Saturday, August 11, 2007
Old Lyme Poem
...and here's my fresh young thing (I wrote it in 1989 , for cryin' out loud! my first Old Lyme Summer- yet I remember the morning as if it was yesterday)
Dawn.
Connecticut shoreline.
Transparent pale delicate
Pink
Softly merging with
Egg blue
Of clearest hue. Skyful of light,
Opalescence and promise.
Music of full wash water flirting with shore
Tide, arisen, kissing the sand
Wanting more.
Foghorn and birdsong
Chorus at dawn
Anything but poetry
Impossible.
Geese vee the sky, cold air underwing
Rushing off to a birdland brunch.
(This is late for them:
The early bird gets the fish.)
Silver sliver, as in song, the Moon
Greeting his neon Sister Sun
With open crescent.
She, all satin and silk,
Her gorgeous peignoir of morning,
And he, retiring aflourish, hat jaunty,
Reminds us : the night was made for love
Pastry thin layers of sound:
Millions of small voices,
Squawks, chirps, and rushes.
Musical ablution.
I was sitting on the back porch of the big old white house right on the shore....the one Gary T. first took me to, and that I was renting for the summer (I was in Les Mis at the time) and I had a large mug of freshly brewed coffee in my hands, pad of paper and pen on my lap....very very early...dawn, in fact...and i knew at that moment that journal writing would not suffice. I had to actually write some verse to satisfy my ecstatic soul....and so I wrote what i saw and heard. To me, it was exactly what I saw and heard...and the thing that colored all I saw and heard was my sheer joy at being alive in that moment. In that moment, all of it, all the struggle and doubts of a young(er) actress' life seemed to make sense, simple and true.
So unlike now, a time of such utter and deep change in me. But going back over old poems and in fact spending time, through the dozens of poems I have written, spending time with the woman who wrote them.... is helping me see....helping me have perspective....how my soul and mind have had lessons to learn but that basically both soul and mind have served me well on the road to growth and deepening....i tend to forget I am a creature capable of learning and tend to think the moments of bewilderment will last forever....but remembering the geese vee-ing over the landscape returns some height of vision to me as well....the largeness of it all...the miles traveled.
Dawn.
Connecticut shoreline.
Transparent pale delicate
Pink
Softly merging with
Egg blue
Of clearest hue. Skyful of light,
Opalescence and promise.
Music of full wash water flirting with shore
Tide, arisen, kissing the sand
Wanting more.
Foghorn and birdsong
Chorus at dawn
Anything but poetry
Impossible.
Geese vee the sky, cold air underwing
Rushing off to a birdland brunch.
(This is late for them:
The early bird gets the fish.)
Silver sliver, as in song, the Moon
Greeting his neon Sister Sun
With open crescent.
She, all satin and silk,
Her gorgeous peignoir of morning,
And he, retiring aflourish, hat jaunty,
Reminds us : the night was made for love
Pastry thin layers of sound:
Millions of small voices,
Squawks, chirps, and rushes.
Musical ablution.
I was sitting on the back porch of the big old white house right on the shore....the one Gary T. first took me to, and that I was renting for the summer (I was in Les Mis at the time) and I had a large mug of freshly brewed coffee in my hands, pad of paper and pen on my lap....very very early...dawn, in fact...and i knew at that moment that journal writing would not suffice. I had to actually write some verse to satisfy my ecstatic soul....and so I wrote what i saw and heard. To me, it was exactly what I saw and heard...and the thing that colored all I saw and heard was my sheer joy at being alive in that moment. In that moment, all of it, all the struggle and doubts of a young(er) actress' life seemed to make sense, simple and true.
So unlike now, a time of such utter and deep change in me. But going back over old poems and in fact spending time, through the dozens of poems I have written, spending time with the woman who wrote them.... is helping me see....helping me have perspective....how my soul and mind have had lessons to learn but that basically both soul and mind have served me well on the road to growth and deepening....i tend to forget I am a creature capable of learning and tend to think the moments of bewilderment will last forever....but remembering the geese vee-ing over the landscape returns some height of vision to me as well....the largeness of it all...the miles traveled.
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