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GRASS CLIPPINGS
(The extraordinary nice thing about this plateau of quiet is the sun shines as usual and the
smoke from previous grass clippings got around grave edges takes the usual wispy two
steps upwards to one back as on my nice day down on the flats. Up here tombstones of
language hold down sacred bones of bequeathed wit and word style. Some get out and
wander about with the land of the living and over there a couple of stone carvers carve
epitaphs for beer and talk pastime. Snatches of conversation drift about with the smoke
and here I’m tending simply to grass in the place. Idle grass clipping doings on such days
is steel, chlorophyl, sky, earth, dew and salts to the marrow and goes with poetic
brain-
body magic). How do you do.
A Celt and an Englishman the former forgetting the blood of the latter (could they
be Dylan Thomas and William Blake) discuss the magic of style in word imagery. The
latter carves words on a tombstone in a boneyard of english while the former dangles a
cigarette on his lower talking-lip right-hand-clutching his tankard of beer. Could Lye clip
grass ledges and mix manifold grass tips with wafted snatches of their conversation. Why
not to both queries.
For instance, is said the Joyce type of pure diffluent imagery is beautifully intactly
lifted right from spontaneous mind-level first thought classical fluorescence, less bones
than the gray matter irridation about it. No straight-jacketting into everyday workshop
grammar either. Snip, snip, snip, the words are faluting as milky way constellations in
flow of imagery. To the Blake its, "mitigated night custard", to the clipper its read in the
grass tips at the urn’s bottom, "interpolated litigation of archaic classics". To the Thomas
who wags the cigarette of his lips in rejoinder its "Liffey’s for gravey as BBC money’s for
jam". The grass cremator says into the urn "It’s more like the smell of my green grass
clippings growing freshly around the levitating hills and dales of old Dublin’s pubs’ doors,
the hills sitting down inside with dimensional Irish humanness, shine on harvest oil of hair
of peat pony and celtic heifer sweat of". Indeed.
In contrast to pure diffluent type first thought after-the-ball-game flow of classic
imagery is Stein’s dear Gertrude of plastic plonk and oak word bank scrubbed clean and
strata built pure Bach fugue stitched with buttons sewn in a big dutch of a room full of
daylight all beamed by church buttresses to put one of a ward in a word rose to revolve
around the top of a letterhead and book-root it not stationary but in a static image, no pot
for the mental root of it, but for the toe of the mind to find.
More like a lizard a grass clipper chews on his cud waiting for simple myth level of
chlorophyl while word-cutters in stone continue engrossed in their serifs. Dust of words
caught in their nostrils they stop to blow noses and chat and chip a bit. I spy the carved
name Rimbaud on stone and see the camembert of visual dry wine precipitating my
marrow by his youth in intense tang of feelings communed with as easily as clarity to the
haze of a hill’s base, the stark of a gallows arm, the dank of a woods in the mystery of
wandering alone in the romantic commune of Nature very. And why not? in Latin.
To fill a tankard and sharpen a chisel to continue the two come more drifts of their
skipping about the heaven of language in rocks. The grass blade man cremates a few
more grass tips a contented pariah without western culture in Greek or ivy but
appreciative so far as it goes with the chemicals of his own cremations. He hears the
splash of Gerard Manley Hopkins getting out of his window over the hill to strew his
alphabetical stones along the banks of his monastery vista’s garden stream to make words
to be seen as from a Roman-wise reclining elbow on a surplice, not of silk but of linen, to
look down and read them on the bottom, sharp crystal clear words smoothed by spring
water, some put in place by trout’s nosings.
Into the vast boneyard of tombstones to all men of imagery, unable to read a single
epitaph, wanders the greatest troutnoser of all, it’s an Australian Aboriginal. What’s he
want? It appears to Lye and his tsetse fly tied to a string the Abo wishes to wander to
learn the bones of his own saying in keeping with the words on stone henges. For, as Lye
with his fly lets it go a little and pulls it back a little, he hears him say, "WHAT IS IT
ROAD FOR ME HERE THEY ARE STANDING UP HILLS". At all of which Lye stops
fly casting and cremating his readings to ostensibly roll a cigarette but really wondering
why the beauty and stone-blind strength of such aboriginal word-imagery, mentally
necklacing the mind’s ideas of walkings, are left out of the reckoning of epitaph carvers?
Too many stained windows, too much albumen?
"I beg your pardon", said this grass prospector, saying, locking a dictionary on its
two lexicographical legs straight in the binding of it’s A-Z-ing, "Listen dear Bookhead,
one glance at your one standard of meanings and on reckons our civilization like yours and
mine has gnawed at those big white bones of classic calcium quite long enough sucking up
lime for our quills lo, and its ponderous bulk of domed learning". "Continue at once", said
Bookhead. "K.O." said my tsetse fly. "Thou great smug brittle-boned …." "Lye, did you
or your tsetse say that?" "I have no hair on my head and the fly with his hairy legs said it,
so I’ll let him go again, and maybe pull it back too." "As one bookhead to a green-grass
snipper, I’d rather tape the world of the senses in strict awake logic than risk sleeping
sickness, said the Dictionary. "OK", said I, "And you’re part of walking sticks for the
bone in from-the-bone to-the-bone process. But, Sir, you’re not the myth of the land nor
the gleam in the elements. No, you’re the one who gives us the wide-a-wake sickness."
Bookhead snapped "Shut", embalm-pressing the tsetse, and wandered off to check all
epitaphs for a ready reckoning of who’s who. Names were his unbidding.
I stand to all names but respect more the deep freedom of imagery and all those
wonders of individual expression in all cells of our hopes for plumbing the vastness of
individuality – Absolute in aspects of all experience. In the Abo and the Islander of Seas,
the Spanish and African caves. Carved on veldt rocks I see between the lexicographical
legs of taped knowledge some deeper wisdom notched into our power to comprehend
beyond epitaphs which only echo the grave of social sects in evolution. All man is all man
from intuition to knowledge and back via his aesthetics. I would stand like a stonehenge
and say looking between my eyes, "WHAT IS IT ROAD FOR US HERE ARE
STANDING UP ALL HILLS MY LUSH PLAINS OF GRASS, HAY TO ALL
MY CREMATIONS."
© Len Lye
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