BTW Lullabies
Reading Daryl Hine &: A Serial Poem I came across a passage that echoed in my mind with a reading of Gjertrud Schnackenberg Heavenly Questions.
First #60 from the Hine book
Immured in a single-occupancy cell,I was the line "How all manner of things shall nevertheless be well" that put me in mind of Schanckenberg's poems and the shellfish reference added another piece of evidence to the perceived intertextual relation since she has a poem "Fusiturricula Lullaby". But it is the opening sequence of the book, "Archimedes Lullaby," that I quote here in the hope that you too will hear the reverberations.
Each day indistinguishable from the next,
& nearly inextinguishable, perplexed
How all manner of things shall nevertheless be well,
With a celibate selfish as a shellfish spell
[…]
A visit to the shores of lullabies,Like the magma-flows beneath tectonic plates, the line about hushing returns in variations: And close your eyes now, hush now, all is well (from "Fusiturricula Lullaby").
Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand,
Is seated in his half-filled universe
And sorting out the grains of shape and size.
Above his head a water-ceiling sways,
Beneath his feet the ancient magma-flows
Of metamorphic, underneath plateaus
Are moving in slow motion, all in play,
And all is give-and-take, all comes and goes,
And hush now, all is well now, close your eyes
And so for day 1895
20.02.2012
