A. A. Marcoff
The End of the Day
the whole sky is invocation and fugue: its pink light seems attenuated, rarefied as angels, stretched into moments that evoke a world to be, now, and always, a world into which the gulls go, in wave after wave, as if swirled onto a canvas with all the energy of Van Gogh: where the gulls go is the wild: the Mole Valley extends into its hills, and fades with dusk like a vision, or flower, or rumour: I will always remember these moments, and they echo those years of my youth when I looked into an African sunset and saw the cosmos red and crimson as a nebula, soaring with galaxies, the ground beneath my feet also red, a red clay, or earth:
flowers
burst out of my vase
like stars
such is this universe
of infinities
I am listening to Richard Strauss in the catena of time and space, his 'Four Last Songs': the orchestra sounds as though those violins are played with rainbows, and the songs inhere within me, and so does the setting sun: the music unfolds like weather and wing and celebration and legend: I first heard this sublime work when I was suffering with depression, and it sang to me then, of spring, September, and my death, a going to sleep I would have welcomed as a friend: it is the farewell and the flow, the process of dreaming and the shadow of a dream: now the whole planet seems to drift off into sleep, and I hold a stone in my hand, from the garden, and remember how Newton, at the end of his life, looked back with modesty and thoughtfulness, looking out towards the red horizon, thinking the infinity of dreams, the rouge of an apple, the sky, a red world:
red –
the great sea
of sunset:
worlds are born,
stars
flowers
burst out of my vase
like stars
such is this universe
of infinities
I am listening to Richard Strauss in the catena of time and space, his 'Four Last Songs': the orchestra sounds as though those violins are played with rainbows, and the songs inhere within me, and so does the setting sun: the music unfolds like weather and wing and celebration and legend: I first heard this sublime work when I was suffering with depression, and it sang to me then, of spring, September, and my death, a going to sleep I would have welcomed as a friend: it is the farewell and the flow, the process of dreaming and the shadow of a dream: now the whole planet seems to drift off into sleep, and I hold a stone in my hand, from the garden, and remember how Newton, at the end of his life, looked back with modesty and thoughtfulness, looking out towards the red horizon, thinking the infinity of dreams, the rouge of an apple, the sky, a red world:
red –
the great sea
of sunset:
worlds are born,
stars
Flame
Odysseus Elytis knew what war is like: he fought, he suffered: he witnessed death and destruction: his masterpiece 'The Axion Esti' describes aspects of that horror, but also and in the same breath celebrates the beauty and wonder of creation: the title means 'worthy it is', and he is saying that 'THIS WORLD / this small world the great!' is still beautiful and worthwhile despite all the evil and death and conflict: life is explicitly worth living...
I myself am one who has slowly emerged from a terrible darkness: I have at last rediscovered the miraculous: this is the fire of being, and I burn with the flame of existence: like Elytis, I now try 'to cast drops of light into the darkness'...
there is a landscape of snow, the land pristine, white as light: it snows again, snow falling on snow, memory on memory: I have learned that there are 'Three Forms of White' to the Japanese artist Nakabayashi Chikuto: these are, 'snow, flowering plum blossom, and an egret': snow falls like consequence: the quality of snow is the quality of dreams driven by a world of experience and impression: the mind blooms and flows like blossom and imagery: the egret here by the river now opens its wings like a Japanese fan, delicate and beautiful as a moment:
at one
with the river
& the egret's flare
there where the waters
run to light
the gulls in the sky above are like light in the winter white: snow again now: snow is the shadow of time as it falls into the moment with the flowering wind, and memory:
beautiful
the journey
through
the intense land
I go into the snow
I myself am one who has slowly emerged from a terrible darkness: I have at last rediscovered the miraculous: this is the fire of being, and I burn with the flame of existence: like Elytis, I now try 'to cast drops of light into the darkness'...
there is a landscape of snow, the land pristine, white as light: it snows again, snow falling on snow, memory on memory: I have learned that there are 'Three Forms of White' to the Japanese artist Nakabayashi Chikuto: these are, 'snow, flowering plum blossom, and an egret': snow falls like consequence: the quality of snow is the quality of dreams driven by a world of experience and impression: the mind blooms and flows like blossom and imagery: the egret here by the river now opens its wings like a Japanese fan, delicate and beautiful as a moment:
at one
with the river
& the egret's flare
there where the waters
run to light
the gulls in the sky above are like light in the winter white: snow again now: snow is the shadow of time as it falls into the moment with the flowering wind, and memory:
beautiful
the journey
through
the intense land
I go into the snow
|
|
El Greco it was who influenced the young Picasso, with that blue luminosity and otherworldliness, poor people, the destitute, appearing like ghosts in blue composition and atmosphere: the blue silence of paint: Matisse it was who gave us a world-within-a-world, his 'The Joy of Life', all that primitive pink and yellow exuberance, those nude reclining figures slightly distorted, strange landscape: and it was Turner who captured an ocean of light, that radiance swaying endlessly and changeably upon the waters: I think of his 'After the Deluge' (Moses reading from 'Genesis'), as the artist explored Goethe's 'theory of colour': and I remember too Locke's writings on the primary and secondary qualities of matter, as he also explored colour:
theory of colour
theory of matter
the sun strikes the waters
like fire
& turns light into a swan
this holds the theatre of the world, illuminations, essence: it is the miracular and verges on a steeper, deeper light: this is the genius of time, and I hear the voice of the wild...
