Vox Populi
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Alfred Corn: All It Is
The flexible arc
described by treetop leaves
when breathing currents ripple
a branch to one,
then the other side.
Or the level, quickened swell
that follows a gust over wetlands
home to a million reeds.
Any terrain you find arises from all
that came before: succeeding
event horizons from earlier eras
brought forward by today’s considered
impetus to lift the way it looks,
lightly, freely
out toward whatever senses you are there—
breathed into completion, a sphere,
into all it is.
Copyright © 2014 by Alfred Corn. From Unions (Barrow Street Press, 2014).
Alfred Corn is an esteemed American poet and essayist who has received many honors including an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. The Returns: Collected Poems by Alfred Corn is available from Press 53.
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So beautifully conveyed, I’m caught up in the sweep of these things, the poem itself like a waterbody. I’ve been reading Loren Eiseley’s “Immense Journey,” this is a payment in kind for, in lingual sensation. Its Spring Ser Maize! Bravissimo!
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I’ve been suffering “reader’s block,” with too many choices. Now I pulled The Immense Journey off the shelf, ready to commence. Thanks for your mention. The pages have turned brown waiting, but it beckons this morning. Here I go into its new found land.
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Jim: its such a fine traipse isn’t it!
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Kind of you to say, Sean. Thanks.
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Golly … what a wonderful way to start the morning. The phrase “breathed into completion” will stay with me into my complicated day.
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“Any terrain you find arises from all
All that came before:…”
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As you all probably know, I live in Lima, Peru. My son was just here with his second wife. At one point we talked about what came before (his first wife, his daughter, my first husband, his dad) and that we are grateful to all and everyone who’s ever touch our lives for better or for worse, because of who we have become.
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“Any terrain you find arises from all
that came before…”
What a sense of order in the natural world, of quiet beauty, of how things just are – I wish we had the humility to emulate …
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In his book of essays called The Gazer Within, Larry Levis wrote:
Someone or something has lived here; some delicate linkage is preserved between past and present. I am filled by, looked at by, the landscape itself; the experience is not that of a mirror’s, but a true exchange… (p.72). Corn’s poem is that true exchange…
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Reading this poem as a marvel of linkages. I closed my eyes after the first reading and re-discovered a place in myself– a boardwalk that curved through a marsh, with the shush of wind through the encroaching cat-tails, their smooth brown heads rising, each with its natural curve.
A natural, spiritual location delivered to us, if we look and listen. A poem to bring us back to inter-connection, the rising, the sway. All it is. But maybe not all it will be?
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At a time,now, when we must ponder what has come before, and how we have arrived to our now…in nature and in the human arcs…this subtle and moving poem, and its bend… above and below…. (and What a lovely companion it might be, philosophically, to Seamus Heany’s verse “History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.)
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Thanks, Margo! The quotation from Heany is perfect.
>
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Thrilled to be in the same sentence with Seamus.
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