I'm going to Alaska! I signed up last July never believing that I would actually go! I have a couple of paddling excursions planned including one to Mendenhall Glacier with just 2 of us going! I am excited that I will get the views from the top of a ship and still get the wilderness experience of paddling. Hope that I will be able to paint a couple of large paintings from my sketches. This was painted from a lo-res image off a web travel site, but gives me a flavor of what I will see soon! This is Tracy Arm fjord near Juneau.
This will be a great trip!
ReplyDeleteBtw, today I came across a poem I saved years ago and I thought of your en plein air style,of capturing light, and thought you might like it:
“Light, At Thirty-Two” by Michael Blumenthal from Days We Would Rather Know. © Pleasure Boat Studio.
Light, At Thirty-Two
It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:
How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn’t she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.
And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.
And now, I’d like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
this morning when we woke—God,
it was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As that first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.
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ReplyDeleteYou are welcome to comment with any favorite poetry! Thank you, it is beautiful!
ReplyDeleteYour poem helped me to understand The Last Frontier. I have seen other mountain ranges, but never have I felt or experienced such scale or majesty as in Alaska. It was the presence of light and the physics of water vapor that creates the mystery of The Place. At least that how it is frequently described. I have photos, but they don't show the essence of The Place and it's Light. Yes, let there be Light!
ZFI
In that case, here's another one about light that I saw today. Since it deals with storms, it reminded me of a brief sketch I wrote last week after driving through the ominous but awesome weather.
ReplyDeleteOutscape
by Charles Wright
There's no way to describe how the light splays
after the storm, under the clouds
Still piled like Armageddon
Back to the west, the northwest,
intent on incursion.
There's no way to picture it,
though others have often tried to.
Here in the mountains it's like a ricochet from a sea surge,
Meadow grass moving like sea stalks
in the depths of its brilliance.
"Outscape" by Charles Wright, from Sestets. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Night Writer: Running With the Storm -
I’m cruising west on the two-lane County Road 50 heading out of Miesville and making for Hwy. 52. When I had stepped out of King’s Place moment’s before the northern and western skies were luminous despite it being after 9:00 p.m. To the east and south, however, lay Mordor with lines of lightning crackling non-stop between walls of bruised eggplant. I had turned toward the light instead.
Now, ahead of me, the sky is a dingy parfait of blue and pink with gray-brown clouds striated across like a relief-map of the Hebrides archipelago. Appropriately, George Mauer’s “Running With the Storm” shuffles up on the stereo and the piano pounds as rain-drops start to gravel on my rear window. Looking to my right the dark green farm fields hold houses, barns, silos and electrical towers that all seem to glow from within. To my left, the sky looks like an overturned basket of eggs. Still ahead of me, the glowing sky is smaller but even in the face of the inevitable it is not going down without a fight. Not tonight.