Anodyne
Friday, February 03, 2006
 

Fairfield Porter, View of the Islands, Maine, 1975

Deep seasonal depression, unleavened by Yesterdays New Quintet or New Topographics.

A lot of 60s magazines in today, including Locus Solus 1, featuring Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Ashberry, Frank O'Hara, Robin Blaser & etc. Also four poems by Fairfield Porter, extraordinarily talented realist painter and occasional art critic, including this one, which I reproduce for the weird little shiver of recognition it prompted in me as I read, like weak spring sun:

The Mountain
By Fairfield Porter

Here is a mountain I am unable to encompass
Except after many deliberate days in the sun
That keeps constantly burning through the cold air.

Along the slanting edge of a massive shoulder
Grow myriads of short flowers springing
From the wet earth soaked with melting snow.

Above the airy sparse woods, pouring
Between the tree trunks with still coldness,
Like the sudden shock of a mountain pool,

I circle with care to the higher meadow slopes
Through breathless shadows under the final rocks
Uncovered below the unprotected sun,

Until over the snow at last on the rocky summit
I survey across the blue and sunny valleys
Filled with giant slowly penetrable forests

The distant peaks I have not yet walked over
Countless and all different from each other
Projecting and broken in the transparent sun.
- posted by cjb @ 9:43 PM


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