Poetry x 3

Job is one of my two favorite books of the Bible. The book dishes out basic, though heavy and important questions in beautifully poetic language. The poetry is somewhat diminished in the version I'm reading right now, the New Living Translation, but what it lacks in linguistic esthetics it makes up for in plain dealing straight talk. Like this verse: "I would rather die of strangulation than go on and on like this. I hate my life. I do not want to go on living." And there it is. I like that Job wishes he had never been born, reminding me of Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. There have been times when I related to that, making Job one of the few biblical charaters who seems like a real person and not, well, a character.

The other night I was out walking after dark and I spooked some deer in a field. I stopped and listened to the whistling/blowing/snorting noise they make when they're alarmed or to warn other deer. As I listened to their hoofbeats thudding rythmically away, I could picture exactly how they looked in the darkness. The way they bound lightly and effortlessly, a smooth fluid rising and falling, like dolphins leaping over waves. The hoofbeats and whistling brought that picture to my mind like poetry. Auditory poetry, with sounds rather than words.

Speaking of poetry, I love Amy Lowell's "The Letter" which ironically expresses the limitations of words through...writing, of course.

Little cramped words scrawling all over
the paper
Like draggled fly's legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncertain window and the
bare floor

Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing
in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth,
virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart
against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.