Lay your burden down, brother—
I’m sure you’ve heard this one before
And I don’t want to sound irreverent
Or flippant but isn’t it a bit incongruous?
I mean, we’ve been lugging
Our frames around for ages
And we still don’t know where
The big picture is.
If we keep looking down long enough we are sure to find it.
ReplyDeleteI remember a time when the frame was made of four strands of green willow woven at the corners. It was hard to carry because it was lightweight and shifting and it was easily undone. I don't remember when it became this ornate, beat-up thing that's hard to carry because it's so damned heavy and can only be undone with a sledgehammer. Lay it down? Well, one of these days....
ReplyDeleteThese comments (especially Joe's puts me in the frame of what Seferis says in "An Old Man on the River Bank"--
ReplyDeleteI want no more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace.
Because we've loaded even our songs with so much music
that they're slowly sinking
and we've decorated our art so much that its features have
been eaten away by gold
and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow the soul
sets sail.
(Not quite what the format is supposed to look like but you get the picture.)
Seferis is inexhaustible....
ReplyDeleteone of my great purchases
ReplyDeletemaybe even my greatest
was when on the way back to the States
in summer of 1971 (just a few weeks before going to Hopkins)
from about 14 months living in
Lindoz
I stopped in at Jonathan Cape in London
& purchased an hard-bound copy of George Seferis'
Collected Poems 1924-1955
(with that brown wrap)
it had just been published (1969)
turned out that Eliott Coleman who spent his summers
somewhere in Greece where he had bought a house
was friends wit George Seferis
as I recall, Seferis died while I was at Hopkins
etc
Joe vis-a-vis your comment: Seferis' "the sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry?"
ReplyDeleteI have the same brown wrap, dual-language hard-cover edition, Ed; and your memory serves you well: Seferis died on September 27, 1971 in Athens. I was in grad school at the University of Washington.