The face of the waters

    

I woke to fog, & myself this morning. My mind is the bird that flits from rock to rock and does not rest. It is the fly that lights, alights but cannot find purchase. I feel the flame of my mind like a candle being blown roughly, the smoke of it is ragged and blown, the center eludes. I try and focus my mind through the prism of this poem, find some relief in the description of a space—(a shock of air hanging between two masses?), a cool, clear defined block of airs that moves fitfully but is contained within a clear geographic skin…

‘The same mist hangs in thin layers

among the valleys and gorges of the mainland

like rotting snow-ice sucked away

almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift

among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack—

dull, dead, deep peacock-colors,

each riser distinguished from the next

by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,

alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.’

(from “Cape Breton”, by Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979)

When I read this, reread this,,, it changes, it moves. I find relief in this somehow—while other parts of her poem are rockbound/landbound, anchored,, this is a breath—a movement of air over waters. I always seem to think back to William Blake on mornings like this. I remember seeing a set of his drawings at the old Tate Gallery in London, drawings of the most urgent kind, drawings on Biblical themes. His drawing of God’s Creation of the world has always stuck in my mind.. an illustration of that first spark of life. His treatment of this moment seem to tease at the difficulty of it-- like my mind today—he lights like a pinprick on it and flits up again in seaspray, unable to easily describe it. I am unmoved by so much Biblical history/description, but felt completely awash in the lushness and crystalline depths of these moments illustrated and written about by Blake.

And the troubled rumblings of Creation: ‘The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters…(Genesis 1:2, translation chosen by M Greenberg in “Speak Silence: Rhetoric and Culture in Blake’s Poetical Sketches”)”God moves over the waters, God’s face was on the waters’.. the very first spark of creation was a face over dark waters, the first action a ‘breath’. The thing I cannot wrap my mind around, the thing that pulls at my gut, is the deepness of those waters, the sheer obsidian darkness of waters that were endlessly packed, receding, & unnamed. They were ‘mass’ of uncreated lands, but the stuff was all there! 

With desperate wrangling, I remember trying to translate a Greek version of the Old Testament myself into English, & remember the sheer insanity of this. Greek is big—encompassing, whole & entire—trying to piecemeal it into the minute sections and chopped fragments of modern English seemed impossible--- but ..”God.. moved// on the face of the waters..” seemed as close as one could get… to the moments, the string of moments that were marking, starting to mark time/place/action/thing. The whirling before was unquantifiable mass, and then a blush became apparent on the skin of the dark water, a lighter shade that could speak of itself in single, against the massive ‘other’.

This smudge of ‘first’ was made by an action—an action of looking, an action of closeness—a breathing, like someone breathing hot breath over ice on a winter windowpane. Something appeared there on the skin of the water—just there, that was new—the matter ‘became’ in response to the action, the ‘something’ grew out of the water like a bloom, rising up to meet such a close and fevered caress.

Am old Polaroid falls out of my book, my mother and I in matching coral colored dresses—me at 2 ½ years old, eyes closed, her smiling. She and I do not speak right now—mostly this seems appropriate and like a huge sigh of relief. But I feel the dark undertow of it, in the bottom part of my heart—maybe a marking of something generically unnatural or sad—sad in the whole but not the specific—sad in the overarching sky but not in my lone self, pinpricked into the dark hill of today.

I spent time with my friend last night, the traveler, and heard gems and rock strata in the things he said. His movements right now are marked by passage through sedimentary rock, they are marked by layers in the earth, by the ringing of volcanic rock, by mountain colors. I am homebound, landlocked, stuck. But I try to throw my mind out like a boomerang today, into the night air, into the early morning air, into the spray of seaside air to see what it might bring back. And Elizabeth Bishop ends her poem “the birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts./ The thin mist follows/The white mutations of its dream;/an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks” (from ‘Cape Breton’).