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T here it is, in the 31st line of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven “With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over” I have never seen the word ‘skiey’ before and besides loving its challenge of pronunciation — it doesn’t roll off your tongue does it, with its two syllable that have a hard time distinguishing themselves from each other? — I am delighted that it means exactly what it sounds like, it is a real word, and I immediately start looking for ways to use it.
The problem I encounter is how nothing strikes me as particularly skiey. The sky is so much its own thing, the closest most things get to resembling the sky is in color, but then it doesn’t take much attention to realize that there isn’t a single color by which I’d characterize the sky.
Maybe, I think the problem is that I am a person who scurries, eyes downcast, generally lacking the spiritual wherewithal to contemplate vastness or meteorological temperament. It could be that the sky is lately representative of all the directions from which grasping talons could without warning descend.
(This shows up in my morning pages and I am delighted to have something that is neither laundry list nor complaint, that doesn’t worry about one of the boys, that reminds me I like words as words even before they are freighted with things to tell. Raven, sitting next to me on the bed where I use a lapboard to write in my journal has reached out, maybe tentatively because I have been a little prickly the last few days, and in one of those startling moments when you realize how you are feeling first of all by noticing your own body language, I realize my shoulder has relaxed, muscles melting under the warmth of his hand: the prickliness isn’t there this morning!)
Skiey, has this other dimension then, possibility and boundlessness, the limits on possibility are as laughably small as my own scurrying figure. The changes of the sky carry the astronomical regularity of the sun’s minute by minute, month by month, tracing out the planes of the ecliptic, but also the chaotic change of dramatic switchings from dark to light and back again as winds from far off gorges chase clouds down the valley where this city perches. I resist with all my might the cheap metaphor, the unforgivable conceit, but note that I can relax where the sky touches my shoulder as if it were my husband’s hand, reassuring me of this connection, not scared off by my prickles.
I worry about words facing extinction, wish someone maintained lists of endangered species that I could do my part for by bringing them slowly back into more common usage, but consideration of skiey makes me think that I wouldn’t want it to be too common, exactly either, that the things I want compared to the sky are rare, special.
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During one period of waiting in the hotel room in Seoul I found myself watching a Korean tv documentary on a middle-aged Korean photographer traveling in Bolivia. The show followed him on his excursions across high desert plains, where the sky was a startling tumult of clouds flowing over mountain ranges and evaporating, an indescribably vast, overwhelming sky. Even though I could not follow the commentary (perhaps an advantage?)Watching his face watching the sky was telling its own story, his expression of awe, rapture and humility – it was strange to see someone else so clearly experiencing those private yet seemingly universal emotions in the face of the overwhelming beauty of nature…Skiey…I will cherish this word as I continue to contemplate the ever changing beauty above!
I love the skyey! And I love you, not least for caring about it. We should write Cormac about it—he would find a way to stick that word in there somewheres. When I was a wee brat I made my own illuminated copy of “The Hound of Heaven.” I should rummage around and go dig it out, see what color I made the flowers. I feel certain they are pale blue.
Last night I slumped against the Brujo’s office door and wept my FACE off, having just finished The Road for the third or fourth time. The ending hits me harder with every reading—this one was just blinding. Why do I say all this? I say it in the service of arguing, for some reason, that skyey is indeed about more than just sky. That it requires an immanence to be.
Amidst the oft-noted lack of color in McCarthy’s novel is of course the leaden overhead, not even properly worthy of being called a sky anymore. But also, it could be as blue as it wanted—if there isn’t an earthly anchor for its arching purity, the ceiling cannot be meaningful.
Am I still asleep? I don’t think so. This risks turning into some version of “so much depends upon / the red wheelbarrow,” but I maintain that the *blossoms* being skyey is crucial. The frail living transience of them, placed against and partaking of a heaven which writers have long believed fixed and permanent, in some way.
Maybe.
PS Night before last I fell asleep dreaming a poem. I told myself to get up and write it down, but of course I didn’t. It was so lovely and cerulean and SHORT. And just before I nodded off, I realized what I should call it: “Skiey”! The perfect title, I thought happily; and lost myself, and the poem, in unconsciousness.
But it might have had something in it about looking down into a cup, but over the rim so as not to fill the water with my reflected face, and thus being able to see instead a full blue circle of you-know-what.