Friday, November 26, 2010

Oddment

A stray Chartres poem from last year, which didn't make it then, got tinkered about with plenty but still I'm not sure if it makes it.  But it's Friday night, late in the daily blogging stretch, I'm a bit bog-eyed with snow and long hours and typing e-mails on the tiny computer, and I don't much mind.



Chartres


from gentle darkened depths
she draws you   mermaid blue
wrack red   blood gout anemone
poppy petals creased transparent
over the limestone white sheet light
the gleam of ringing river water

iris gold hearted fibrils
a tongue speaking clarity
fractured to rainbows
sieved through meshes of meaning
broken from a prism into the seagreen
wings of the announcing angels
flood blue robe blue cobalt soda

and the saffron of haloes

~

8 comments:

Jean said...

Wow. I like this very, very much. Fragments. Tiny panes. Broken, like 'broken from a prism'. Escaping from the form, like sparking, escaping light.

herhimnbryn said...

Stained glass windows, light, silence.

I am imagining a mosaic now.

Anil P said...

"sieved through meshes of meaning" fits so well with the pictures on your blog.

Dick said...

I'm glad you corralled this stray, Lucy. It's so rich a representation of what surrounds you in the cathedral. A tumble of images that bring across the blurring of all that light and colour as clearly as your pictures.

Fire Bird said...

it makes it for me. evoking rich stained glass cathedral light this wintry morning.

Roderick Robinson said...

Sounds as if you've just opened your paintbox and decided to commit genocide on the misunderstood and misused comma. Here and there a very muscular poem (eg, the third and penultimate lines).

For me Chartres is nothing near as noble. It is the Hotel Marmotte on the industrial estate with a strange feature in some of the rooms. To accommodate grandson Zach I now know to book une chambre avec un lit superposé sur l'autre except even that isn't exact and requires à l'angle droit after superposé. I got into the verse-writing racket when challenged to do a sonnet about watching paint dry. But the Hotel Marmotte would be a step to far. For the record I have seen the stained glass, but in another age. The phrase "refracted history" offers itself for consideration.

20th Century Woman said...

I thought about beautiful blobs of paint as I read that. It's abstract and yet there is the cathedral image lurking behind the color.

Lucy said...

Cheers and thanks for your responses.

Mostly the cathedral I suppose but not only.

One has to be careful with too many colours.

Spaces are the new commas.

Gnomic, moi? I just have short legs.