I posted a photo of a rabbit last week, but it wasn’t a very successful one as the bunny’s colouring blended so well with the undergrowth. I gather that this blending into the background is crypsis (as opposed to mimesis when the creature disguises itself as something else).
Here, then, is a less cryptic rabbit:
Continue reading “seeing and not seeing”
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
but I couldn’t remember who said it.
Knowing I’d kept it as one of a whole list of poetry-associated quotations, I searched my computer for hyacinths.
It turns out it was Carl Sandburg, though further investigation online suggests he may actually have used the subtly different phrase:
poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
The search for hyacinths also turned up the forgotten draft of a poem.
Continue reading “a lack of biscuits”
If of thy worldly goods thou art bereft
and of the store two loaves alone are left,
sell one and with the dole
buy hyacinths to feed the soul.
I seem to have known that verse all my life, and always associated it with the phrase “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Of course the latter is from the Bible; the verse, it seems, is by Rumi. Presumably the original wasn’t written in English, which would account for the variations I found when I went looking to see where it came from.
Continue reading “not by bread alone”
Alternatively, Happy (lunar) New Year.
And a fragment of a poem, which at least has sheep tracks if not the animals themselves:
I’ve walked the sheeptracks of your dreams
in search of unicorns, but they have fled.
Now they graze where honey flows in streams
through pillowing hills.
Though perhaps it should be goats not sheep in the photo, and Chinese dragons not unicorns in the poem.
I went to an open mike evening the other day. It was supposed to be in a fairly spartan room above a pub, but the bookings had got mixed up and the SWP were there before us, so at the very last minute the venue was changed.
The new venue was a basement room, although the décor was altogether too decadent to make me feel like an underground poet. The Trotskyists might have liked the wall colour, but I’m sure the spit-and-sawdust pub setting suited them better.
I say “basement”, but I suppose in fact ground level was lower at the back, or there would have been no windows downstairs. 
Not that we could access them.
It seems that the world of discovery that lies “through the arched window” is out of bounds. I wonder if the square and round windows are similarly barred.
Once more, then, I find “you can’t go home again.”
Even little ted looks rather worse for wear.
don't confuse the narrator 