I blogged recently about "occasional poems". My method, time & again, over 25 years, has involved a sort of recursive movement - a fold-back on what came before. I have a lot to work with. The poems roll out for a while; then they turn, making a kind of feedback loop, & going forward at the same time (hopefully).
This process is a motif in the poems themselves. It's about recollecting what came before. There's also a theological dimension to this. History is about remembering something - someone - buried or misunderstood, but stubbornly there - will not go away.
I see someone on the street who re-appears often in my poems (over decades). At the same time, I notice the final two stanzas of a poem I posted here the day before the Charlie Hebdo incident : lines which seem to celebrate or beautify the very name of the magazine. Very strange. This too is a kind of backward glance, an elegiac impulse.
Here's another occasional poem, then, written today. Another collage, another cartoon - maybe topical, maybe not.
OLD BERET
Cherish yet this goblin-goblet
buried in George’s field.
Iron curve, silvered
by time & rain – thin graphene net.
Your delicate recursive thread
bears planetary load.
Her slow gait (pigeon-toed)
& long brown coat, her bowed head
musing down the street, black hair
beneath an old beret.
Agenbite of inwit,
egret; sad, by shoreline (ancient ire).
Time shunts loom’s backbrace (thundering
boom). Young Charlie’s oak,
febrile with Hebrew spokes
(dove-speak). Gdspd, my blundering
cartoon – your secret sunny man
is safe with me. I fell
from towers of Notre Belle
Dame, late of Galilee (bold Magdalen)
when the lights went out. Hawk’s eye
& raven’s wing, a shadow-
script of Jonah’s prow
just now emerging from the sea,
the Southern Cross of everything.
Rose octahedron in
your heart... ponderous bronze
groaning (pain)... OK, Ahaz. Palm-king.
1.8.15
No comments:
Post a Comment