A vain attempt at capturing the smoke of personal meaning.
I'm becoming everyone I know.
Chains of them wrangle and snake
into a starless universe.
I close my eyes,
eclipse everything that's real,
un-bang eternity
and there I all am.
I can barely be me.
Except when I'm humming yesterday
in the shower in darkness
-a seventeen year old girl at the piano,
fresh from palming her naked breasts with these
compliant hands.
She's playing These Foolish Things,
andante
and we're in God's house -
well, an outpost of it.
I hear the hammers strike the wires
and some kind of beauty
cascades, engulfs...
'til wisps of Kensitas
separate us from the boundless again . . .
And I say to Richard from the darkness:
I am my own meme,
my own camouflage.
I am evolution;
I'm every part and every whole;
I am lost for limits sometimes.
In a log-jammed circle on the desert,
I spill over, am pushed over.
The circle's edge is an endless burning bush.
And I'm scorched by the ocean that repels,
that they clamour for all around me,
and I am wounded and they are whole
in their need,
under their false stars,
and I patronise with pity,
curse myself,
and fight my way back,
through muddied puddles to the starting line.
To the fiery silver white teeming of night
the child in me grasped falsely – or was it truly -
to the splashing crystal pools that happiness was,
and I say to Richard:
I need a lot more time than this.
"Oh will you never let me be? "
There are things I have to change.
"Oh will you never set me free? "
And Richard smiles
"Oh how the ghost of you... "
He talks from somewhere down the chain
over his shoulder at me
as if nothing matters now
and they must fade and I must fade.
For this is what it's come to:
a rusting needlepoint of urge
fashioning myself into nothing,
anchored against the great myth.
I listen for the wind of the stars,
search in secret for the signature that saves,
and imagine again the reach of the infinite.
Suddenly everything else shrinks forever
and I expand at blinding speed,
then throw it all into reverse
down an ever narrowing street
down the driveway and down the path
into a house of dust,
where I whistle in her ear
-because I'm too shy to sing then-
"Oh how the ghost of you.."
And I'm outside the circle
a defiant soulless ember,
one "lover on the street... "
of ash,
where the hammers
simply hit the wires.
18 03 08
(These Foolish Things by Link, Marvell and Strachey, 1935)
Poetry by jim hogg
Read 570 times
Written on 2008-12-31 at 01:04
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A House of Dust
I said to Richard:I'm becoming everyone I know.
Chains of them wrangle and snake
into a starless universe.
I close my eyes,
eclipse everything that's real,
un-bang eternity
and there I all am.
I can barely be me.
Except when I'm humming yesterday
in the shower in darkness
-a seventeen year old girl at the piano,
fresh from palming her naked breasts with these
compliant hands.
She's playing These Foolish Things,
andante
and we're in God's house -
well, an outpost of it.
I hear the hammers strike the wires
and some kind of beauty
cascades, engulfs...
'til wisps of Kensitas
separate us from the boundless again . . .
And I say to Richard from the darkness:
I am my own meme,
my own camouflage.
I am evolution;
I'm every part and every whole;
I am lost for limits sometimes.
In a log-jammed circle on the desert,
I spill over, am pushed over.
The circle's edge is an endless burning bush.
And I'm scorched by the ocean that repels,
that they clamour for all around me,
and I am wounded and they are whole
in their need,
under their false stars,
and I patronise with pity,
curse myself,
and fight my way back,
through muddied puddles to the starting line.
To the fiery silver white teeming of night
the child in me grasped falsely – or was it truly -
to the splashing crystal pools that happiness was,
and I say to Richard:
I need a lot more time than this.
"Oh will you never let me be? "
There are things I have to change.
"Oh will you never set me free? "
And Richard smiles
"Oh how the ghost of you... "
He talks from somewhere down the chain
over his shoulder at me
as if nothing matters now
and they must fade and I must fade.
For this is what it's come to:
a rusting needlepoint of urge
fashioning myself into nothing,
anchored against the great myth.
I listen for the wind of the stars,
search in secret for the signature that saves,
and imagine again the reach of the infinite.
Suddenly everything else shrinks forever
and I expand at blinding speed,
then throw it all into reverse
down an ever narrowing street
down the driveway and down the path
into a house of dust,
where I whistle in her ear
-because I'm too shy to sing then-
"Oh how the ghost of you.."
And I'm outside the circle
a defiant soulless ember,
one "lover on the street... "
of ash,
where the hammers
simply hit the wires.
18 03 08
(These Foolish Things by Link, Marvell and Strachey, 1935)
Poetry by jim hogg
Read 570 times
Written on 2008-12-31 at 01:04
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
