Grad School: Week 11

from The One Day

Smoke rises all day from the two chimneys above us.
You stand by the stove looking south, through bare branches
of McIntosh, Spy, and Baldwin. you add Oak logs to the fire you built at six in the castiron stove.
At the opposite end of the same house, under another chimney,
I look towards the pond that flattens to the west
under the low sun of a January afternoon, from a notebook
busy with bushels and yields. All day in out opposite
rooms we carry wood to the stoves, we pace up and down, we plan,
we set figures on paper-to converge at day's end.

for kisses, bread, and talk; then we read in silence,
sitting in opposite chairs; then we turn drowsy.
Dreaming of tomorrow only, we sleep in the painted bed
while the nights frail twisting of woodsmoke assembles
overhead from the two chimneys, to mingle and disperse
as our cells will disperse and mingle when they lapse
into graveyard dirt. Meantime the day is double
in the work, love, and solitude of eyes
that gaze not at each other but at a third thing:
a child, a ciderpress, a book-work's paradise.

Donald Hall

Ahhh...If work life was only just like this. Donald Hall pacing one side of the house, Jane Kenyon on the other, and magic, labored over and pure, leaving by mail to the publishers at regular intervals. Donald Hall would be the first to recognize that work is hard, good work even more difficult, and he is a writer who continues to put pen to paper prodigiously. This poem does put me in the mind of fall, and it has arrived here in Lincoln, finally. Giant, wet prairie snowflakes falling and melting instantly for a good half hour.

I will admit that my mind has been elsewhere this week, not entirely in the studio, not entirely out of it. Somewhere between Donald Hall's two chimneys. Mainly i've been pacing around the house. To compensate, i'll leave you with a video my wife found, and leave this post at that. This video was filmed off the coast of Ireland and shows what a flock of starlings can look like if you are very lucky. A flock of these birds is called a Murmuration. Do check out her blog MINNOW, although she should probably be sending traffic my way, given the number of hits she is getting. Have a good week, and thanks for reading. Here it is. If you feel like getting a good set of goosebumps, it's worth two minutes:

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.