My Wheel Barrow of Time

                                     
                                                             It has been said:

                                                            "so much depends
                                                              upon
                                                             a red wheel
                   
                                                             barrow
                   
                                                             glazed with rain
                   
                                                             water
                                                             beside the white
                   
                                                             chickens."
                                                                              - William Carlos Williams

           "For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers,
but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three                  removes, when we know least about it."   - Emerson, 1844, "The Poet"


                                                          In my wheel barrow
                                                          of time - the compost
                                                          of past and future.

                                                          In the longest night -
                                                                    the end of the world
                                                                    the beginning of the world.

                                                         In this night
                                                                   we who live by fire
                                                                   we who live by dreams -
                                                         in this light
                                                        we are all but mirrors.

                                                        © Laurence Holden, 2012

Fall falls

This is my 67th year. Fall fell with solemnity. The light dimmed. It’s spectrum shifted from viridians, cadmiums soaked in pthalos toward umbers and manganese violets soaked in ultramarines.

I live in a great forest that reaches across the upper fifth of my state of Georgia in the Southern Appalachians of the U.S. The trees have given up their tremendous harvest of hope in fallen nuts and leaves, the leaves blazing just before their descent. In this, an end and a beginning are folded in one another’s hands. I suspect they probably always are in life. It is a hard truth which I never seem prepared to fully accept.

I walk to the river nearby, over and over again, in all the seasons, to see this plainly there in front of me, this truth about this joining of beginnings and ends, and to ask over and over again - just how this can be?

I often return with poems to sing, but always the question too, raw and abiding. Sometimes I abandon my clothes and immerse myself in the river to feel what it’s like to be part of it. But I always climb out, it’s surface behind me mirroring and recalling my shape, without ever managing to leave that question behind in the water- how is it that beginnings and ends are enfolded one in another? And then the greater, nagging question: what does this mean?


I ask my oil paints this same question too. Like a river it flows, yet stays and says: this is presence. What does it mean?

                                                   "Summer Trees, Morning Rain," 2012, o/c

                                           
                                             SUMMER TREES, MORNING RAIN

                                                                Summer trees,
                                                                morning rain.

                                                               Beside the river

                                                               all that is
                                                              goes this way.


In this 67th fall, I am closer to my beginning and my end then ever.  I’m often afraid that time is a river that runs only one way - to its end. But this is not what the river says. It runs, but never abandons its beginning - it merely stretches. and in its tremendous elasticity creates and affirms it’s enduring presence. This is difficult to grasp. Our lives are so ephemeral, so soaked in transience. But perhaps it’s not just us - perhaps everything is this way - it’s just the way Creation works. All our names are writ on water. We all follow, inextricably, undeniably, from noun to verb.

So I converse with the river, with its song, with the song I sometimes take away with me, with the paint., and with the words. It’s all a great language, echoing. Everything in the Universe echoes - language is filled with water, water is filled with language.

Two of My poems appear in the winter issue of Written River

Written River Winter Issue

A RIVER OF WORDS & IMAGES

A new version of "A River of Words & Images:"  Poetry and Music by Laurence Holden/ Images by Honor Woodard - new music by me!