Hi folk. I've been battling with a poem for a couple of weeks, on and off,
and sure could use your help. An objective view would be handy. I don't want
to lose any mystery in it, and I don't want it to be too dry, too factual -
but it does seem awkward to me at present aned every time I toss it around,
it just seems to be awkward in a different way! Here it is:
*Blake’s Choir / draft four*
*Without Contraries is no progression. *
*(*from Blake’s* The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)*
I warm my hands on it some nights.
It opens me out to hear each syllable
in a choir singing a majestic oratorio
in eighteenth century London, image on
image from a hundred texts and a dozen films
layered to create a papier maché mask
of Blake’s face. I take it off the shelf
to remember her now, the old crone
in a Sydney harbourside mansion who
placed Blake’s choir in my hands, and said,
‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ patting
his Poetical Works, its flimsy skin
aged to a veinless patina.
‘You’ll enjoy this, my boy.’
Old Alf, furniture removalist, driver,
said, ‘Let’s go.’ We went,
and I went down my own back roads
and side streets, across
bottomless oceans, through white clouds,
to forget more people than I ever
met, and read a million poems which
ran out of breath, to settle down
awkward as a pelican landing
on this seat this morning to remember her,
my bottle-scarred muse, alive
with each rise and fall of Blake’s pulse
in the plaited skein of our days.
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
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