Hello All,
Many thanks for your comments on this peculiar poem. I understand your puzzlement and I should say that I wrote this as something of an experiment so itīs great to hear how readers have responded to it. I suppose I should try to explain what I was trying to do. It is rather complicated but it goes something like this. I wanted to write something which overcame time. In real life we never can, in art itīs probably what we are all always trying to do in one way or another. So I thought Iīd try not only to overcome time, but to makes the attempt to do that a part of the subject of the poem as well. So I imagined a narrative and then broke it up into pieces and put it back together so that the broken pieces left an impression of the original story, but disjointed. Something like a cubist painter representing a subject from different angles within the single plane of the canvas. My hope was that the impression would be conveyed to the reader. I donīt believe that it is necessary for the reader to reconstruct exactly the narrative I started out with, but something of the `feelī or tone should be preserved. Colin mentioned that he was working towards this kind of reconstruction in his feedback. Hereīs the story I used. The narrator (male) had a girlfriend as a youth whose father didnīt approve of him. He sometimes met her secretly when she came out for a walk with her sister. He would wait for her under a rendez-vous-tree. They would kiss, which is no very great surprise. Later she married someone else but he (the narrator) still loved her and still met her secretly (sneaked in the backway). The marriage was not a happy one but she would not leave her husband. She had children - two sons, as it happens - and our hero is only imagining the youngest at her nipple but it is an image that haunted him and still does. There is no real indication that the woman is waiting for her husband to die and the reference to widowīs weeds is perhaps the weakest part of the whole structure. Time has passed, and it wonīt stop here either. The hero has lost touch with the lover. But in his memory they are still teenage lovers, her skin and her hair are still as they were then. It is only through memory, and art, naturally, that our star-crossed lovers can defeat time. Hence the phrase `to trigger timeī. Itīs an odd one with a double meaning - to shoot as in destroy time and its efects. But also to use as a trigger, i.e. to make something happen. Memory would not exist without the passage of time. So the very thing that has caused their predicament has also provided a solution.
This is much too long. Sorry. Does it make any sense? Not much.
Best wishes, Mike
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