Eros – Page 2 – BEFORE I FORGET

Early or late you woke
to revive the waning fire.
Numb asleep I still could hear

splinter the shingle you broke,
against closed lids see flare
the flash as kindling took.

I was roused by sleight
and saw, crouching in a nimbus
of flame stirred up from embers

a sylph afire, a sprite,
the camber of your members
bathed in amber light.

***
No foreboding of separation here, so this is not an alba by the strict rules of that old Provençal genre. Also, its setting is predawn, the light pictured therein emerging from an open stove rather than through a window.

Such internally rhymed poems were unfashionable in the early 80s when the cult of sincerity ruled and artifice was shunned, as if the two qualities are contradictory. This little song was sent forth to multiple literary journals, to no avail. At one point it fell to serve as tinder in another fire as I passed through a periodic purge of my vanities. Fortunately, I retrieved it from an old typescript I had lost track of and can now revive the moment of incipient desire it celebrated. As we approach the end all we have is vanities, maybe all that memories are.

Osip Mandelstam once wrote that a poem begins with an obsessive humming in the ears, what some might call an earworm. That is certainly how it has been for me, though there are many things that go on after that initial tuning in, that annuciazione. The specificity of poetic language can in fact be found in the tension between the pull of words organizing themselves, being organized by the writer, and the noumenon those words evoke. I have written elsewhere that the reason I write is to have poems I understand to read. This poem, the words and the events feeding them have haunted me for years. The seminal incident which fed and still feeds Edge goes back to the winter of 1969 in Edmonton when I lived in a highrise for the first time. I can no longer determine whether “walls of light” came first or the vertigo of feeling on a precipice with no walls to retain me. That I projected that giddiness into another’s relationship with me was, however, there from the onset.

***

Hold still, I know it hurts
much more than I can judge.
You live on the very edge,
your guts exert
gravity to begrudge.

Hold still, I know it hurts
when once again he skirts
the pith with verbiage.
He too lives on a ledge,
his arguments integuments,
scaffolding where he can lodge.

Hold still, I know it hurts.
Precariousness imparts
this poignancy to rage.
We all must face the edge
when nakedness thwarts
and confines us in its cage.

Hold still, I know it hurts.
You live on the very edge.

< Memory the Mockingbird

Tag: Eros

Before Dawn

Edge