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| Giorgio Morandi |
Offer in the sense of give... A gift, the notion of potlatch, or, the gift containing it's own return... Bountiful...
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Girogio Morandi, one of a kind. A painter's painter (before the term became a commonplace)--his work unque in it's balance between careful looking and total attention to making real...
The one above might be his most mysterious (the resolution is a little low, however); the one below shows you how inside and outside--object and background--are really one and the same... all movement and feeling...
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| Giorgio Morandi |
In one sense, this James Wright poem doesn't fit, but then a James Wright poem will fit anywhere--just like a Morandi--reminding us that we are the makers---and that our material is...well, everything...
As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor
And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
-- Written A.D. 819
Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.
But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest?Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
-- Written A.D. 819
Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.
But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest?Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?
James Arlington Wright
