Aug 10, 2023
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O bulbous periwinkle,
sunk in sodden goldenrod sand.
Your valve sets me a-tingle.
Let me hold you in my hand.
***
First in a series of quatrains inspired -- obliquely -- by Rimbaud's Sonnet des voyelles. One hidden compositional constraint is that the colours mentioned must be found in one edition or another of Crayola crayons. This ia "two-for" since periwinkle is not only a marine gastropod, plus a flower, but a color, like goldenrod.
The consensus increasingly seems that covid is on the wane, if not over. Begging to differ, I remain dubious.
In any case, the turn from #agoraphobia to claustrophobia reminds me of a sonnet I wrote about passing storms, and my feelings when they pass ...
Another poem from my middle baroque Berkeley period which, like North Hatley 1978, treats the motif of anticipated departure, foreboding of divorce -- vespers, as opposed to alba.
For my comments: https://www.instagram.com/p/C0XYLhRy5oG/?igshid=N2ViNmM2MDRjNw==
One good work of verse deserves another. Though thudding rhymes alone do not mother Wisdom, grace or insight, at least to stab At them tempers a critic’s gift of gab. Putting him, her, it or them on equal Footing with the poet. Far from a sequel, This review of Guriel’s novel, Forgotten Work, aims at but an ancillary slot in the limelight ....
One good work of verse deserves another. Though thudding rhymes alone do not mother Wisdom, grace or insight, at least to stab At them tempe
n 1981, I had a first vacation from the wine business and, upon advice of my new-found friend Richard Haly, I went off to Mexico instead of France, a country too closely associated with work at that moment in my life.
At this suggestion I visited Michoacán and stayed with a friend of his, Enrique, about whom I have written in connection with the poem Gossamer So Sheer. When it was time to take my leave, he gave me a little bottle of mescal to bide my time on the bus to Guadalajara.
The result, apart from some of my Haiku in Mexico, was this increasingly drunken meditation, one of my various ruminations on clouds, form and content.
Tokens
"How could I have written such a silly thing?" I often mutter to myself, having run across a yellowed typescript or a text unfortunately preserved like a fossil in print. "Juvenilia" is the catch-all for these relics, usually best left to slumber in peace. I have nonetheless taken to waking them, excavating and polishing some for curation, as I put it.
Not a gift, more a burden, poetry nonetheless offers largesse to anyone who has practised it over a life-time, opening a treasure chest of gilt tokens distilled from past passions and illusions which can still be cashed in for memories no longer in current circulation.
Revising the lyric below has enabled me to stand again on that curb-side of the Boulevard St-Germain, angle Danton, renewing my futile desire for the anonymous woman who stood momentarily next to me before crossing through afternoon sunshine towards métro Odéon in late September, 1965.
***
Of the winding paths the mind’s eye traces aimless in the past I risk no comment. The see-saw of tense and place prevents my grasping their grammar. Just the moment’s bustle I know, scant marks of confusion gilt in the sunslant air: calliope motes, a wisp of disobedient hair.
Yet given the girl poised light as a lip on this curb, I could whisper into the soft nautilus of her ear one secret of time.