Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops

This entry is part 47 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

Still, how beautiful and perfect
each raindrop looks— pearls strung
in that radial pattern, artful across
the web. Easy enough to think

each raindrop a pearl, a rhinestone
broken loose from a silken thread. And
the web’s an easy metaphor, just think.
Someone paces, paints, or writes all night.

Then something loosens: a sigh snaps the threads
that held the shapes, that filled and colored
in the light. Sleepless, write or paint all night:
then revise at dawn; wreck, rewrite. Begin

all over again— what filled those shapes? Color
that beguiled with absolute certainty of itself.
Revising at dawn, amid the wreckage of beginnings,
you find it’s hard to remember how love looked

except beguiling, so absolutely sure of itself.
Think radial patterns, think lines that artfully cross
with all you need, want to, remember. You know how hard to look
at what’s unfinished; proclaim it beautiful or perfect, still.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

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3 Replies to “Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops”

  1. Your last six lines say it all. Like remnants of the snapped spiderweb, how can they be pieced together again so they would look perfect? Pearls disappear with the fallen raindrops. But a work of love, though unfinished, would look beautiful, still. Bravo, Luisa.

  2. VISIONS AND REVISIONS

    Endless visions and revisions
    will follow every work of art,
    its end is also its beginning.

    A cat straining to catch its tail
    to earn its master’s delight?
    But that’s not the metaphor.

    When the last image attaches
    itself to a final web of moving
    yet still pictures on a canvas,

    when the impasto of colours
    have shaped the unuttered
    angst trembling on the easel,

    when sounds have moulded
    sense into a riot of language,
    creation is done, work begins.

    Will the poem sing brightly?
    Will the painting now speak?
    When are they truly finished?

    He shaped a man out of clay
    and thought him imperfect,
    he needed her to be complete.

    How hard it must be for Him
    to watch them destroy what
    grows out of their love and loin.

    Yet he was proclaimed good
    and perfect among the trees
    and the mud dried out of Eden.

    How hurtful it must be for one
    to start from the wreckage
    of what began from ardent love.

    —Albert B. Casuga
    08-08-11

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