{"id":2984,"date":"2015-11-27T15:10:36","date_gmt":"2015-11-27T20:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2984"},"modified":"2015-11-27T15:16:48","modified_gmt":"2015-11-27T20:16:48","slug":"the-geese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2984","title":{"rendered":"The Geese"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source has brightened a lot of the last decade for me, opening doors into places and subjects I hadn’t known I wanted to learn about, and introducing me to stuff I’ve since realized I care deeply about. A case in point: an interview with Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn<\/a>, towards the end of which he reads an Elizabeth Bishop poem which is achingly reminiscent of the Nova Scotia I know. His lead-in is absolutely spot-on (“…what was it that just hit you, emotionally? where it was in the poem where that began, and was sustained?”)<\/p>\n

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\r\nPoem\r\n\r\nAbout the size of an old-style dollar bill,\r\nAmerican or Canadian,\r\nmostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays\r\n-this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)\r\nhas never earned any money in its life.\r\nUseless and free., it has spent seventy years\r\nas a minor family relic handed along collaterally to owners\r\nwho looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to.\r\n\r\nIt must be Nova Scotia; only there\r\ndoes one see abled wooden houses\r\npainted that awful shade of brown.\r\nThe other houses, the bits that show, are white.\r\nElm trees., low hills, a thin church steeple\r\n-that gray-blue wisp-or is it? In the foreground\r\na water meadow with some tiny cows,\r\ntwo brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;\r\ntwo minuscule white geese in the blue water,\r\nback-to-back,, feeding, and a slanting stick.\r\nUp closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,\r\nfresh-squiggled from the tube.\r\nThe air is fresh and cold; cold early spring\r\nclear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky\r\nbelow the steel-gray storm clouds.\r\n(They were the artist's specialty.)\r\nA specklike bird is flying to the left.\r\nOr is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?\r\n\r\nHeavens, I recognize the place, I know it!\r\nIt's behind-I can almost remember the farmer's name.\r\nHis barn backed on that meadow. There it is,\r\ntitanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,\r\nfilaments of brush-hairs, barely there,\r\nmust be the Presbyterian church.\r\nWould that be Miss Gillespie's house?\r\nThose particular geese and cows\r\nare naturally before my time.\r\n\r\nA sketch done in an hour, \"in one breath,\"\r\nonce taken from a trunk and handed over.\r\nWould you like this? I'll Probably never\r\nhave room to hang these things again.\r\nYour Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,\r\nhe'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother\r\nwhen he went back to England.\r\nYou know, he was quite famous, an R.A....\r\n\r\nI never knew him. We both knew this place,\r\napparently, this literal small backwater,\r\nlooked at it long enough to memorize it,\r\nour years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,\r\nor its memory is (it must have changed a lot).\r\nOur visions coincided-\"visions\" is\r\ntoo serious a word-our looks, two looks:\r\nart \"copying from life\" and life itself,\r\nlife and the memory of it so compressed\r\nthey've turned into each other. Which is which?\r\nLife and the memory of it cramped,\r\ndim, on a piece of Bristol board,\r\ndim, but how live, how touching in detail\r\n-the little that we get for free,\r\nthe little of our earthly trust. Not much.\r\nAbout the size of our abidance\r\nalong with theirs: the munching cows,\r\nthe iris, crisp and shivering, the water\r\nstill standing from spring freshets,\r\nthe yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 (source for the text: “Poem”<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source has brightened a lot of the last decade for me, opening doors into places and subjects I hadn’t known I wanted to learn about, and introducing me to stuff I’ve since realized I care deeply about. A case in point: an interview with Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn, towards the end of which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,14,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nova-scotia","category-pome","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2984"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2988,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions\/2988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}