Blue Atlantis

FINDING ATLANTIS

April 21

Edgar Cayce would lay down
And fall into a deep trance,
Singing without sight the depths
Of all we know and don’t.

He could read a book just by
Laying on it, he could read
The springs of oil and disease,
He could read without knowledge

The rise and fall of nations
To come & re-read our histories
As they were, not seem. His voice
Told of Atlantis & its farthest reach

Which sank entire in the sea.
I wonder if his talent was in
Dipping a dark wilds cable
Down that sea into the mind

Of a lost tribe’s future history,
Singing of its blue eternity.





From Yves Bonnefoy’s poem “Let This World Endure,” transl. transl. Hoyt Rogers:

III.

Let this world endure,
Let absence and word
Fuse forever
In single things.

Let word be to absence
As color is to shadow,
Gold or ripe fruit
To gold or dry leaves:

Not parting until death
Like a snowflake on a hand --
The water vanishes,
So does the gleam.

IV.

Let so pure a presence
Never cease
Like sky that fades
From water as it dries.

Let this word remain
As it is tonight:
Let others, beyond ourselves,
Partake of the endless fruit.

Let this world endure,
Let the shining dust of summer eve
For ever enter
The empty room,

And the water of an hour’s rain
Stream forever
In the light
Along the path.

VI.

Drink, she said,
Bending over him,
As he wept full of trust
After his fall.

Drink, and let your hand
Open my red dress,
Your mouth consent
To its good fever.

The heart that burned you
Has almost drained away.
Drink of this water, which is
The mind that dreams ...




To the human senses, the most obvious patterning of the surface waters is indicated by color. The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness, the greern water of the coastal areas, with all its varying hues, is the color of life. The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflecteed back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays downward into the water and back to our eyes, all the red rays and most of the yellow have been absorbed, so it is chiefly the cool, blue light that we see.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us




BLUE IN BLUE

April 21


I fell asleep in my first love’s
Arms & dreamed I was
Drifting far at sea, through velds
Of brilliant blue. The sun

Brocaded the surface of my float
With dancing eyes so gold
I swooned, entranced, serene,
Scattered, drifting home at last.

Such blue was a new sky’s depth,
A new sea’s vault in heaven, my
Body wrapped in hers asleep
Beyond all surf and flesh for

All eternity and forever
Here and now. In that hour
After coming hard in her
I fell down in a sacred deep,

Baptized in the heart’s third blue:
A soak I’ll never sing or love but do.