BEFORE I FORGET

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 sun-slant 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
cream nautilus of her ear one secret of time.

***

“How could I ever 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, 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 above 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.

Autumn of 1965. San Raphaël. I had taken the train down for a few days on the Côte-d’azur before returning up to Grenoble for my immersion. Perhaps because I had just spent my first ten days in Paris and roamed its museums ravenously as much in quest of a woman as out of appreciation of art, the poems I can date to this period are pictorial, static, masturbatory. When I cast myself back into the state of my mind then, more adolescent than fully adult and deeply marked by not so much the poetry as my received image of Rimbaud, I recall a drop cloth of pervasive sadness illuminated by convulsive shifts of mood, much more expressionist than the scene here. The havoc of my emotions was indeed a pose — in fact, it was posed behind some psychic proscenium, as if I were my own audience. This poem reveals me to have been much more Apollonian than the Dionysian I imagined myself to be.

***

Open wide the window
which gives to the sun.
Rock on the rhythms
of a passing phrase

in a foreign tongue.
Such is the air, seen
to be unseen, that we
can measure and mime
the sun’s slow time.

Clocks interfer.
Compare the beat as
shadows slice off glare
and a Degas bather,
in some cool room,
brushes her hair.

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