Trick of the Light

It is a poem ostensibly about deer feeding on roses. So you wonder how the ending came to be. How the lantern came to hold a place as an image for the house you grew up in.

And that which comes alight, the house you grew up in: sometimes it is a lantern small enough to carry before you in one hand.

We get to this ending after passing over some remarks on the beauty of the household versus the beauty of the field. And it seems with this lantern ending that the demarcation gives way. The light seems a thing of beauty belonging neither to household nor to field. And the question arises about who the light is for. Its illumination is limited by its size. This is not a beacon. It is akin to a spark. One recalls the story of the blind man given a lantern (see Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones). But there is no blind person here. No extinguished light. Just the miracle of metaphor whereby a whole house through imagination becomes palm-sized. All alit.

Hand. Lantern. House.

The poem is called "Folklore" and is collected in The Whole Night, Coming Home by Roo Borson.

And so for day 1083
30.11.2009

Crumbs of Fire

In a prose poem from The Whole Night, Coming Home Roo Borson offers a set of sentences that remind one of the ghazal form. The sentence clusters hang separately like couplets and they resonate — there is some inkling of a reason for their proximity even if one cannot quite express the creative tension they embody.

A paper kite, mauve in the light that has already forgotten us, still tugs at its string, attached to the earth somewhere.

This is when it is first detected, not as a thought, but because of the surprise. When the smell of the fuchsias comes tolling.

These are the concluding sentences of "Fuchsias". The colour mauve is of course an element that ties together the kite in flight and the tolling of scent. And in the hands of such an accomplished poet, the very description of these flowers as "crumbs of fire" floats in the mind like, well, as she calls them, "crumbs of fire".

And so for day 296
06.10.2007