Rain Light 24 Stars

synchronicities in a day's reading:

I started this morning reading the poet and critic Bill Berkson's portrait of the poet and critic Edwin Denby (two of my favorite poets.) One of the things that struck me in the portrait was that Edwin Denby spent the end of his life obsessively reading Dante's Paradiso. So I started reading it, James Cotter's translation given to my by Dr. Cotter himself this past Easter. 

Later I listened to a New Yorker podcast about W.S. Merwin's poem in the New Yorker, Rain Light.

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning.

Then, a little later after that, I read Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale." In the tale the crone who gives the knight the answer to what most pleases women is surrounded by 24 dancing women. The dancing women disappear as the knight draws near, leaving the crone alone.

Finally, at the end of the day I went back to reading Paradiso, and there were both Merwin and Chaucer, brought into relief in intriguing ways. 

First with the Rain Light. In his intro to Paradiso James Cotter writes, "the single radiance of God pours down through the nine spheres like luminescent rain." Rain light.

Then, a little later Cotter writes, of Canto XIII, "With these twenty-four stars spinning in two circles, we may try to picture the two rings of twelve dancers rotating one within the other's circle and in opposite direcitons." And this became Chaucer's twenty four dancers. And who knows, maybe Chaucer was even thinking of Dante's dancing stars when he wrote of these mysterious women. Probably not, but it comes together now in my mind at any rate.

It all becomes a poem of sorts, something like,

Edwin Denby loved neon lit up in the daytime

and W.S. Merwin was watched by invisible stars all day.

Denby spent his last days with Dante's Paradiso, bathing in the luminescent rain, 

while Merwin wrote of the rain light following his mother. 

Chaucer's wise crone was surrounded by 24 dancing women.

Dante's paradise introduced by 24 dancing stars. 

Dancing stars and rain light fill my days,

before the washed colors of the afterlife.