a bowl of gourds on the dark-wood table
before the window before the paddock to the
piggery, unadorned, and cultivated through
chance and heel, forgotten beside the trellis;
a bowl of colour and varied shape: Bishop’s
Mitre, Red Turk’s Cap; one looks like the
old orange toad who lives behind the
water butt and likes to be called Bebe;
but the Montgolfiere balloon of yellow
and green took me up through slated
cloud in 1783 from the Bois de Boulogne,
so came the silence on the way to the stars
such a time away at ions of eyes per hour,
rivulets in tributary down the inside of the
flask by letter and equation far beyond my
jiggery and pokery, round ticket through
time … I breathed in back from the mass
so distant that its light would never return,
back in through milky way and system,
faster than any quantum of backward light,
back past giants and Mars, back into
Earth’s sweet atmosphere and the waiting
bowl brimming with the circles and undulate
trajectory of every plot surmised beyond
my paned windows; where meadow fescue
curves like blackened oak and manual
labour, abhorrent of vacuum and straightened
line (those harbingers of discontinuance):
they almost screamed at me, “This is now,
this is NOW;” mind confined by time grades
eternity by linear thought which always
misses the soft canticle of the gourds:
“So man, upon his world so great
Has always wanted to create
Machines which, started once will never
Cease but carry on for ever.
Yet all the time O foolish man,
You’re merely part of that great plan,
A tiny part, hast thou not seen
This wondrous universe machine?
This motion so perpetual
Is the universe and all
That lies beyond in time and space,
E’en down to us, the human race.
There’ll be no end, there was no start,
There is no shape therefore no heart.
And to create it doth aspire
To use the debris of its ire.
Poor mortal look deep in your heart
And realise that you’re just a part
Of that which knows no boundaries,
Heeds not your trivial quandaries.
Servants of the cosmos vow
To play your part and take your bow,
Or servants you will always be –
Until you die, ‘tis then you’re free.”
read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to : The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
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breathing wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
clouds & creativity & green & life & oak & orange & silence & space & stars & thought & uncle & yellow wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
death & windows wormhole: the policies came to nothing
eyes wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
glass wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
identity & light & time wormhole: tired
speech wormhole: constant hummm
wood wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
mlewisredford 