Saturday, May 26, 2012

Frame of Reference


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. 


6 comments:

  1. If we keep looking down long enough we are sure to find it.

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  2. I 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....

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  3. These comments (especially Joe's puts me in the frame of what Seferis says in "An Old Man on the River Bank"--

    I 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.)

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  4. Seferis is inexhaustible....

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  5. one of my great purchases
    maybe 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

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  6. Joe vis-a-vis your comment: Seferis' "the sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry?"

    I 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.

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