| Two Poems by Sherod Santos | ||
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RED ADVANCING Homage to Piet Mondrian Out beyond the last grim hamlet's gaze, he reflected on what reflected him, a red cloud suggesting blood, later flame, and later still the primary color of a mind in thought, the thought itself advancing skyward toward a space composed in level planes of hardly human feeling. It was, after all, a matter of spirit, an inner vision of the outer world, and he considered it all routine enough, the canon of proportions in a slant of light, the coloratura of the bird song that surrounded him there, smoking his cigarette on the towpath past that state of nature he most deplored: the nether-land of God's color, green. For what it's worth, he'd looked in all the predictable places, the mise en scène of haycocked fields and watermills, the gilt-limned trellis of a horizontal tree, even, for that matter, l'esprit nouveau of the Paris salon untouched as yet by that quiet catastrophe called de Stijl. But only in time would his dreamy civil servant soul concede this one coherent fact: that the "poetic faculty" (or, as he'd encountered it in Simonides, "the word of things a picture is") was already there within him, established like some instinct which, obscured by decades of indifference, now clarifies into the memory of a small blue anvil he'd one day as a boy observed floating past where he had cast out from a rowboat tied-up on the river Gein. As it happened, he'd imagined it all a will-o'-the-wisp, the shadow-play of refracted light, but then, years later, the mouth of the river debouched great heaps of burning glass-"sparks everywhere," the newspapers said, "and small waves guttering the driftwood fires"- and suddenly it all came clear again, that small blue anvil and what it meant to love a mystery like a work of art. And remembering that made the boy in him feel wildly, unaccountably happy, and made the man in him turn dully away. DAIRY COWS AT CRAWFORD FARM Islandmagee, County Antrim Still road-weary but quite warmly stowed beneath a goose-down duvet in the B & B, I awaken to a lowing stream of cows flooding the field behind a milking barn, a scene that seems to have followed me here from childhood, the traced illustrations of a nursery rhyme (their watercolors not even thought of once in over thirty-five years), or a Sunday's hour-long lesson on a notion that surely eluded me then, the peace which passeth understanding. So framed, the mind's rumination deepens like a dream, and like a dream from which the mind's eye culls, not the particulars of a landscape (withheld, in any case, as sun and mist alike lift off the reluctantly greening hills) but the mute disbursements of an emotion that's composed, in part, of earth and air, so too my window opens on a feeling I can't separate from those dozen or more milk cows milling about the grasslands of the Crawford's farm. It follows then that the mind takes pleasure in puzzling out how something within their cumbered rumblings through the morning air recalls that instinct pastured where the slow, pacific form thought takes is given time to reflect on thought: thought thinking thought, and the once unthinkable end of thought, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. So wherever they go, alone or at times beside themselves wading the mud lanes out from the dairy or grazing the inked-in grasses by the pond, they move the way a low-forming storm cloud moves, trolling the earth out of which it draws, in the welling concentration of a passing hour, a heaviness it must soon become. And yet a cow jumped over the moon, we're told, and what has ever more easily slipped the snare of its own burden, turned burden, by nature, to beneficence, than the plush surprise releasing along their bloodstream's course a plenitude spiked, as Virgil claimed, with salt herb, lotus, and shrub-trefoil. A plenitude which, to temper that bitterness we drink to warm and clarify the day, I stream out into a steaming mug delivered, like gladness, on a breakfast tray. __________________________________________________________________________ SHEROD SANTOS
Poet and essayist Sherod Santos is the author of four books of poetry, Accidental
Weather (Doubleday, 1982), The Southern Reaches (Wesleyan, 1989), The City
of Women (W. W. Norton, 1993), and, most recently, The Pilot Star Elegies (W.
W. Norton, 1999), which was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five nominees
for The New Yorker Book Award. Mr. Santos' poems appear regularly in such journals
as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, andThe
Yale Review; his essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New
York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review and Parnassus. His awards
include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Discovery / The Nation Award, the
Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine, a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and
the essay, and the 1984 appointment as Robert Frost Poet at the Frost house in Franconia,
New Hampshire. He has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim
foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. From 1990 - 1997, Mr. Santos served
as external examiner and poet-in-residence at the Poets' House in Portmuck, Northern
Ireland, and in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently professor of English at the University of
Missouri - Columbia. Editor's Note: The folks at ForPoetry have voted for Sherod Santos' The Pilot Star Elegies for The New Yorker's Best Books of 1999 Award. Readers can cast their votes! Simply go to www.newyorker.com and click Book Awards icon. Deadline is January 14th.
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