and the blue light of El Greco and Picasso inheres within the blue light of the kingfisher in my years by the River Mole, and I have long felt a sustained sense of joy in the Mole Valley, something comparable to Matisse, and I see gulls every day wing their formations in the great sky, over the hills where the sun rises on a morning of worlds:
gulls appear
like a constellation
soaring
on the wings of springtime
on the wings of the sky
the swan it is that looms like the light of dawn, the sun in its cosmic wings: the swan swells my consciousness with its white space, like a Bach partita on the violin, bends the light like a bow, becomes the sky:
that ordinary magic
of light and shadow
watching
a philosophy
of swans
the valley opens up, both groundwork and dream, parable of wing and water, impetus of dreams: light is the fountain of this world, and I watch it flowering as a white-wing hawk in the confirmation of the wild: and I have found those fugitive qualities of light here by the river, and I write a sunlit script on the pages of that light, exalted in my innermost irrevocable being, and sing and sing and sing...
theory of colour
theory of matter
the sun strikes the waters
like fire
& turns light into a swan
this holds the theatre of the world, illuminations, essence: it is the miracular and verges on a steeper, deeper light: this is the genius of time, and I hear the voice of the wild...
and the blue light of El Greco and Picasso inheres within the blue light of the kingfisher in my years by the River Mole, and I have long felt a sustained sense of joy in the Mole Valley, something comparable to Matisse, and I see gulls every day wing their formations in the great sky, over the hills where the sun rises on a morning of worlds:
gulls appear
like a constellation
soaring
on the wings of springtime
on the wings of the sky
the swan it is that looms like the light of dawn, the sun in its cosmic wings: the swan swells my consciousness with its white space, like a Bach partita on the violin, bends the light like a bow, becomes the sky:
that ordinary magic
of light and shadow
watching
a philosophy
of swans
the valley opens up, both groundwork and dream, parable of wing and water, impetus of dreams: light is the fountain of this world, and I watch it flowering as a white-wing hawk in the confirmation of the wild: and I have found those fugitive qualities of light here by the river, and I write a sunlit script on the pages of that light, exalted in my innermost irrevocable being, and sing and sing and sing...
Water Lillies
there are some landscapes that have haunted me, followed me like a breeze through the course of my life: and where else to begin than with Giverny? I have learned that Monet endured much poverty in his early career, and suffered the tragic loss of his first wife: there were times when he never knew if they would have a roof over their heads, and times when he was ejected from an inn where he was staying...
but in 1870, after the disastrous war with Prussia, he left Paris and went to London: and it was here that he discovered the work of Turner: that essence of landscape, sketch, mirage, something indeterminate yet wild as nature itself: some say it was Turner who really inspired the Impressionists: Turner achieved the painting and the poetry of light and moment, that radiant ruby of colour: Monet himself produced fields of crimson and the memory of poppies, improvisations, The Thames in a weird light, Waterloo Bridge, impressions – a sunrise: when he settled at Giverny, he designed his sublime garden and pond where, following Turner, he reinvented landscape painting, and was constantly inspired by the presence of water-lilies there:
water-lilies –
the flowering
of
a moment
of light
after nearly going blind, he did regain his eyesight (almost miraculously), and spent his final phase painting those lilies of Giverny a little obsessively: his last paintings go round and round the oval galleries at the Orangerie – a world within a world of worlds:
casting a flower
into the cosmos
floating
through years
of water-lily dreams
suddenly everything blazes white and blind, as light crashes through it all like an avalanche: and I find myself by the mill-pond here in Fetcham uncertain of anything but water and light: here have I seen six egrets round the edges of the pond – flares of white within the wings of reality – that white space: and in the aftermath of this blaze of fire and light I stand by the stillness of water, awake, alive, aware: these waters exist like consciousness and contemplation and the flowers float with that reality of dreaming:
long since settled to silence
as if
the world itself
were about to dream –
water-lilies
but in 1870, after the disastrous war with Prussia, he left Paris and went to London: and it was here that he discovered the work of Turner: that essence of landscape, sketch, mirage, something indeterminate yet wild as nature itself: some say it was Turner who really inspired the Impressionists: Turner achieved the painting and the poetry of light and moment, that radiant ruby of colour: Monet himself produced fields of crimson and the memory of poppies, improvisations, The Thames in a weird light, Waterloo Bridge, impressions – a sunrise: when he settled at Giverny, he designed his sublime garden and pond where, following Turner, he reinvented landscape painting, and was constantly inspired by the presence of water-lilies there:
water-lilies –
the flowering
of
a moment
of light
after nearly going blind, he did regain his eyesight (almost miraculously), and spent his final phase painting those lilies of Giverny a little obsessively: his last paintings go round and round the oval galleries at the Orangerie – a world within a world of worlds:
casting a flower
into the cosmos
floating
through years
of water-lily dreams
suddenly everything blazes white and blind, as light crashes through it all like an avalanche: and I find myself by the mill-pond here in Fetcham uncertain of anything but water and light: here have I seen six egrets round the edges of the pond – flares of white within the wings of reality – that white space: and in the aftermath of this blaze of fire and light I stand by the stillness of water, awake, alive, aware: these waters exist like consciousness and contemplation and the flowers float with that reality of dreaming:
long since settled to silence
as if
the world itself
were about to dream –
water-lilies
Tony (A.A.) Marcoff is an Anglo-Russian poet who has lived in Africa, Iran, France, and Japan. He writes mainly tanka and tanka prose now, but has also had many mainstream poems published in Poetry Review and other journals. Tony has been a university librarian, teacher, and occupational therapy helper in a large psychiatric hospital, where he was in charge of poetry and creative writing. He now lives in England near the beautiful River Mole, which is his meditation and inspiration.
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