"tell me, Bird, how soul inhabits the place of fire, / how soul dwells there in its trembling?"
— De la O, Marsha
Author
Date
December 12, 2016
Metaphor
"tell me, Bird, how soul inhabits the place of fire, / how soul dwells there in its trembling?"
Metaphor in Context
We are, Cézanne reminds me, an iridescent chaos. And perhaps he speaks
of the nature of light, or the coils in my mind, or
Hortense with her hair loosened, alone, Hortense implacable
in red, his family would not receive her, she bore his only son,
raised him living apart, desperate for funds, they judged her,
surface and depth, light on watered silk, how carefully she
composed her pain through all those hours, all those
portraits, twenty-nine of them, how marriage confounded
them both, confounds us,
every
marriage
spanning a ravine of time
down
at the crossroads where stream and light and stone are one
flame,
yes, fire ascendant in water, fire paramount,
water catamount,
puma water, plum-colored in its darker parts . . .
I hear somewhere close
that bird calling could-be, could-be--
tell me, Bird, how soul inhabits the place of fire,
how soul dwells there in its trembling?
of the nature of light, or the coils in my mind, or
Hortense with her hair loosened, alone, Hortense implacable
in red, his family would not receive her, she bore his only son,
raised him living apart, desperate for funds, they judged her,
surface and depth, light on watered silk, how carefully she
composed her pain through all those hours, all those
portraits, twenty-nine of them, how marriage confounded
them both, confounds us,
every
marriage
spanning a ravine of time
down
at the crossroads where stream and light and stone are one
flame,
yes, fire ascendant in water, fire paramount,
water catamount,
puma water, plum-colored in its darker parts . . .
I hear somewhere close
that bird calling could-be, could-be--
tell me, Bird, how soul inhabits the place of fire,
how soul dwells there in its trembling?
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Marsha De la O, "A Natural History of Light," The New Yorker (December 12, 2016). <Link to www.newyorker.com>
Date of Entry
12/08/2016
