Thursday, January 26, 2017

Kit Kelen - for ataraxia #7 - smell of first light


smell of light first

in a cloud now
mist with moon through
smoke still as rain

the kind that is constant
like the infinite line

river is where
colour goes in

goes with us
lungs brim

this thickness takes up
in paddocky clefts
ridges of timber come

how the map
gathers and pools
makes mirages

you can’t say when it clears into rain

but what won’t look good
once sky is down?

then everything's jewelled to the tip
drinking in


3 comments:

  1. Hi Kit!
    I love the poem, the sounds, the images, the : « river is where colour goes in » …
    my only question is about the fist line, and I can understand why you wanted it to be the first line, but why not to leave the word cloud unsaid, (at least for a little while) … and we would have something like
    now
    mist with moon through
    smoke still as rain

    my feeling is that, by saying cloud, you leave people outside of it, looking at it, while directly making the experience of mist and rain is already being into it, and whatever name this can have, people don’t really care. So, to my humble opinion, the presence of the cloud is truly there in the poem, but the name, the noun, is like diminishing the power of its effects. Furthermore, we find in the 8th stanza “sky is down” which is expressive enough … And now my next question is: are these comments betraying some specific European, or even French aesthetic criterion? … If yes, then forget everything I wrote about this poor innocent cloud!

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  2. thanks Beatrice
    this is an interesting train of thought

    I considered making
    in a cloud now
    the last line

    but I guess I wanted to open with this specific surprise

    and in English the idea of being in a cloud is surprising in the sense that when yr actually in the cloud then yr supposed to think of that place as being mist or fog or something ... in an aeroplane or a balloon would be the exception ... but cloud is, by unspoken definition/assumption ... the thing yr outside of ...

    is it the same with nuage? I've also assumed so but I wouldn't really know

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  3. but I can't get enough continental aesthetic criteria!!

    ReplyDelete