| |
She put the receiver down and smiled at the advice just given to her new friend. So,
the writer needed to find his voice, did he?
She laughed aloud!
What about her own inability: to "speak", to find that elusive narrator who would surpass
all others, to invent some unique and marvellous place from within which to sculpt
words and to make them mean so many different things at once ...
to resonate
in the evening,
in the sunset,
and forever ...?
It was all so ironic and difficult really, prose.
And yet she could tell stories, she knew that much.
Ah, but poetry, now that was something else.
All that space ...
the sheer expanse of vast imaginary canvases --
conjured up on fictive walls in Arabian
galleries centuries ago;
taut and invincible on the ship that transformed her great grandfather,
Samuel Emmanuel Swarz, from citizen of the Azores,
trainlines
1
It is found again!
What? Eternity.
It is the sea mixed
With the sun
Rimbaud
2
Outside the train a vast ocean of sand-coloured grass
swarms with the embryos of poems waiting
to be dreamed
into being ...
3
Beyond language and this steaming train
lay everything known before birth
when a queen and a favourite
knew how to play cards
at the bottom of a lagoon
decorated with the tempestuous
embroidery of sainted aunts
and other golden headlands ...
But that was before I fell into the sea
to search beyond the fringèd curtain of mine eyes,
to find your mind agape and red-hot.
4
Now texts are being drawn
onto the passing picture
planes ...
She is weaving
infinite threads of loss
5
The glass screens out the actual sounds and smells
but closing her eyes she knows them ...
6
inscribing images
inscribing images
inscribing images
7
Upon closed eye-lids there is an after-blur
of squarish windows turning blue and red,
funnelling murky colour along the clumsy
telegraph poles of memory ...
reminiscent of scattered mosaics:
overhead tramwires and sky;
alchemy and the earth, nubile
and rich in blood; the young Rimbaud
and the absolute certainty of death ...
8
Later, when plummeting into an unknown world where being relies on something other than flesh she'll see your poetry attired in Royal Robes cavorting across space trailing extravagant trains of fabric dyed purple and the deepest indigo and strewn with streams of golden tassels. They'll be transformed, transported, shot through with meaning beyond your wildest dreams, enthralled, entranced -- too busy to stop, for anyone.
9
Throughout her body there will be a trumpeting of this endless savannah, its entirely sumptuous notes pressing close to her swollen belly. And whole acres of time will pass during which the plains shall blaze as if for the joy of being alive in the sun. Their plenitude will take up and swallow all other themes ...
10
And permeated throughout the movement of this immense expanse both inside and outside the sensation of self ... the train mumbles, still. The train mumbles of everything lost and gone, lost and gone forever ... and of distance, that will not submit, that will not submit.
Distance refusing to lessen its evangelical call to life.
Distance shouting like a thousand bellowing yokels.
Distance bringing to life the delighted but tragic
orchestra of earth and sky.
11
She stares at a small faded child disappearing into the landscape, a tiny typed asterisk set against a sea of bleached yellows. Remember. Remember. The train now smiling.
12
She looks at the lines outside. The semi-imagined straggling brushstrokes. The tiny movements of a pencil across the train window. The myriad chance scratches.
Eyes tracing lines, crossing and tripping, and singing and shouting and stumbling along, now fast, now slow ... now non-existent.
13
It is gone.
The emptiness unashamedly filters out all else.
14
But when I thought all was lost
you flamed amazement
and with rough magic
promised calm seas
mixed with the sun ...
15
What? It is found ...
|
|
|