I don’t think I’ll see any lovers this morning
rising from dewy meadows,
twined like bind weeds
and blooming pink hued and golden
with such clinging desire.
This morning only grey plumed pigeons
paired on the power plant lines
below sleeping peregrines.
You went through London’s swamp
clutching that last thing,
the mantlepiece clock
and its key for winding.
What happened to perpetual motion?
Timepieces, simple mechanics,
just hands sweeping around a dial,
the earth around the sun,
the shifting moon factored in.
No confusion,
clouds come up,
but the mountain stands still,
the erosion, the plates underneath,
too slow to register any significant error.
Yet always the friction.
Louise said heaven.
Some pale plateau glowing
in her fervent imagination,
but also tangible
like a thatch of a chestnut’s mane
that you can’t help but thread your fingers through
and hold close, inhaling the musk and fire.
Who named you and made you other.
And what energy fuels this need to grasp
and stake some claim, graze into the next pasture.
The senses sway and pull us under the blue green caress in
waves.
We glean and gather and pack our hearts with rough bales,
Only to pull out later
Sad amber catches of eyelashes and kisses,
faint pockets of breathless gasps
on the edges of desks, perhaps,
where beauty falls
in each swerving atom
and should they collide . . . .
jesusgod, what you do here. i read it and then read your last post. when i came back to this one and read it again it was as though reading something fine i had read many years ago. do you know what i mean to say? what cani say?! i laugh at myself. i go back and read again and again to say something. is it perhaps best that i have nothing to say but yes, and how difficult, how tragic, how lifelike. you have given voice and story to all of our stories, the tension between the sway and the desire to hold the static, but not really, never really static, only love we desire to preserve, or perhaps life:) holy holy, jane. this, i think, is my favorite of yours. (i mean, even your goddamned title! i was so happy with just your title! you do this to me often.)
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erin
Oh, erin, you have no idea what joy you give me. Just for someone to GET me. Dear god. This began as a massive collision, no, many collisions and I have been gleaning and gleaning and not knowing the outcome, not at all. And still not knowing, but so pleased to be able to write and have readers. That is all, really. That is all.
DeleteSomeone on Facebook said that this gave them a 19th century Blade Runner/steampunk vibe and that comment made me think of my lovely Louise as never really knowing the chestnut or the pale plateau, but only dreaming them. Who winds the clock? Who names us? I am both ecstatic and melancholy. And you are happy with the title! I clap my hands with such satisfaction like a wind-up monkey. :)
I'm glad Erin sent me this way.
ReplyDeleteI had to read this a couple of times, the images, each taking me somewhere, to linger somewhere: the horse, the meadow, the birds, the clock. I get this sense of anticipation, this innate looking we all do for something to happen that allows us to linger over things that seem to portent a bigger world, an anticipated heaven.
Miss Jane, this poem is capacious!
Thank you so much, rosaria. "an anticipated heaven," yes, that's a lovely way to put it.
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