somehow nature
performs an alchemical feat—
it has genes to support this fragile structure
of unique experience—emergent property
of DNA; it’s the senseless universe’s way
of becoming conscious of itself:
our eyes exist to help the universe
to see just what it looks like in moonlight
& in high summer; our ears help it to hear
its singing in the night its waterfalls
a million feathers ruffling in the dawn
with the passage of the new wind
nose to help it smell mouth to taste
the endless sense of dumb mortality
the tricksters in the pickle jar; seamlessly
flowing into the cosmos—the breathing
I suddenly notice: chest expanding
and contracting identical to the
breathing of the rain forest; bloodstream
in all the world’s rivers; bones carved
from the chalk cliffs of Dover dance
the shimmy of the moon’s dark side
the universe remembers your evolutionary
intimates: zebra coconut tree blue-green algae
o carry yourself like a child of the universe
*
think
far beyond ordinary thinking
this grey morning in early spring of
the bold adventures of ideas you wake
into beyond the incidental events
of mere living which you can easily do
into the charm of all those arty patterns
their constant convulsing variation
down all the glittering centuries—
their parallel insistent development
into which you dip your mind
for a refreshment separate from
the pounds shillings and pence
of life and at the end of the day
put all this joy of thinking to bed
in a different room & just dream
*
you the poet
your subject
is a sense of the world
inevitable & inexhaustible—
departing from it
you become artificial and laborious
even though the artifice be skilful
and the labour perceptive
you write about twilight
because you shrink from the noonday
you write about the country
because you dislike the city
there are stresses you invite;
there are stresses you avoid
a flat landscape extending
in all directions to immense distances
placates you but you shrug shoulders
at mountains
the measure of you
is the measure of your sense of the world
if you touch triangle or cymbal
it is because you feel like it
your image restates its subject
in terms of strident attitude
Three wonderful poems that work together like a charm. Notice how the last line in each poem moves down and connects so beautifully with the first line of the poem that follows.
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Almost and maybe all the lines are enjambed even when it might feel like they aren’t, as below.
“the endless sense of dumb mortality/the trickster in the pickle jar; seamlessly/flowing into the cosmos-the breathing”…(13-15). When we are in the presence of poetry that has achieved this high level of form, the lines blur between form and content, or as Eliot said, there’s nothing free and free verse.
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I love the phrase ‘o carry yourself like a child of the universe’ – brilliant!
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