a small alba

white the moon
white the wine

white the light
white the leaf

white the rock
white the bark

white the stone
white the dawn

*

pond
the pond
old pond
old-pond
an old pond
the old pond
ancient pond
an ancient pond
the ancient pond
ageing pond
a lonely pond
the quiet pond
frog pond

This not-so-small alba draws on a poetic genre that originated in Provence with the troubadours. The word “alba” in Occitan means “dawn”: the poetic alba is a dawn-song.

Typically, it voices the regret of lovers who must untangle after the night’s pleasures and separate. Sunrise also initiates the dull or possibly dangerous business of the day, as in Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet coaxes Romeo to stay with her by a sweetly obvious subterfuge pretending: “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day: / It was the nightingale and not the lark, / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.” The traditional alba, too, sometimes takes the form of a dialogue, which may be shared between the lovers, or by the speaker and the watchman who has roused them. That dialogic element may be reflected in Harry Gilonis’s diptych.

Crisp, lit, physical presence commands the first, eight-line poem. The second, 13 lines evoking Bashō’s most famous three, experiments with the frog pond from different grammatical, visual and potentially philosophical angles.

The first poem is also a set of variations on a word etymologically connected with “alba”: albus, the Latin for “white”. This is a deft and beautifully unifying connection, verbal and visual. The images ride in on para-rhyming couplets that suggest parity beneath the white light of the moon and the peri-sunrise. We barely glimpse the lovers: if they are present, they’re surely, by implication, joined as equals to each other and as equals to the nature beyond human nature.

The poem’s anaphoric structure creates emphasis on the adjective. Monosyllabic plainness, vowels and consonants chording distantly but harmoniously and a sentence-patterning of adjective/definite article/noun, are devices that convey the reader into an older, oral culture. There’s both a Celtic and an oriental quality to the writing. (Wine and the moon were favourite aids to inspiration among the classical Chinese poets.) Carnal associations – white wine but also white flesh – may faintly hover.

This white wine is the one element which is made rather than found. It’s essential in evoking, very delicately, the disinhibition that may herald love-making, or perhaps simply the pleasure of drinking sociably with a friend who will be staying over in the spare room. The moon’s light reconciles the whole time frame, the passage from night to dawn, with the staples of the northern landscape: leaf, rock, bark, stone.

You could imagine two speakers chanting the first poem, a line in turn. Such a duet could work for the second poem, too. But neither is quite convincing. The alternative would be to read the second poem as an answer to the first. If so, it’s an oblique sort of answer: the speaker at this juncture almost seems to turn away from his addressee.

It’s as if a single voice were composing the second poem aloud, trying the pond of language from different angles before it dives. Enclosed in the meditation, the reader slows down, registering line by line the tiny, nuanced differences an adjective or an article can produce. It’s a technique that provokes many questions: how, for example, does “old pond” differ from “old-pond” and how does the latter differ from “an old pond”? Slowly, as the accumulation of self-correction intensifies, an understanding dawns.

In Bashō’s original haiku, the isolation of the frog in springtime was significant. He seemed old like the pond: unmated, he plunged alone into its water, to enjoy a quiet swim in the dusk of his life-cycle.

Gilonis adds the adjectives “ageing”, “lonely” and “quiet” to the pond rather than the frog, nonetheless developing themes of time and loss. The pond is already ancient, and it is in the process of becoming still more so. The final utterance, “frog pond”, brings everything to rest. What is left to be said or seen? Those two, hyphen-less words form the core image of the diptych, and recall the patterns of the first poem. Circularity reflects in the repeated “O” vowel, both its look and its sound. Wholeness beyond the self has been attained.

The alba has been elegantly subverted and expanded by Gilonis’s dawn diptych. Nocturnal coupling ceases, not at the command of any watchman, but because of natural changes. Solitude, old age and death are merely hinted. No obvious lamentation is made. Reading the poem silently on the page, I thought the frog-pond meditation added a further note of robust but delicate humour. Then I spoke it aloud, very slowly, and, I confess, it had a completely unexpected effect on me: it made me cry.

Gilonis’s Rough Breathing: Selected Poems covers three decades of his work – meticulous, beautifully poised among many traditions: essential poetry-reading, essential-poetry reading.

• Since this article was published, the author of a small alba, Harry Gilonis, has confirmed that the two poems are not a diptych, and are intended to be read as separate entities, although he agrees that there is some “conversation” between them. Apologies for misreading the asterisk as a signal of greater connection, and for missing the Contents listing, in which the second poem is given the title it lacks on the page where the two poems appear. That title is “pond …”