The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 12/14/07

[BlueIris]

"Archaelogy"

  "Our real poems are already in us 
  and all we can do is dig."
		                     —Jonathan Galassi

You knew the odds on failure from the start,
that morning you first saw, or thought you saw,
beneath the heatstruck plains of a second-rate country
the outline of buried cities.  A thousand to one
you'd turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap
of a poor Near Eastern backwater:
a few chipped beads,
splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets
whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered,
would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists.
Still, the train moved away from the station without you.

How many lives ago
was that?  How many choices?
Now that you've got your bushelful of shards
do you say, give me back my years
or wrap yourself in the distant
glitter of desert stars,
telling yourself it was foolish after all
to have dreamed of uncovering
some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god?
Pack up your fragments.  Let the simoom
flatten the digging site.  Now come
the passionate midnights in the museum basement
when out of that random rubble you'll invent
the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices,
streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells
to which, in the blue of evening, one by one
come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars.

—Katha Pollit

[BlueIris]

1. Hey. Kids. It's a good poem.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. Yes, this is very good, my dear BlueIris...

I like the images a lot...

I also really like this quote:

"Our real poems are already in us
and all we can do is dig."

I heard someone say once that this is how sculpture is; you are liberating the statue from the stone encasing it.

Thank you...

[BlueIris]

3. Awwww. That is a GREAT quote about sculpture.

[ThomCat]

4. Wow. I didn't know Katha Pollit was a poet too.

That's really good. And I can see sort of see her descriptive writing style in there.

[BlueIris]

5. Hi, Thom! Glad you got a chance to read this. :-)

[BlueIris]

6. Kick.