Anne Kellas #2 - The pond, moonlight (responding to a line in Nathan Curnow's 'Versing')

The pond, moonlight

(responding to a line in Nathan Curnow's 'Versing':
Once I helped a kid who said ‘all music is music’
 https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/nathan-curnow-1-versing.html

Once I helped a poet who said all words were just words.
The first time she said that, I smiled.
She was a new poet. I was old.
The next time she said it, I stared her down
like a child arguing. No they’re not.

But she came back at me with a backhand,
slammed the ball so fast I did not see it coming.
Zen koan.
Why are you so sensitive about your words they’re just words
she snapped.

And then she said my words made no sense
and pointed out the lacunae I had left open,
like the space between one stanza and another
where a cloud had been.
Dammit it’s true I had been imagining a cloud,

thin, whispy. It had gone.
The words left in my poem sat on the page.
They knew their place,
their status
in an old game. Prayer or prophesy.

Sense, she said.
It makes no sense, 
that last line. There’s no logic.
Logic, realism? I argued,  It’s a poem!
I’m an abstract poet I added,

And you’re an artist, I said,
imagining her watercolour palettes
sticky with colour. I'm a surrealist. 
You ... me ... But nothing rubbed off.
The cloud was there between us.

Blooming words. And what of the strong poet
I thought later, for whom the words of others
are not just words,
but worlds looked into.
A deep mirror

like the pond at midnight.
where the past
is.
See, there it stands,
patient as black trees

silent, still
in a very old photograph.
The pond, the moon, midnight.
In exact order.
No cloud.

http://100photos.time.com/photos/edward-steichen-moonlight-pond