Sunrise and Sunset
At the beginning of the pandemic I started a relatively short-lived project wherein I stood on a chair in my kitchen and photographed what was on my kitchen table each morning, some flowers, my breakfast, maybe a book. The light was spring light, and it was effervescent. We knew and we didn’t know what might follow. The light was new and bright and hopeful even if filled with dread and panic. But it was a new dread and panic then.
This project grounded me, and helped me anchor my days, when everything was unmoored, the library was closed, and we were hard core self-isolating.
These days what grounds me is attending to the sunrise and sunset. Mainly, I’m photographing the sunrise from my back porch, but aspire to be somewhere to shoot the sunset. This rarely happens, but still, I observe it. If I’m home I can see it through the trees, peeking through various suburban houses. If I’m at work, there is usually a pretty spectacular view, even if I’m not able to photograph it.
These days, I’m thinking a lot about civil twilight. (I feel like it’s good to know your twilight terms, and to know the when and how long of each, especially as a photographer, but also just as an observer of our everyday sky). Today in Edmonton for example:
Civil Twilight from 7:49 am-8:31 am in the morning.
Civil Twilight from 4:16 pm-4:58 pm in the evening.
According to Time and Date:
The length of twilight depends on latitude. Equatorial and tropical regions tend to have shorter twilights than locations on higher latitudes.
During summer months at higher latitudes, there may be no distinction between astronomical twilight after sunset and astronomical twilight before sunrise. This happens when the angle the Sun makes with the horizon – also known as the Solar Elevation Angle – is less than 18 degrees during the local midnight.
Similarly, higher latitudes may experience an extended period of nautical twilight – if the Sun remains less than 12 degrees below the horizon throughout the night.
At latitude 53, in Edmonton, civil twilight is quite lovely these days.
You might know the song Civil Twilight from The Weakerthans?
I’ve blogged before about “the great work of sunrise” by Thomas Merton and it’s something I think about a lot. There’s also a line by Charles Wright about how we can count on the fact that the sun rises and the sun sets. “Most everything else is up for grabs.”
So this led me to write this poem composed almost entirely, not quite but almost, of other poets’ great lines and thoughts. I posted it on social media with that disclaimer, too, but I still felt like I should footnote it because not everyone can have read everything, and though a lot might sound familiar, even the most diehard poetry fans might wonder where this or that came from. Though at the same time, I also hope it just doesn’t matter. So. Here is the poem, and below I’ll run through some of the thefts/borrowings/allusions/homages, etc.
The title comes from the Galway Kinnell quotation: "The secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.” Julia Hartwig wrote about poems performing miracles. Adam Zagajewski wrote about praising the mutilated world, Joy Harjo about praising the rain, and Elizabeth Alexander about walking forward in that light. The wild patience belongs to Adrienne Rich. Being astonished by an apple is from the artist Cezanne who said, “I will astonish Paris with an apple.”
“Make of yourself a light,” was the last instruction of the Buddha. Mary Oliver references that in a poem, too, and of course the wild and precious life is hers. Richard Wagamese said, “I am not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I'm here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times.”
A lot of people have addressed poems to Nobody, but Merton did and so did Dickinson. The sows and self-blessings are from Galway Kinnell, again.
The condensery is from one of my all time favourite poems, by Lorine Niedecker, “Poet’s Work.”
I’ve lost the reference to “a stone is a stone.” At least I think it’s a reference? It’s in my head as someone else’s. So probably it is. But there are a lot of stone poems. Simic’s. Janet Simon’s. etc.
We dwell in possibility, a famous line by Emily Dickinson, as is hope is the thing with feathers.
“Everything is Going to Be All Right” is by Derek Mahon. I’d included it in a previous post on giving thanks.
Adam Zagajewski said that it’s not time we lack, but concentration.
Seamus Heaney said, if we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.
In the last stanza there’s a bit of a reference to Zagajewski poem titled “Poets Photographed.” It goes:
Poets photographed
but never when
they truly see,
poets phographed
against a backdrop of books,
but never in darkness
never in silence,
at night, in uncertainty,
when they hesitate………etc.
Poets have always been possible. But sometimes it feels like the opposite of that. And yet there are all these lines in our heads which echo and resound, that rise up and settle down inside us. That’s really all I wanted to convey. We have more poetry in us than we sometimes think we do. We are indebted to all those we have read, the traces of all the poetry and poets who have influenced us and ravished us and taken us out of ourselves and made us think and feel and who have astonished us, and yet, there is no debt.
December 4, 2020
