

Is never drawn to break into light

Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness

And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom

That will often see you enchanted by twilight

Without ever recognizing the falling night,

It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:

All you do and say and think is fostered

Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease

That is not ruffled by disappointment;

It presides in a deeper current of time

Free from the force of cause and sequence

That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,

Its dark light might quench your mind,

For it knows how your primeval heart

Sisters every cell of your life

To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,

Offering you only discrete glimpses

Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,

Magnetized by some resonance

That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night

As the poet who draws your dreams,

Creating for you many secret doors,

Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic

That knows you to your roots,

Always awaiting your deeper befriending

To take you beyond the threshold of want,

Where all your diverse strainings

Can come to wholesome ease.

~ John O’Donohue

                   

Music by Rosie Golan, “Can’t Go Back”

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