Over the ever bending water...

Every Thought...

Week 22: Bridges

If I indulge now and then in the extended metaphor, it is without apology.  It is part of my journey from here to there, giving me perspective over the ever-bending water.


05/27:

TWL, Lines 77-93: Upon The River Of Cydnus

77     The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
78     Glowed on the marble, where the glass
79     Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
80     From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
81     (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
82     Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
83     Reflecting light upon the table as
84     The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
85     From satin cases poured in rich profusion.
86     In vials of ivory and coloured glass
87     Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
88     Unguent, powdered, or liquid — troubled, confused
89     And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
90     That freshened from the window, these ascended
91     In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
92     Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
93     Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

77. A BURNISH’D THRONE: Eliot: “Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, l. 190.”

See Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.190, 195-201.  Antony’s friend Enobarbus describes Cleopatra:

“she purs’d up his heart, upon the river of Cydnus.
...The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.”

IMOGEN’S CHAMBERS: See also Shakespeare, Cymbeline  2.4.84-94, 102-105, where Iachimo allusively describes what he saw of Imogen’s chambers to her husband Posthumous:

“...First, her bedchamber,
Where, I confess, I slept not, but profess
Had that was well worth watching--it was hanged
With tapestry of silk and silver; the story
Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman,
And Cydnus swelled above the banks, or for
The press of boats or pride: a piece of work
So bravely done, so rich, that it did strive
In workmanship and value; which I wondered
Could be so rarely and exactly wrought,
Since the true life on't was–
....The chimney
Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece
Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
So likely to report themselves.”

Dian is the wood goddess Diana, whom the hunter Actaeon saw naked while she was bathing in the forest.  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3:206-312.  For other allusions to Actaeon and Diana, see lines 10 and 197.

80. A GOLDEN CUPIDON: Enobarbus (see note 77) continues, at Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.202-208:

“...O'er- picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
  Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.”

Venus was the mother of Cupid and Aeneas, further alluded to in the lines to follow (see note 92, with reference to Virgil, Aeneid.  Compare the undoing and doing by the “Cupids” with the Pia being made and unmade at line 293.

See also Cymbelline 2.4.111-115 (see note 77):

“.... The roof o' the chamber
With golden cherubins is fretted: her andirons–
I had forgot them--were two winking Cupids
Of silver, each on one foot standing, nicely
Depending on their brands.”

87. STRANGE PERFUMES, which are “stirred by the air” (line 89), establish the atmosphere of this section, full of meaningful words made empty in their presentation. See note 76.5.  For the “vials of ivory” (line 86), compare the ivory pieces standing between the chess players at note 138.

92. THE LACQUEARIA: Eliot: “Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I. 726:
‘dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.’”

See Virgil, Aeneid 1.726-727, where laquearibus, a paneled ceiling, is translated as “gilded roofs”:

“From gilded roofs depending lamps display
Nocturnal beams, that emulate the day.”

DIDO AND AENEAS: This passage is from Virgil’s telling of the tragic romance of Carthigian Queen Dido and Aeneas from Troy; see also line 307 and notes 12, 34, 70, 231 and 307.  For the full story, see Virgil, Aeneid Books 1 and 4.  After leaving a besieged Troy, Aeneas, in search of a new homeland, came to Carthage, home of Juno, goddess of marriage. To welcome him, Dido, the Queen of Carthage, had prepared a lavish banquet.  With the intervention of Venus, Aeneas’s mother, and Cupid, his brother, Dido became smitten with Aeneas.  This would prove fateful for both Dido and Carthage.  Dido fell in love with Aeneas, and for a time they would even live together, but Aeneas would never marry her and would leave Carthage without her, ultimately finding his own place as the founder of Rome. Dido, left behind, would kill herself, and eventually Carthage would be defeated and destroyed by the Romans in the Battle of Mylae (see note 70).

Compare Dido’s feast with the royal engagement efforts for the granddaughter of Catherine the Great, wisest woman in Europe (note 45).  See also the failed efforts of Hellawes the Sorceress to seduce Sir Lancelot (note 388).

DYSFUNCTIONAL COUPLES populate, or dispopulate, the poem beyond Dido and Aeneus.  See lines 111-126 (empty talkers) and 139-172 (Lil & Albert), and notes 34 (Isolde & King Mark), (Adolf and Alexandra), 99 (Tereus & Procne), 128 (Hamlet & Ophelia) 145 (Lilith & Adam), 198 (Agamemnon & Clytemnestra), 279 (Lord Robert Dudley & Amy Robsart), 293 (Pia de Tolemei) 365 (the traveling bones wife), 388 (Hellawes and Lancelot) and 408 (howling wives, men on death beds).  For more blissful rivers, see notes 165 (a lustfully-paced courtship), 176 (a double marriage) and 291 (wedding bells).

