"August, Departing" -- a poem by Gillian Prew

Here’s the stain,
heaved out
and an orchard of clouds
sleeping. The crows flee
warm fugitives
on August’s blunt edge. I see
a distant coldness,
the skirt of the sun shirking.
The tide is loud with the drowned
and the windy chains of gulls.
The air smells of salty bone
and the womb forgetting.
By the rotting light I breathe,
counting the pretty darknesses.

Copyright © Gillian Prew

I pasted her poem in without asking permission. 

Here's Gillian's blog page for the poem: Gillian Prew.

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Most mornings, I wake up and think I know what's what, when it comes to aesthetic stuff. I even think my opinions vibrate with some kind of unstoppable truth. That's basically ridiculous. Because other mornings I wake up and realize my opinions carry no more weight than anyone else's. After all, I'm no famous poet or whatnot. If a publisher ever accepted one of my poems, the laws of physics would most likely disintegrate, with volcanoes spewing a trillion poisonous and berserk frogs. 

So in my more sober state of perception, I realize that my opinions about poems are merely expressions of how I relate to being in the world. No one else should care that much about what I have to say. If I'm convinced that poems should resonate with a spiritual and aesthetic kinship to poems by the masters, then that is just my isolated and peculiar opinion. Others will feel just as strongly about and give their allegiance to other poems, things that cause injury or illness to my soul.

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Maybe a year or longer ago, I stumbled across a few poems by Prew. I was stopped in my tracks. Here was something unusual -- poems that are intellectually and emotionally coherent; poems that actually say something worth experiencing; poems that are written with a sensitive aesthetic touch. I can't quite verbalize the effect those poems had on me. I suppose it's like hearing a piece of music that has a deep, eccentric resonance with something in yourself, maybe like the echo of a half-forgotten dream.

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August, Departing

The first thing that jumps out at me is the cadence and the way the line breaks contribute to the masterful rhythm. What a mystery it is how cadence can lend an implicit meaning to image, sentiment, and evocation! Then...

and an orchard of clouds
sleeping. The crows flee

Soon after the opening, we (or I) are smoothly transported to a moment of unusual vision and to the realm of aesthetic mood. It's amazing to me how phrases composed of simple words can, in the hands of a rare poet, effect in the reader an opening onto new space, a realm or moment of surreal texture woven into wan beauty.

a distant coldness,
the skirt of the sun shirking. 

The season is changing. But the poet stands in the altering air with a perennial grief and a continuum of being. The word "departing" in the title is instructive. It carries over into the lines a coloration of and a clue to the hidden spirit of nature. How it is a great and latent coffin always opening to receive the departed and our cooling sense of normality (shadows deepening as time's parade of substance and wing becomes ever more funerary and strange). The image of the sun effectively reveals a quality of weariness behind the hysteria of physical law and phenomenal efflorescence.

The air smells of salty bone
and the womb forgetting.

Water is symbol and riddle, I think it's safe to say. And the sea, viewed or literary, can bring with its waves a tang of the future as well as an intuition about the nature of nostalgia. Is it "womb forgetting," with the womb having forgotten something, or is it a complex unitary phrase -- "womb-forgetting," as a lamentation about and toward the poet's (and our) primal amnesia? 

The poem concludes in a condition of limbo, an equipoise in which one might consider the aesthetics of shadow and the exquisite tones of ennui.

By the way, "windy chain of gulls" is astonishing and brilliant.