A Backward Glance O'er Roads Travel'd

Friday. I promise something fresh, something recent, soon. Until then, here are two poems I wrote when I was 16, within a week of each other. They make me smile, not because they are particularly good, but because they bring me back in ways that only something you produced can. It's funny how that works. Revisiting a thought you had at a specific moment is almost as good as a time machine.

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First Impressions

Momentary beauty

in what may have been a dream

mysterious and lovely
quiet and serene

if in a dream it was we met
appropriation of
all beauty and truth beget
you; mysterious icon

Haunting my imagination
puzzling vapors and remnants
the you of my creation
thought of which leads to divinity

I had just encountered that quote from Auguste Rodin:

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and there defines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated

Completely enamored with this thought, I set about exploring. Could places, people, induce such contemplation? What are the limits of "art". As any good aspiring creative mind would attempt to do, I took this idea in the macro and tried to express it in the micro. My muse at the time, a 17 year old french-cherokee bombshell, provided all the "practical" inspiration needed to express the intangible curiosity I felt towards the label "art". It also has this magical kind of self awareness concerning the fleeting nature of beauty, which I should have picked up on as subconscious hints about the cherokee girl.

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The wave

Inspiration

No truer form

A stir in the mist

On the edge of existing

The Movement of the water over the sand

Graceful in it’s quiet, calm, rhythmic, breath.

Pen to Page

Feasible, tangible

on the tip of your tongue

The feeling remains but words won’t come

Choppy and uncertain. Tensing, relaxing. Belief then unbelief

The vastness of the sea, building, taking shape.

Furious Transposing

The reason and the rhyme are one

The time has come to pass

He whispers as he walks the way, “No one wave is the last”

The Wave, white capped and fierce crashes against the cliffs

Dread fills my heart as the tide comes in, its song my spirits lift

Still

The calm must come to make complete, the cadence of the deeps

I find rest, and am challenged by the secrets that they keep

If truly this is the first of many enigmatic waves

I pray that I might be all caught up and in the torrent be found safe.

Overall, probably not as good of a poem, but I am a sucker for the personification in the third verse. The image I had in my head was of this white-bearded, ageless lighthouse keeper type materializing from the crags and escarpments of a new england beachfront and walking by me and into the water, into a Nor'Easter. An acknowledgment that creativity is cyclical and then returning to the chaotic waters, the ether beyond ourselves from which all our good ideas come.