The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Thu 12/27/2007)

[RetroLounge]

Lamium

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.

Louise Gluck

************************

:hi:

RL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Good morning, my dear Retro...

I'm not normally up so early...

But today I am, and here's your great poem...

What a lovely, cool image, or series of images this contains...

I feel the silvery coolness, the shadow the leaves make...

Thank you...

[RetroLounge]

4. You're welcome

and write this line in your notebook:

I feel the silvery coolness, the shadow the leaves make...

Bet you can use it someday in a poem.

:hi:

RL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

5. Great idea!

I will do that forthwith!

Thanks for the tip...

Somedays I am unaware of my own poeticness...is that a word?

:hi:

[xchrom]

2. ...

It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.


From Louise Glück, "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence," Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1994) 74-75. Copyright 1994 by Louise Glück.

[RetroLounge]

3. Nice quote, Thank you...

:hi:

RL

[Tuesday Afternoon]

6. It makes more sense to me, the second time I read it.

It takes a certain audicity (or conceit, if you will) these truth seekers who think that love of cold is the answer.

I know this is not making sense, but I think I am on the trail of something here. I caught a glimmer. The edge of an epiphany.

Thanks, Retro :hi: