The Island is Also That Towards Which One Drifts

Islands

O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath

They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs
The Bathers think
islands are separate like them

–Muriel Rukeyser

I found this fresh and invigorating poem on Intercapillary/Space where I also found the following succinct commentary by Edmund Hardy:

The imagined isle, dream of absolute personal law, the romance of a self – no doubt washed away in a storm – re-selving without other people all around as mirror deflectors and absorbers to cause that self to jitter in a Brownian motion, the dream of being internal from the start. Enough of those dreams; underneath, there is the sea-floor, in profile, seamounts and guyouts, the oceanic lithosphere moving away from mid-oceanic ridges. Think, then, not in islands but in oceans; a useful enough slogan although, swimming around, we may find that “the island is also that towards which one drifts”*.

* Deleuze, “Desert Islands” in Desert Islands and Other Texts

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A Maul for Bill and Cindy’s Wedding

Swung from the toes out,
Belly-breath riding on the knuckles,
The ten-pound maul lifts up,
Sails in an arc overhead,
And then lifts you!

It floats, you float,
For an instant of clear far sight—
Eye on the crack in the end-grain
Angle of the oak round
Stood up to wait to be split.

The maul falls—with a sigh—the wood
Claps apart
and lies twain—
In a wink. As the maul
Splits all, may

You two stay together.

–Gary Snyder

Two poems to commemorate the wedding on Saturday of my son Clayton and my soon to be daughter Mona. Yes, and yes: You two stay together.

I’ll be back online next week.

Clayton and Mona, freshly engaged in Boston