Thanks for the read and comments. Columbian seems to offer more than
yourself a problem. How do you understand the phrase 'Pre-Columbian Art '?
Not being funny but I understand the word better in this context than I
would were it referring to the country. It's amazing how words carry with
them connotations, many of the connotations are universally acceptable and
can be relied upon in poetry to carry those connotations with them and it is
part of the art to use the connotations without pointing them out, I
suppose. But some words carry personal connotations that a poet cannot cater
for since he cannot know that they exist. There is of course the case where
the poet's own personal connotations are at variance from the universal and
problems lie there.
I'm glad you found 'umber'. Did you not have a paintbox as a child that had
such wonderful names for the colours like Viridian, Prussian Blue, Scarlet
Lake, Vermillion, Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Cobalt blue, Chinese white, it used
to read like a poem to me when I was a child. God knows the name for that
dreadful colour that emerged when all the colours mixed together. Khaki??
Duck shit?? Who knows. It always puzzled me as a child, 12-13, being told in
Physics that white light was made up of all the other colours but it didn't
work that way in my paint box!! Regards Arthur.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Colin dewar" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2003 9:27 PM
Subject: Re: New sub: The Rock ( A haibun) Rewrite


Arthur,

It starts off well and gets better if you ask me. I like the interior world
of the stone towards the end. It's like the Tardis (on Dr. Who). Then "Pale
in the day sky the moon drops into the sea" reminds me of the scope of the
exterior world in which  the stone and the watcher have their existence.

However "Columbian" immediately makes me think of the Columbian mamoth or
the Columbian something else rather than an exploratory voyage. It wouldn't
require anything radical to conjure up an image of the New World. Isn't
there a Keats poem. "....stout Cortez and all his men.......silent upon a
peak in Darien" ?
Is it "On first Looking into Chapman's Homer"? Maybe you could rifle through
it and jump to an alternative connection to "Columbian" as it too describes
the wonder of a new world. Or you could just say something like ..."like
Columbus".

The last line of the poem is the weakest IMHO. Doesn't quite capture the
gradual changes of dusk or if it is meant to capture a revelation it stands
too much on it's own, apart from the moon or stone that gave rise to it.

I've just checked "umber" in my dictionary and it's a real word.

Thanks for the read.


Colin


----- Original Message -----
From: "arthur seeley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2003 8:46 AM
Subject: New sub: The Rock ( A haibun) Rewrite


The Rock ( A haibun)

        The road glitters in the Cretan sun, above it mirages quiver and
shimmy. A path forks off  to dip through the gloomy underpass, from there it
trails through back ways towards Stavromenos of the white church and the
dusty supermarket.

Beyond the reach of bees
a wilt of dying flowers.
Hum of passing traffic.

            I step from cool shade into the hammering sun to stand upon the
anvil of old roads, stopped by heaps of debris. Away from the main road the
silence is intense,
the air rich with the soil’s vapours.

The church tower looms
through a stand of tall pines.
Ants debate bone or seed.

           Men have left this heaped rubble, scooped from the earth to leave
a drain that guides winter storms and spring's swift melt seawards. The sun
pins me in the dust that rises like smoke where I walk. The road  bends then
stops at the edge of the drain, a litter of rocks. I teeter a path where
there is no path.

White dust coats all;
leg, arm and thistle leaf.
Flicker of a passing swallow.

  The shadow of an old woman, black as a beetle, turns at the corner of her
house and scuttles into the shade of lemon trees and vines. A tethered goat,
one horn shattered ragged, dances on small feet, bleats and butts at my
intrusion into the lull of his day. Cicadas stir, call cave on my shadow
from the dry grasses of the verge.
This is not the time to be out. Locals sprawl and sweat in sleep or potter
under lemon trees, closeted in shade or flutters of cool.
I am a mad dog, loitering to savour the stink of old goat, listening to the
choir in the grass, under a noonday sun.

My eyes weep in the reek
of smoking rubbish.
The mountains bulk behind.

            One rock in all that rock; a thin line of fracture. It is no
bigger than my head and round as a fruit.  Its rough skin pocked by its
descent down the centuries. I part it as I would a cut melon.
          First light floods to illuminate dazzling striations, set there by
ancient silts, laid down by the run of lost rivers and the sift of forgotten
seas, brought here from a time before Minoan myth and legends of Santorini;
sudden as  lightning, thrilling as untrodden snow.

The goat’s bell chimes flat
 as he shakes his beard.
A fly tells beads of my  sweat


           I view, from my Colombian mast, a new world of gold and purple
lands, whorls of ochre and lilac, painted deserts and umber prairies, open
like an unread book in my hands.

Pale in the day sky
the moon drops into the sea.
A curtain flutters and falls back.