words & pictures
Did the birds tell you
In tremulous warning
We will build another sky in kinder hues
The air as thin and bright as diagrams
Of escaping oscillations
Held against a winding sun
Bury my hand
Time’s mortared skin
In earth as warm as sleep
Whistling hymns to magpies in return
A knife-hard split
At the corner of my mouth
Opens a sharp, metallic sting
Oxalis grows where you died
As if luck were grown a stranger shape
As if this voice of clay and air
Were another wanting prize
The hills hoist tilts In windmill indecision Hung by its own petard Which always sounded Quite uncomfortable to me As if the rust stained bag of pegs Slung like a smile below the crank Were some brash sporran Not just a place to keep your keys As Dr Freud would have said A tangling cat’s cradle Trailing kelp ends The wire hung In slack loops For cockatoos to swing In the asbestos afternoon The rain a loudening drum A cry, the bird is gone Shoulders wet The leaves and blades In eye twitch shuddering Turn the other way The trapeze as empty As Sylvia’s dead trees
The rain harangues Curtails the rags of afternoon To a kind of twilit comfort Of these few close held rooms You are in my sleeve Sate as other Sunday evenings Hesitant as a bird Crumpled as if you were already thrown away Like the stone the tailor threw A knit as camouflaging As any grass-thin shadows Your voice, close enough For doves to misconstrue Still, against the staccato dark Of shades rigged tight as seabird sails In any failing storm I don’t understand How suddenly you flew
I will take calcium from your teeth Until they are milk and opal strange Too soft to eat me with An accusation borne with a bird-bark laugh My birdsong replies as raw as warnings Sometimes I feel the mask beneath the skin Descended from the stranger world An owlet that you carefully kissed If I all reasonless wept Hands against my neck and chin As if they were his unfurled wings Here now, away from all such childhood familiarity Your hands have the eyes of wear Pulling roots and weeds from raucous beds Of judas penny and rhododendrons How with a wringing love In this embrace they watch Measuring pale skin with callouses I do not remember lullabies Only a lost and dreamful sleep Your morning voice still echoing Insistent as a sunrise
From the bird seed that I spilled Grows a bloom with eyes like wheels That turn the way the sky chases clouds On spindle legs and crooked wings It gathers bottle caps and things That make a jangle noise That – though voiceless – breathless sings The birds all watch with care and chance As the petals fold and dance A hunger in their tourmaline misrule With whetted beaks and silvered claws In flock and fury pierce the hide Of the creature that, in obeisance stays Til leaves rent and eyes sky-blind Fire yellow from inside Takes wing and flies into the sun
What is a poem? May as well ask, What is a bird? If your answer is, A creature that wants to fly, you are in the right place. Some consider the purpose of poetry is merely to create of mundane thoughts something poetic, a sort of polemic or didacticism or biograph dressed up in Sunday clothes. The creation of something poetic is, rather, a consequence, not a purpose. If you wish to give a sermon or a speech, do. However eloquent, this is not quite a poem.
In A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream Shakespeare has it that;
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
From the intrigues of the imaginary, the poet makes something both astonishingly new and yet profoundly familiar.
Lewis Carroll infamously asked, How is a raven like a writing desk? Later in half-hearted glibness answering his own conundrum, because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat and it is nevar put with the wrong end first. I would simply say, the fault lies in the question, and return it to its beingness as a rhetoric koan; a raven is a writing desk – ink spills from both, how then is it not?
Edgar Allan Poe will tell you, a poem is the rhythmical creation of beauty, its highest purpose to evoke a sense of beauty in the reader. A poem, as French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has said, is a contemplation, written from a reverie. A kind of semi-autonomic daydream, in which purpose, language, tradition and elaboration entwine with the subconscious impulse. This reverie has the singular purpose, in its newness, to impel a consequent reverie in the reader. Akin to a suspension of that surface of critique, and falling into an auto-hypnopoetic trance.
If childhood is indeed as a glass of dreams, a glass darkly, poetry returns us to that wide awake reverie, to that reflexivity in which the world is images and mysteries that, before experience so fiercely trammels them, merge in unsuspected and unprecedented ways, that we are driven to order and unpuzzle.
The reader’s induced reverie is of course informed by what is significant to the reader, what resonates from their own journey of unpuzzling strata. If the poet is only trying to impart experience, well. We all already know what a bird is; what we want to know, what we want to feel, is of its desire to fly, and in the immensity of that blue, for a moment, in a dream, to fly with it.
Thus; A poem is a bird that from its desire to fly, creates itself.
In my bird garden I asked a dove If she mourns lost winter afternoons The sky furiously balming Your brow against the glass Breathing shallow But, with that reluctant mist That warns of life in mirrors Fast evaporating The bird replied Though we are Neither not so cold Nor defined by the shape of rain That we would forego Our easy days Still, when the magpie sings We will find an eave to hide behind Life is fraught Bridges far between The house you build By tumbling roads Will fall one day to the bright stars Of soft, emerging asters You think a bird a fool, but How she watches, how she waits On her flimsy precipice The magpie is a winter mountain
