11.30.2023 – these are tawny days

these are tawny days
bashful mornings hurl gray mist
on stripes of sunrise

These are the tawny days your face comes back
The grapes take on purple the sunsets redden early on the trellis.
The bashful mornings hurl gray mist on the stripes of sunrise.
Creep, silver on the field, the frost is welcome
Run on, yellow halls on the hills, and you tawny
pumpkin flowers, chasing your lines of orange
Tawny days and your face again

Tawny by Carl Sandburg in his book, Smoke and Steel, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., (1920).

The website, https://www.vocabulary.com/, defines tawny as an adjective meaning of a light brown to brownish orange color; the color of tanned leather.

The online Merriam-Webster says that tawny is from the Middle English, from Anglo-French tané, tauné, literally, tanned, from past participle of tanner to tan and that the first recorded use of the word is from the 14th century.

The book of Genesis, Chapter 1, verses 2-5 state:

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

For myself, when the Bible reports he separated the light from the darkness, I think that God set up what we know as the planet earth and when he separated the light from the darkness, God gave the planet a push that started it in motion so that on the planet, day was separated from night by the rotation of the planet.

From that moment all laws of what we now know as physics came into play.

Neither here nor there, that means, for me anyway, that God had a timer running as the earth revolved on its axis and when the Bible reports “… the first day”, God knew just what he meant, but I digress.

Anyway, at the end of that first day, the light sank below the horizon and on the morning of the 2nd day the light came up.

I am betting that when that light came, it was a tawny day and anyone who might be there to see it would see that the bashful mornings hurl gray mist on the stripes of sunrise.

My wife is not fond of these sunrise pictures I take with my iPhone because she knows that to take them, I am driving one handed, with my other hand holding my iPhone as I cross the Cross Island Bridge on Hilton Head Island.

I know it’s goofy but what can one do?

We live in the low country and it is flat.

There are few views to be had anywhere.

The Cross Island Bridge is one of few places you can see anything of the area.

And, as Augustus McCrae said the book Lonesome Dove, “, and “…if he missed sunrise, he would have to wait out a long stretch of heat and dust before he got to see anything so pretty.”

11.26.2023 – there is the place now,

there is the place now,
where I look back, look ahead
and dream and wonder

This is the view right now from the Bridge Street bridge that crosses a small tributary of the May River, between the Colhoun Street Dock and the Oyster Factory Dock in Bluffton, South Carolina.

We walked over the bridge the other day and we had to stop and stare.

We walked on to the Oyster dock and stood there as long as we could stand those nasty gnats that can be so tiresome that we have known people to decide living in the low country wasn’t worth dealing with the gnats.

On the walk back I stopped to take some pictures with my phone, one of which I sent to my grand daughter and said that we were visiting the Land of Oz.

She did not dispute it.

I look at this image, which I offer here … and I am not sure, what, which world I AM in.

If you are using your desktop you can view a full size image by clicking here …

I was reminded of the poem, Between Worlds, by Carl Sandburg …

And he said to himself
in a sunken morning moon
between two pines,
between lost gold and lingering green

I believe I will count up my worlds
There seem to me to be three
There is a world I came from which is Number One.
There is a world I am in now, which is Number Two
There is a world I go to next, which is Number Three

There was the seed pouch, the place I lay dark in, nursed and shaped in
a warm, red, wet cuddlmg place, if I tugged at a latchstring or
doubled a dimpled fist or twitched a leg or a foot, only the Mother knew

There is the place I am now, where I look back and
look ahead, and dream and wonder
There is the next place –

It was if all three worlds, the one I came from, the one am in now and the one I go to next, are all in the same place.

For an other other world, I offer the view in black and white.

11.20.2023 – passing footfalls beat

passing footfalls beat
in my ear like restless surf
of a wind-blown sea

While the hum and the hurry
Of passing footfalls
Beat in my ear like the restless surf
Of a wind-blown sea,
A soul came to me
Out of the look on a face.

Eyes like a lake
Where a storm-wind roams
Caught me from under
The rim of a hat.
I thought of a midsea wreck
and bruised fingers clinging
to a broken state-room door.

Under a Hat Rim by Carl Sandburg published in Chicago Poems, Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1916.

11.16.2023 – nuances spoken

nuances spoken
delicate change – cloud and blue
and flimmering sun

On a tip, the wife and I visited Sands Beach at Port Royal, South Carolina.

As the crow flies, its 13 miles from where we live.

To drive there, around the swamps and marches of the low country of South Carolina, its a 40 minute, 27 mile drive.

It is located at the southern tip of Port Royal Island where Battery Creek breaks off from the Beaufort River a few miles above Port Royal Sound.

The beach has a walkway along Battery Creek and a 4 story observation tower.

The view from the top of this tower helps you understand the meaning of ‘the low country.’

The day we were there, the water was still and blue and the surface reflected the sky and clouds in a way that defeated use of any words in the my dictionary.

I was reminded of the writing of Jenny Lawson who in her book, Furiously Happy, used the word, Concoctulary, which she footnoted, saying ” … a word that I just made up for words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist.”

Ms. Lawson doesn’t just invent words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist, she made a word for the words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist.

Concoctulary.

As Ms. Lawson writes, “… It’s a portmanteau of “concocted” and “vocabulary.” I was going to call it an “imaginary” (as a portmanteau of “imagined” and “dictionary”) but turns out that the word “imaginary” was already concoctularied, which is actually fine because “concoctulary” sounds sort of unintentionally dirty and is also great fun to say. Try it for yourself. Con-COC-chew-lary. It sings.”

So I needed a word for the way the clouds reflected in the blue still water of Batter Creek off of Sands Beach in Port Royal and I found flimmering.

Try it for yourself.

It sings.

No surprise to say that I didn’t invent it though.

Carl Sandburg did.

In his poem, Dream Girl, in the section Other Days of the book, Chicago Poems as reprinted in the Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Mr. Sandburg wrote:

You will come one day in a waver of love,
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.

You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,
A poise of the head no sculptor has caught
And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,
Your face in pass-and-repass of moods
As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.

Yet,
You may not come, O girl of a dream,
We may but pass as the world goes by
And take from a look of eyes into eyes,
A film of hope and a memoried day.

Flimmering.

As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.

It sings.

So does the view.

8.20.2023 – when Carl Sandburg sings

when Carl Sandburg sings
I know a lover of all
the living sings then

In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes writes about his time a Cleveland Central High School:

Ethel Weimer discovered Carl Sandburg for me. Although I had read of Carl Sandburg before—in an article, I think, in the Kansas City Star about how bad free verse was—I didn’t really know him until Miss Weimer in second-year English brought him, as well as Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters, to us. Then I began to try to write like Carl Sandburg.

Little Negro dialect poems like Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s and poems without rhyme like Sandburg’s were the first real poems I tried to write. I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my step-father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day.

… about Carl Sandburg, my guiding star, I wrote:

Carl Sandburg’s poems
Fall on the white pages of his books
Like blood-clots of song
From the wounds of humanity.
I know a lover of life sings
When Carl Sandburg sings.
I know a lover of all the living
Sings then