Slight Return
FinsburyParkCarrots
Posts: 12,223
And now new woods soar fast and grown
upon our bog of stone,
our plain of precious loss, gale blown:
our days of cold are done.
And now thick trees, set broad and bold
upon our reedrush field,
block pastward roads. We're told our old
lamenting ways should yield.
We cannot see the mountain now
upon our land where slow,
Godbreezed nothingness would blow
more than a leafy show.
upon our bog of stone,
our plain of precious loss, gale blown:
our days of cold are done.
And now thick trees, set broad and bold
upon our reedrush field,
block pastward roads. We're told our old
lamenting ways should yield.
We cannot see the mountain now
upon our land where slow,
Godbreezed nothingness would blow
more than a leafy show.
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him cash, always a boon for poetry
read live. A vital crowd. No, not the staid
old tweedy lot you'd mainly get. The try-
out of those newer pieces live was ... nice
road testing, nice ... A girl sat at the front.
She mouthed out her number to him twice:
Should have spoken to her. Hmm, you don't
Pass these chances up. That's what's at stake
in this: a lonesome gravestone. Shame the night
ended when it did, a little late to make
The Swimmers for last orders. It's the blight
of this old life: that words should be the curse
to keep one from good loving and the throng
of life out there. To write to make a purse
dries up the throat and falsifies the song.
Jim thanks the organisers, then shakes hands
and quits the 'net cafe. Coats and shoes
flap past him. Cold air breath streams past in bands
that smell of burger vans. Hot, banshee throes
begin to agonise his frosted ears:
Some lads, whose song "One- nil, one-nil, one- nil",
provokes in him an echo of the good old years
when no-one read his work. "I'd party 'til
I couldn't stand or talk, but never bore
and never spout out poetry. I'd swear,
love, curse, fall down, get up for more.
Then words came in the morning with my fear.
How dare these lovers mouth to me and rude
young louts shout out the score as if to chide
me, left to walk these streets alone? Plain, crude
words will mock my solitary pride."
He slaps his forehead. "Thinking like an ass
again, old James?" Moonlight on his boots
makes a moment's poem. It will pass
when he looks before him and he roots
through faces passing for that prettiness
he saw tonight. And there she is, just by,
behind another cafe window, her dress
offpink, seamed with one red butterfly
sequined, a flash of memories
of Jean, his first wife. Pah. A young man sits,
just opposite. "Don't listen to his lies!"
He mutters on the glass. The kid takes hits
deep from his coffee cup and starts to mouth
some monolgue. The girl's eyes narrow now.
"Oh no. A would-be poet. Stupid youth!
Girl! Run from his sham, his flash, his show,
His verbless scrawl without a period,
Those metaphors he mixes,those broad
fat brushstrokes drawn to make a blob a god
inside his world view splodge. Run from that toad
and find a carpenter, a fisherman,
a coalman or a beggar, but don't fall
for someone with a notebook and a wan,
world-weary look and wish to offload all
that poetry on you. Get out of there,
live, start breathing, love, try not to care
about the Beat!" A pigeon raised its cere
to look up at him. "Tell me, does he scare
you, little birdy? Does your instinct say
That kid's a poet, summoning chill rain
over his lover's life? You'd run away,
dear bird! If only humans had your brain."
Jim heads through midnight crowds, and breathing in
he feels the river breeze upon his face
and reaches bridge still silence. There within
cool waters down below, there's the embrace
of lovers from high stars where no word
hinders kissings. Jim looks to the still
unrippling river belly where the cord
to good moonmotherness remains. Until
the river ends, the heart of poetry
is nameless, moonknown, whiteblack; here
he knows in shadows where the song lies. "Try
not to make a sound", he thinks. "Not where
the light on water's all. I'll live from now
watching midnight water for the glow
of starlain lovers on the stream. And free
from words, I'll laugh, and dance, and learn to Be."
An eminent philosopher, she said,
taught to her a pier glass parable:
the ego is a candle flame, its light
radiates bright circles in its pass
across thin scratches in its sphere. She laid
down in prose, clear, inexorable,
how the random scratches under bright
candlelight seem shaped in the glass
concentrically to the candle's keep.
But prose might miss the magic of this sight,
as science without soul will often do.
The candlelight is Love, glass patterns deep
soul glimmerings. The energy of light
draws all within its simple orbit, so.
II
Let the river beam my lover's eyes
December sunned, where in morning come
gulls making circles on the verging air
above these reeds from which I sit and peer
out upon the fenlands, black. Here, yes,
here I'll summon magic, calling home
five thousand miles of whispers from one, fair
voice upon brook motion from a sheer
silent field, southwestern. Let me behold
my lover's eyes five thousand times in wide
Washward rolls of northward riverflow:
Let morning hang its tenderness like gold
hair lain on my breast, her hair: Inside
the river, beam my love's bejewelled glow.
It's in the prophecies. And the prophecies is locked away in the Church, in fact the Church of Rome. There was a man going out the sandybanks, he was driving the cows into the sea to wash them, I heard. one cow turned around and spoke to him. Looked him in the eye and prophecied World War Two and the bomb and all things that are locked away. Prophecied even things about my own family. And these prophecies are known and every one has come true to date. I had a house down by yours beyond, down on the bog road by the turn, over across there towards Fahy. Of course you could see my house across the field there. Mine is the one with no roof now, I still have the land there but I might sell. It's alright for grazing and such. But I hear them prophecies and you know, the sea takes away a good bit of the land every year. You can see when the tide's out there are tree stumps there. Your grandfather cut those trees. The tide's washed that much away since. You should be thinking of moving. I have a house in Claggan. Rhododendron and orchids growing along the roads, it's beautiful with the sun blazing in the spring and the honey bees big and yellow and making shadows on the grass. Come to Claggan boy. Doona's for the sea.
makes a moment's poem.
that is absolutely gorgeous. I'm going to write it down in my little notebook.
here there is an area where the rhododendron were so thick that when the explorers first found it they named the area the hells because that is what it was like getting through them. They are still abundant, but no longer hell to get through.
I always tend to like hopeful images.
Thanks. It's been tweaked a couple of times since I put the first drafts up about six months ago. Actually, I'm not sure now if that's the most recent tweak or not. I should pay more attention.
excellent, fin
~it is shining it is shining~
I kinda love your poetic,prosey stuff.
At first...I thought that I. was going to be about a candle let alone...yet it turned out quite interestingly enough into that deep,evil Freudian philosophy
that tends to attack us and diminish our sense of self-worth.To Hell with psychology I say ,Finns, but executed amazingly well:)I sense your philospher
is smarter than Freud and his theories;)
A whisper and a chill
adv2005
"Why do I bother?"
The 11th Commandment.
"Whatever"
PETITION TO STOP THE BAN OF SMOKING IN BARS IN THE UNITED STATES....Anyone?
It's an allusion to a famous passage from "Middlemarch" by George Eliot:
"An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent-- of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have arranged Fred's illness and Mr. Wrench's mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity. It would have been to contravene these arrangements if Rosamond had consented to go away to Stone Court or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do, especially since Mr. Lydgate thought the precaution needless. Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning after Fred's illness had declared itself, Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma."
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
I think that it seems hopeful because the old lamenting ways are gone.
And there's a leafy show in place of a barren expanse.
And the cold days are done.
And new soaring growth seems healthier than a stone bog!