Hello Christina,
                Thanks for your comments. Yes, others have mentioned the opening. It seems my fascination with getting clichés into poems is not shared by everyone. How odd. I take your points also about cutting some of the middle. Did I really write `dismal greyness´?  Blimey. I´m very interested in your final comment - that the poem ends at `different feather´ and the last two lines are just telling not showing. If you have the time and sufficient interest, could I ask what those lines told you?
Thanks again for your reading and comments.



Best wishes,   Mike



--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---

Well, I love the title, Mike, but the beginning's disappointing.  The poem 
starts for me at 'So I returned to our seaside town...'  I think you could 
cut back a lot of the main body of the poem: things like 'and the gulls 
crying desolation to the winds' feel like easy options and need a fresh wind 
to give them a lift.  Do you need to tell us that the greyness is dismal?  I 
wonder whether just greyness says it all in the context?  The poem ends for 
me at '...different feather.'  The dilemma's the old one of whether I feel 
something or feel I'm being told something.  I think the material's here for 
a feeling poem but perhaps I'm missing the point.
bw
christina

> 
> Revelation of the Smart Chair
> after Peter Didsbury
> 
> 
> Is it a bird or is it a plane?
> Or is it a flying cliché?
> I had thought I might use a more lyrical opening,
> something to suggest the meeting of old lovers
> and the role of memory to hint at my state of mind.
> But the flying cliché will do just as well to say this;
> that the present is a mirror to see again the past,
> gilded in moonlight, it might be,
> or bathed in the glow from burning logs
> if we look at it that way,
> and how things seen like this,
> in a mirror, in a strange light,
> might well take on a new and surprising appearance.
> So I returned to our seaside town,
> wearing its sad, out-of-season aspect,
> the pier shut up, cold rollers crashing on the pebbles
> and the gulls crying desolation to the winds,
> seeing at the same time a pale reflection of its summer self
> and noting that the dismal greyness had been there all along.
> We had coffee in the same tawdry cafe
> where six months earlier we had drunk our last coffees.
> By and large we avoided the past
> and stuck to what I took to be neutral topics.
> You spoke of a poem by Didsbury and how a confusingly complex truth
> might be embodied in a sentient, really smart chair.
> You spoke too of music, beating time with the flat of your hand
> as you rehearsed the familiar tune of a composer
> I had not known you enjoyed.
> And it was not until my homeward train was on its way,
> our meeting receding into a past of its own, that the clouds parted
> and what I had taken for a flying cliché
> showed itself as a bird of a quite different feather.
> So now I know what that silent witness, the smart chair, reveals,
> standing alone in the centre of the room with a warm seat.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>