 |
| Pazar, Bursa, October 2011 |
I snapped this photo while we were wandering through Bursa with my friend Elçin, but I remembered it tonight while writing another email. Some while back, I had been flipping through another Elizabeth Bishop book (her
poems and
fish seem to be emerging as occasional themes) when I chanced across a poem I liked. I copied out a stanza and promptly forgot about until this morning:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
for ever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
The lines come, I think, from a poem called "At the Fishhouses." In any event, there's only a faint echo between the photo and the poem, but the latter reminded me of the former. The strange ways the mind plays 'telephone' with itself: A poem about water and knowledge brings to mind a fresh tray of
istavrit at the market in Bursa, some three weeks ago.
Comments