Saturday commute lxxiii: dissolve, dull stain

Perhaps a single pining mandolin

Throbs where cicadas have quarried

To the heart of all misgiving and there

Scratches on silence like a pet locked in ..

I shall recall nights of squinting rain,

Like pig-iron on the hills: bruised

Landscapes of drumming cloud and everywhere

The lack of someone spreading like a stain.

Lawrence Durrell

The Tree of Idleness

1955

Selected Poems

op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday lxvi: Splashmaker tests another stone

   All that good administration

   was able to do, bad manners

   have triumphantly undone.

 

Villiers David
Advice to my
  Godchildren
op. cit.

Glad news of David Ferry

    Mr Ferry has won the

    National Book Award

    for the collection

    cited last month.

    
    It was indeed an-
    other occasion of
    happiness and risk.

    
    It would be unnatur-

    al to suppress the

    impulse to award 

    such prizes, but 

    it is almost unnat-
    ural to do so by
    extreme selection.

    Does such a gesture
    compromise intention
    to commemorate?

    What is saved by
    sharp discernment?
    Who is entitled to
    his simple answer?

    Do we love our
    playing fields be-
    cause their out-
    comes can be fair, 
    and give us broad
    elation in the game?
    Or do we love them
    because they thrust
    up heroes on demand?

    There is a cast of
    mind which has a
    blue state, a cast
    of mind of red. It
    never was more clear
    than just this year.
    It amounts to a dis-
    tinction in what a
    a treasuring is.

    Mr Ferry writes poet-
    ry of structure, bal-
    ance, endurance and
    grace. Our playing
    fields teach us to
    love these qualities
    not as ornaments: as
    features of obliga-
    tion, of readiness 
    for honest play. We
    love Ferry's poetry,
    it shines of rapture
    in the game.

    
    






David Ferry
Bewilderment
  New Poems and Translations
op. cit.

Please, no jests at a time like this!

Quite right, Mr Hakluyt.
We shall brook no mer-
riment on the pitfalls
of romance in treacher-
ous South Asia. Efface
The Road to Oxiana and
be strict with Louis
Mayer, when faced with
spy arcana, and behav-
iour militaire. Not a
breath of ribald glee,
not a single slap of
knee, may compromise
security of gloom, as
twice imperious effigy
unravels from its loom.

Robert Byron

The Road to Oxiana

1937

Oxford University Press, 2007©

Reading with Mies

Dr Farnsworth's house

in Plano is a moon

viewing platform from

the Katsura Villa in

a field in Illinois,

to conjure some day

a gallery in Texas

where a Raeburn can-

vas gains texture by
reflection.

i     Collection Kimbell Museum of Art

ii    Residence Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

       1945-51

iii  Louis Kahn

      Kimbell Museum of Art

     1972