ELIOT’S MARRIAGE was especially dysfunctional.  His wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was perpetually troubled from 1915 until her death in 1947.  They separated in 1932 and were permanently estranged in 1938 when she was committed to a mental hospital.  See the preface to Eliot, Letters, quoting T.S. Eliot:

“To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought
the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”


  05/28:

Here And Now

I’ve other things to think about than you
and me and whether we will ever be
together anymore if ever we
were there before.  I’ve better things to do,
considering my separate point of view,
than parse the existentiality
of “us.”

(I could lose myself in metaphors
that never end (ground, sun, river and wind)
and feel the power of presence and the force
of perpetuity that even in
a moment lets me glimpse the greater course
from whence I come to where I would pretend.)

You are too far away from me
for me to see, so why should I pursue
the possibility of “we”?  And who
am I to presuppose the theory
that I am yours and you belong to me?
You are not mine, I don’t belong to you,
and maybe I was never meant for you,
and maybe we were never meant to be.

(There is a bend that hides each metaphor’s
beginning and a bend that hides each end;
I have no certainty about my source
or my conclusion.  I can’t see beyond
my current place and yet I can’t divorce
my here from there or sever now from then.
I am what I have been, will ever be
the steel, the spark, the sweat, the breath of me.)


05/29:

Bridge Sonnet

Each road’s another story:  paved or gravel-
Roughed or leveled, mud or dirt,
   always life extending ridge to ridge;
Down one of them I came upon a bridge
Across a valley’s hidden hurt,
   of bolted metal topped with graded gravel
Stretched from bank to bank across a river.
If not for journeys of my own
   I would take time to learn the river’s song,
The something pushing pulling it along;
   instead I turn to what is known:
The road that takes my path across the river.

God grant me all the power I have to travel
   through the shadows of each vale,
Look after me God, bless my soul, deliver
My heart my weary way from ridge to ridge
   and road to road, and with each tale to tell
Apply me steadfast to the grinding gravel
But lead me not into the mystic river
   of unknown sources heavened or helled
And let me walk instead across this bridge.


05/30:

River Cinquains


water secrets
ever bending untold stories
discovers the ocean ducking behind corners
delivers the distant mountain hiding beyond the horizons
water secrets




river                                             journey
slowly turning stretching travel
reveals only ripples to a destination
of its whitewater history left to the imagination
river                                            journey



                 bridges
                 river crossings
                 giving me perspective
                 over the ever-bending water
                 bridges


05/31:

The Swan

by Rainer Maria Rilke (a new translation)

This toil through life as yet undone
is hard; we move with ropes around
us like the artless waddle of the swan

and then death and the letting go
of a life of walking on the ground
is the swan nervously slipping in

to a water that receives him gently,
happily taking what has passed
from under him, wave by wave,

while the swan, with perfect peace and calm,
becomes forthright and regal
upon the water, rested and relaxed.


06/01:

Crossing Quatrains

How long
will this river flow
the country’s culminated streams
connecting unseen mountain sources
to the ocean,
bringing dreams to distant dreams?

How long
will the water run
beneath this road turned into bridge,
beneath the feet
of all who pass from bank to bank
half grateful for this lifted street?

How long
will this stretch of street
in time remain
suspended shore to shifting shore
above the rise and sink of seasons,
of mountain trickle and ocean roar?

This river will
outlast us, all our lives combined
and every street along the way,
and even as I form these words,
I feel
the bridge begin to sway.

This bolted iron in the wind
is likely to outlast us too;
we may
grow old together, but
if time’s the measure we cannot do
what bridges do.


06/02:

Moleskin 3.4: Another Move

The following spring found us settling into our second urban home. It wasn’t a big move, four blocks, and I kept the same friends and the same paper route. I don’t even remember the U-Haul this time, but the transition was still remarkable: our townhome life was now squeezed into an apartment, with dinner smells in the hallways and yappy dogs behind neighbors’ doors. Dad’s station wagon was no longer the primary transportation; now it was a coupe: Mom’s no-frills Dodge Dart. We no longer had our own garbage cans: now it was a big dumpster a dozen yards down the sidewalk from our doors. We never had much of a yard to mow at the townhome, but now we were limited to garden pots on a 3 x 6 patio. It was what our mother could afford on nursing home wages.  Not that there was much to grumble about: my friends all lived in townhomes and duplexes, if not apartments, and we were hardly the only latchkey kids in the neighborhood. None of us lived very far away from the drainage ditch, and everything was still an adventure.