Category: Post

Posted on

First Night

A match whose flare
is  closed from fear
in the cupped hands
of our uncanny holding,
we make the walls flicker
with our whispers.
Together we come
zooming in.

***
The curation of my old notebooks and typescripts continues. A first draft conveying this image is forty years old, but the experience it alludes to certainly pre-dated even that moment of relative maturity.

At some point in the not-so-distant future, there might have to be a footnote attached to explain that in those years, couples took pleasure in smoking together, that cigarettes were lighted with matches, which had to be sheltered from breeze.

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#cats

Why does purr rhyme with fur?
— How human of you to ask!
Simply because we cats prefer
petting us to be your main task.

***
Morgenstern’s Gallowsong led me to Edward Lear and then even, God forbid, to T.S. Eliot. Suddenly popped out of my mind this feline trifle.

The contents of the 1938 edition of The Oxford Book of Light Verse which I ended up pulling off my shelves in that quest were selected by W.H. Auden, still in his crypto-Marxist phase, so he opined:

“When the things in which the poet is interested, the things which he sees about him, are much the same of those of his audience, and that audience is a fairly general one, he will not be conscious of himself as an unusual person, and his language will be straightforward and close to ordinary speech. When, on the other hand, his interests and perceptions are not readily acceptable to society, or his audience is a highly specialized one, perhaps of his fellow poets, he will be acutely aware of himself as the poet, and his method of expression may depart very widely from the normal social language. In the first case his poetry will be light”.

A rather humorless description of what cannot float without humor.