Petals on a wet, black bough

2:56 PM PDT, April 11, 2009

Mildly seasonal as this post's title may seem, Ezra Pound's poem about faces packs all kinds of brooding angst in its two short lines and perfectly sums up my present mood. I admire Pound most because without his censoring pen like a refiner's fire, Eliot's The Waste Land would have ended up a negligible ditherfest.

I never thought of myself as the Facebook type, but life can be either a luxury cruise or dinghy ordeal of self-discovery, depending on viewpoint. So far my profile page is an abject blank, but I'll add to it once I get over the social anxiety I never have in person.

And there's always the Delete feature. Would that all of life's events had one.

Writing is coming along wonderfully, given much recent inspiration.

CK

Dear Shadow

11:45 AM PDT, April 8, 2009

Note: The tale referred to in this post is "The Kind Gods," published in Bewildering Stories and free to read on my blog at https://carolynkephart.blogspot.com/2022/01/short-fiction-kind-gods.html. I created the cover art using an image of the Sutton Hoo helmet.)

_____________

It came like a flash—and ended in flash fiction. By sheer accident I chanced to listen the other day to a song I’d never heard before by a group I’d never heard about, and in another moment I was writing a story. It’s been a very long time since I've done that.

“Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” is by Fleet Foxes, a Seattle-based band who debuted in 2008. Its lone-guitar, single-voice slow waltz, poignant chords, and evocative lyrics rife with ambiguity were simply ensorcelling, bardic, timeless. It took me about twenty minutes to write most of the story, and I thought up the ending last night.

Perhaps it’s the season, or a change of outlook that makes time inestimably precious, or good friends and fan mail, and/or just finally getting my chemical balance right, but to feel like creating again is like being saved from drowning.

Grateful thanks to everything, anything,

CK

Wanderers this morning came by
Where did they go
Graceful in the morning light
To banner fair
To follow you softly
In the cold mountain air

Through the forest
Down to your grave
Where the birds wait
And the tall grasses wave
They do not
know you anymore

Dear shadow alive and well
How can the body die
You tell me everything
Anything true

In the town one morning I went
Staggering through premonitions of my death
I don't see anybody that dear to me

Dear shadow alive and well
How can the body die
You tell me everything
Anything true

Jesse
I don't know what I have done
I'm turning myself to a demon
I don't know what I have done
I'm turning myself to a demon

CK

The Hounds of Spring

4:49 PM PDT, March 24, 2009

[Information about my other writing can be found here. Happy reading!]

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

It never lasts long, this sweet first flowering time. Two days ago the redbud and crabapple trees around the deck were just beginning to bloom; now they’re at their height. From my window I can see their delicate hues, purple and rose, demurely defiant amid the gaunt trunks and branches of oaks and maples still leafless. The daffodils flaunted in their golden hosts weeks ago, and are now shriveling on their stalks. So temporary, and for that very reason so beloved, this fragile, fitful interval.

I can well understand why medieval people always went wild when Spring finally arrived. Even with my modern comforts, winter is a grim and shivering eternity that gets more arduous with each passing year, and this particular year was a bad 'un. My left tympanic cavity is still clogged from the crud that began afflicting me around Thanksgiving, and is only now making an all too leisurely retreat from my mortal clay. To finally feel warm, really and truly warm, is wondrous.

So with my one good ear, my two bad eyes and my cough-rough voice I’ve been reveling in Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana, singing along to the irresistibly upbeat ‘Tempus Est Iocundum.’ Orff’s mainly known for another song in the cycle, ‘O Fortuna,’ but its grim staccato howl that made perfect background music for the last several months has been bumped from my player, replaced by the pagan glee of youths and maidens giddy with the joy of shrugging off heavy itchy rank infested wool breeks and coathardies and frolicking about bare-limbed on the greensward.

Oh, oh, oh!
Totus floreo!

Texts and translations of the Carmina Burana can be found at http://www.tylatin.org/extras/index.html

Swinburne's breathtaking poem about spring's hounds, partially quoted above, can be found here: http://www.bartleby.com/101/808.html


CK