Reflective Study Of Howard Nemerov's Blue Swallows

Across the millstream below the bridge
    from where I work and where we cross
Seven blue swallows divide the air
    into big patterns all their own
In shapes invisible and evanescent,
    as if to thwart the witnessing:
  Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s
    imaginative stagnancies
Or memory’s power to keep them there
    but there they are.

“History is where tensions were,”
    giving stages to society, and
“Form is the diagram of forces,”
    seeing patterns in biology:
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge,
    between birth and forgetfulness
While gazing down upon those birds—
    having the time and taking it
How strange, to be above the birds!—
    to end up here, so out of place!
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain
    wanting to make some sense of it
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web
    trying to trace the winds of waves
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs
    in nature, begging imitation,
Dipped in invisible ink, writing . . .
    an ever-changing rhyme.

Poor mind, what would you have them write?
    Poor poet, sticking out your chest,
Some cabalistic history
    of old traditions being reclaimed
Whose authorship you might ascribe
    to fit your backward preference
To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost,
    leading the living to their unrest,
You’ve capitalized your Self enough
    and overscored the trinity.
That villainous William of Occam
    trimming off inelegance
Cut out the feet from under that dream
    in search of more simplicity
Some seven centuries ago
    out of the dust of time.

It’s taken that long for the mind
    collectively, immortally
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see
    beyond its unreality
With opened eyes emptied of speech
    and turned to continuity,
The real world where the spelling mind
    in a state of higher consciousness
Imposes with its grammar book
    of meaning being read into
Unreal relations on the blue
    brushstrokes over stream and sky,
Swallows. Perhaps when you will have
    time to gaze awhile,

Fully awakened, I shall show you
    what you have not seen before,
A new thing: even the water
    sharing colors with the sky
Flowing away beneath those birds
    dancing above the moving stream
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
    can't capture what they seem to be
And the eyes that see become as stones
    bewildered in the river bed
Whence never tears shall fall gain
    nor add life to the stream.

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
    O sister, brothers, water is not
The point. Finding again the world,
    the point.  Watching it flow, that
That is the point, where loveliness
    is the point, and celebrating
Adorns intelligible things
    truth at every shore...
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.
    to become the fire.