so says eliot. of high modernism fame, as opposed to friend of the webbed-fingered in the early 80s. i was reading 'ash wednesday' this morning...
Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
we are torn between the flux and flex, health and sickness, knowledge and ignorance, hope and doubt, faith and fear, blindness and insight
and then to heaney, who is busy 'seeing things'...
Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the water
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all of this in bright sunlight
On the facade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone's alive with what's invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.
here's to being torn on the horn between seasons...seeing the antic fish between the lines...tracing the signs in the sky with jagged zig-zagged persistence.
