Sky-Guy for the Strayed Eye

The sky is in the sand,
That blend of sea and land,
Where ribbled pools
Make optic fools
Of eyes that stray or strand.


Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum

This poem is my sub-Housmanesque attempt to capture the sight of sky reflected in pools between wave-ribbed sand, so that there seemed to be another world floating there. I don’t like “optic fools”, where the adjective is obtrusively un-Anglish. But I also considered “photic fools”, for the alliteration. In the end, I might have used “eyeish fools”, if it hadn’t meant I couldn’t use “eyes” in the final line. Alternatives like “Of all that…” or “Of those that…” didn’t seem good. Oh, and “Sky-Guy” uses guy in the sense of “trick” or “hoax”, not as it’s used in the title of the TV program paronomasized in the title of this post.

Lux Legibilis

I wake from dreams and turning
     My vision on the height
I scan the beacons burning
     About the fields of night.

Each in its steadfast station
     Inflaming heaven they flare;
They sign with conflagration
     The empty moors of air.

The signal-fires of warning
     They blaze, but none regard;
And on through night to morning
     The world runs ruinward. — A.E. Housman in More Poems (1936)


There was a young fellow named Bright
Who travelled much faster than light.
     He set off one day,
     In a relative way
And came back the previous night. — Anonymous

ConstKunst

John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1825, Frick Collection)


Elsewhere other-engageable…

• Discussion of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1823) at Wikipedia

Performativizing Papyrocentricity #23

Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:

Face PaintA Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, Laura Cumming (HarperPress 2009; paperback 2010)

The Aesthetics of AnimalsLife: Extraordinary Animals, Extreme Behaviour, Martha Holmes and Michael Gunton (BBC Books 2009)

Less Light, More NightThe End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artifical Light, Paul Bogard (Fourth Estate 2013)

The Power of Babel – Clark Ashton Smith, Huysmans, Maupassant


Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR