lonely upon the ledge of his creation
"The White Swan"; "The Bison"
Over the past couple of weeks, I've found myself writing a lot of poetry, and this week I decided that in lieu of our usual Friday Frivolity posts, I wanted to post a couple of poems here that were inspired by previous Friday Frivolities. Writing those posts has turned out to be surprisingly fruitful for sparking my imagination, for “filling the well” into which the poet must necessarily dip her bucket if she is to drink the water of the Muses, etc, etc. Below is a sonnet and a poem that could have been a sonnet but wanted to be longer.
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The White Swan1
White gondola, white beauty like a bride— feathered and fresh, the white swan glides upon the silver lake, stirring in ripples his placid double where the glass divides its world from ours. The Leda-waters shudder in their embrace; the red beak dips and delves: lake-roots, lake-bracken, weeds and leaves are ravaged and come up bubbling through his second self’s liquid resemblance. A queerly floating cloud, the swan proffers the question of his neck again and yet again—a speechless probe— drops purity in subterranean dreck. What god or knight, white swan, what fairytale will you unveil upon your dying wail?
The Bison2
The grass waves like a sea but no sea is here; if grass were sea, the bison would be a boat, bobbing against the clouds that crowd, heap, gather, darken, smear towards horizon. It is as though the wind were a voice that herds the grass and clouds together. They converge, and from this vantage point, his near-black brown’s a blot. He is a non, no-being, nought, a nothingness, a void: this twofold vastness that ripples off the page (one page of plains, one page of heavens) finds him balky, hard, meets its resistance in him. Standing here, he almost seems a punctuation mark from older, stranger language than our own. This mystery of wind through waving grass, each semitone of stir and quiver, why the heaped foreboding in the clotting clouds— he understands it with the musk and music of his animal being. God once stood like this, lonely upon the ledge of his creation.
This poem was inspired by the Friday Frivolity post on swans—the myths and fairytales associated by swans and the numerous artworks that beautifully depict this beautiful bird.
The photograph that this poem was inspired by comes from the book Wild, Wild World of Animals: Wild Herds (1977) and was featured in the moodboard for Friday Frivolity no. 26.
"A queerly floating cloud,
the swan proffers the question of his neck
again and yet again—a speechless probe—"
"It is as though the wind were a voice that herds
the grass and clouds together."
Lovely! 👏