Stoned Glyph

You pay careful attention and are rewarded. “No comment” in Discovery Passages by Garry Thomas Morse rings the changes on elements such as the tiny word “gives” — all drawn from Indian Agent reports and petitions to practice ancient ways of potlach. And then later in the book one comes across a poem entitled “Petroglyph” and it seems a simple variation on three words aligned in a 3 x 2 grid.

  hard
love
  live

But if you look closely, you will see that the justification varies. And so the stone writing is not on stone but more like pebbles laid out on the beach and open to the next wave, washing all away and reminding that the layout requires song to continue on and utter the word “live” with a long or a short “i” and make choices as subtle as the shifts in the indentations of the lines. Taken in at a glance 3 X 2 and entranced. Given to the giving.

In case you are having some difficulty in visualing the complete poem, consider how the schema was generated. (Imagine if you will the simple procedure: produce a list of words, generate the various combinations, layout the result. Of course, the layout of the combinations involves further generations and choices.) I have taken to quote the poem in full. However, it is best viewed in in its published context: all on the right page facing a picture of a petroglyph from Quadra Island, British Columbia.

As in all good poems, form is only a pretext. And what Morse succeeds in doing is not only to focus on the words but also their relations. It’s a gift.

And so for day 985
24.08.2009