NURSERY RHYME: A Poem for National Poetry Day

To celebrate National Poetry Day, here's a poem I like a great deal. I wrote it for Tanya one night in Plymouth in September 1990, almost exactly thirty years ago. It it still on the paper on which I typed it up back in London and unchanged since then. But it never felt like something to submit (and I was getting away from publishing poetry anyway). Now I think it could have gone somewhere.  

 

NURSERY RHYME

 

Before we go on

We shall have to decide

Which things are important

& which we will hide.

 

How much we can live with

& how much without;

Equations like these are

What love's all about.

& once we have weighed

Every point in each hand,

We'll listen & talk, but

We won't understand

 

That balance & logic

Are just symptoms of

A different disease,

But not symptoms of love.

 

HUMAN INTERFERENCE: A POEM

In honour of National Poetry Day, let me offer a poem I wrote thirty years ago, just after my birthday, in Geneva. The event it depicts had just recently happened to me, right down to the pigeons jumping on the carriage at Baker Street and off at Edgware Road, where we were being held. It didn't take much revising, and was published in my 1989 Northern Lights pamphlet Homage To Gibbon and then, after some delay, in Tokyo, in the summer 1990 issue of Edge: International Arts Interface. Both times I misspelled Edgware, adding an e, which was appropriate enough given the magazine's title. It is reprinted here for the first time with the name of the station spelled correctly. I've tried out a few other small changes.  TFL, or whatever they call London Transport these days, no longer uses the phrase 'human interference.' 


HUMAN INTERFERENCE

A few pigeons exit the car at Edgware Road.
The platform seems to soften & melt as
We finally pull away. The walls of the tunnel lose
Their blur, become clear as we come to a stop.
We sit. After a while faces move into focus,
Take on expressions, search the car for room or air
Or pigeons or something to read. Eventually
A disembodied someone talks. A person
Has fallen in front of the train. We will have to wait.
London Transport regret this delay, which they say
Is the result of "human interference".
We get in the way.
Many of us are already late.
We are getting later all the time.

COACHWHEEL YELLOW: a poem for National Poetry Day

Apparently today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom. Because I've just been to see the Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy, I was looking for a poem I've done called 'Zinc Door' after the Franz Kline painting which is hanging at that show. I found two other Klines, 'Torches Mauve' and 'Blueberry Eyes', but not 'Zinc Door' on which I've been working intermittently for years, since seeing the painting in, I think, Washington. But while I was looking I came across the manuscripts of this poem, 'Coachwheel Yellow'. I wrote it in May and June of 1978, and it has some personal resonances that go back to that time. Reading it now, I also feel a bit of Robert Creeley it in, which I'm sure I didn't realise at the time, but I now wonder if that influence is exactly why I chose a villanelle; I haven't done much in such strict forms (for good reason, you may say, as I improvised on the secondary rhyme, rather than sticking to just one pair). It may or may not have been published in a magazine called Rogue Raven sometime in 1979....if anyone knows, I'd appreciate a heads-up...

COACHWHEEL YELLOW: A VILLANELLE 

I always wanted to be able to draw.
Have something made solely by eye and hand.
There were paintings in my poems you never saw,

You heard my dreams, but couldn't understand
That my frustrated fingers felt useless, dead weight.
I always wanted to be able to draw:

Those nights in the greenhouse, working late
To convince myself, despite what you said,
There were paintings in my poems. You never saw.

"Your words are your body. Your body's dead,"
You told me, and because it was true that
I always wanted to be able to draw,

I continued to write what I could, but knew that
It was not what you wanted. In words you despised
There were paintings. In my poems you never saw

There were paintings of you. Reflected eyes,
Which, if you'd seen, you'd have recognized
I always wanted to be able to draw.

There were paintings in my poems you never saw.