Tag snow

* in the trees with John Ashbery & new work

José Angel Araguz 4 Comments

After many walks in the snow the body learns a new rhythm. At least that’s what it’s felt like these past few weeks. I’ve got myself a mean snow trudge.

What I admire about John Ashbery is the way he can keep his line close to the shifts of not his mind but the mind of the poem. In the poem below, whose rhyming couplets have a music that sneaks up on you rather than chimes on in, I feel a recognition of what is termed “puzzling light.”

Not the kind of light that leaves you puzzled (past tense) but a sense of light as vision, where you look at something and keep seeing new things in it, puzzling out what there is.

Like steps in deep snow: each a different mark and feel.

* and miles to go and all that *

* and miles to go and all that *

Some Trees – John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

***

Happy accenting!

Jose

p.s. I am happy to announce that I have 3 poems in the latest issue of the Inflectionist Review. Check them out here. Special thanks to John Sibley Williams and A. Molotkov for giving these poems a home.

* snow! with Charles Wright

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Snow is starting to become a regular thing in our neighborhood.

Ani and I remarked on (read: laughed at) our mutual inexperience earlier this week when we began to see little bits of the stuff flying about one afternoon.

What is that?  Is that fluff?  Gotta be, like cotton, or foam, something, right?

I won’t say who said what: we’re both guilty.  And the conversation – with large gaps of silence in between statements of disbelief – went on longer than it should have.

My defense: We live on the second floor so there was a buoyancy to those first flakes that seemed suspect.  Between New Mexico and blizzards in NYC, I’ve spent a good ten years moving through snow, putting on boots, bundling up, and the rest.  But that’s a matter of snow as presence.

Snow as verb, however… well, it got me this week.

The poem below by Charles Wright is fortifying given the months ahead of us.  Wright is a mystic – and in this short poem (from his collection Sestets) he conjures up what the snow itself conjures inside a person.

* they seem fine with the stuff *

* they seem fine with the stuff *

On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking About Tennessee – Charles Wright

It’s dark now, the horses have had their half apple,

mist and rain,

Horses down in the meadow, just a few degrees above snow.

I stand in front of the propane stove, warming my legs.

If the door were open, I’d listen to creekwater

And think I heard voices from long ago,

distinct, and calling me home.

The past becomes such a mirror – we’re in it,

and then we’re not.

***

Happy notting!

Jose