Hi Doug
> Fascinating as a series of (almost scientific) observations, Lawrence.
Once when I was having an eye test an opthalmologist (i just got a
spelling error sign but you know what I mean) had asked me to describe
what I could see and then, after my answers, remarked that he couldn't
work out what branch of experimental science I am in but clearly that is
my profession; and was most confused when I said whatever it was I said --
can't remember when it was and so how I was earning my crust
I have long had a desire to try to see what is really there -- Alice and
the King who has difficult seeing what is there and is impressed that she
sees nothing comes irrelevantly to mind
> There's an observer, obviously, implied here, in a way that's not always
> so clear in many of the others.
I quite like hiding herhim in a cloak of verbal invisibility
now and then
> So I see the reason for one observation after another, but, perhaps just
> given my sense of writing speed?) I'm not sure if some editing down isnt
> possible, 'is being' & maybe some of he 'to be' phrases, letting them be
> implied instead of stated?
I really doubt it -- that it is possible -- but I shall think about it
letting precise tense be implicit tends to let it be received as flaccid
i just had a look at _is being_ and by all that's non-existent that's what
I meant!
but i shall and must think on that
the accumulation makes for repetition which isn't in the separate
originals; and that is a problem...
as the bomb said in Dark Star, I shall think about this
best
L
>
> Re-read, it certainly moves our senses through a series of comprehensions
> of all that is happening, fast & slow, there....
>
> Doug
> On 2011-10-13, at 3:38 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
>
>> It is low tide, perhaps approaching turn.
>> A light wind from the south-west Beaufort 2
>> at the most. In the anchorage, water seems calm,
>> almost, though one knows examination would discover movement. Three birds
>> squabble about something one has found in wet sand. Turnstones, perhaps.
>> Possibly plovers.
>> The world
>> from here on is being stripped to bare stones, soaked twice and much of
>> the day; the bleached white; and the brown or golden, like corms out of
>> soil. These types intermix; the first two tangled in weed.
>> Orange lichen thrives intermittently.
>>
>>
>> Ghosts of former land show themselves off well.
>> Burnt Island. The predatory solitary rocks
>> part submerged would once have been low hills when sea was lower. Bits
>> stand ungainly where they shall soon be pushed to fall, breaking
>> possibly, soaked and dried, heated and cooled, becoming sand in
>> centuries. And it is so It makes us.
>> A sparrow sand-bathes
>> energetically in bare looseness left by a path worn through a falling
>> hedge. Herring gulls eat close to the rough shore line
>> and then back away shaking their heads in sets of shaking, over and over.
>> A black-backed gull
>> preens itself in blue water. And small birds
>> wait upon walls in sight of yellowed grass where, until recently, there
>> was a tent. The rain in the last hour may bring up much
>> that can be eaten. A song thrush jazzes
>> the afternoon from a low roof. Behind, in the field hedges and a small
>> woods, great complexity of song. Ahead, growing sounds as wind and tidal
>> flow begin to rise. The sun is at its height
>> and must soon fall, all its heat declining. Two birds hard to identify
>> against the solar flare acrobat in what may well presage reproductive
>> attachment.
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10
> .html
>
>
> Why poetry? And why not, I asked,
> my right brain humming sedition.
>
> Phyllis Webb
>
>
>
>
>
-----
UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
----
Lawrence Upton
Dept of Music
Goldsmiths, University of London
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