Yesterday’s Found Poem was brief and to the point. Today, Day 680 of the daily poems, we have something entirely different. A prose text has been taken from Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ which in the reading sounds like poetry, with its heightened imagery and the exuberance of its vocabulary. To render it as a found poem, I have extracted it from the novel and the only manipulation has been to arrange the text in individual lines of varying length.
Crimson dawn
They set forth in a crimson dawn
where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane.
Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud
and the vast world of sand and scrub
shearing upward into the shoreless void
where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain,
gravely canted and veering
out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn
to the uttermost rebate of space.
They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults
and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off
like stumps of great stone treeboles
and stones the lightning had clove open,
seeps exploding in steam in some old storm.
They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines
of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls,
such auguries everywhere of the hand of man
before man was or any living thing.
Cormac McCarthy
from Blood Meridian, 1985 – lineation by Peter Ualrig Kennedy