Here's a thin wooden reply, Max, to your many-layered, sprightly, sprawling
poem. Like Douglas, I got more involved the further I went, past the big
names dropped. Mind you, I like 'two hours of hopelessness' and the sense
of social life before TV. (We are now of course in the post-TV age. A
teacher friend the other day said he asked kids in his art class to suggest
a famous person. You know someone seen on TV all the time. They just looked
blankly at him. Social media is all to them.) My favourite moment is the
collapsing chair yielding up its selfhood! Not sure yet how the erotic
interlude stacks up or in your poem. It warrants further re-reading, not
yet available to a house mover.

Bill

On Thursday, September 24, 2015, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Enlightenment
>
> Diderot, Voltaire,
> and several lesser lights,
> came to my room
>
> in my student days,
> promising company
> and ‘enlightenment’.
>
> I fancied them, and fancied
> they’d fancy me. My town,
> my country, seemed run by
>
> sermonizing churchmen
> and priests; some deferred to
> the Pope in far-off Rome,
>
> with their banning of books,
> movies advised against.
> Who was there now to show us
>
> how to be enlightened?
> Oh there was Bertrand Russell,
> old Bernard Shaw, such a tease -
>
> good for a light evening
> in the drafty hall next to
> prim St Andrews Church
>
> (tolerant Presbyterians
> there), but Shaw never
> offended anyone, it seemed.
>
> My professors put on
> Moliere, churchy Eliot,
> Shakespeare, worthily.
>
> A man from England,
> name of Ronnie, put on
> Beckett - testing us -
>
> two hours of hopelessness,
> so far as we could tell.
> He and his cast played up
>
> the misery, played down
> the jokes. Waiting for what?
> This was all just before t.v
>
> kept folk at home turning
> everything into personalities
> and showbiz. Ideas,
>
> I whispered, freedom!
> contrariety!
> possibility!
>
> 2
>
> Young David Hume, finding Scotland
> dour, short of enlightenment,
> lived for years in France, that mix
>
> of light and dark, quietly
> doubting such old standbys as
> miracles, and soul and self.
>
> OK to the first, second
> and third troubled me, no thinker.
> My uncertain student self
>
> first met my Edinburgh prof
> in the new Hume Tower
> (‘Write on Auden? If you must…
>
> he’s stranger than you think.’) -
> listened hard, leaned back
> breaking one of his new chairs.
>
> It boded ill. The chair yielded up
> its selfhood, my own quavered,
> never quite recovered.
>
> 3
>
> On his Melbourne campus
> where he winters briefly,
> the poet-philosopher
>
> acknowledged as we
> passed, my shy smile shyly.
> He would not know of my -
>
> shall we say? complicity?
> working to redeem in poetry
> the body from alienation
>
> from its spiritual company.
> But he the philosopher
> knew what he was doing.
>
> My efforts were thoughtless
> as could be. He had a grip
> on Plato and on every
>
> century down to today,
> sorting the complexity,
> pointing ways forward,
>
> moving himself on
> from his early thin
> wooden spirituality.
>
> 4
>
> In repose
> it was a face
> of some grace;
>
> slow from brow
> down her nose
> he would trace
>
> to a place
> where he’d pause,
> pursed lips
>
> nearing hers,
> murmuring:
> ‘is this yours?’ -
>
> opening
> mouth with tongue
> seeking hers.
>
> This awoke
> in her cheek
> a slight blush:
>
> ‘your moustache -
> it tickles.’
> Her fingers
>
> pressed back
> his whiskers,
> smilingly
>
> tweaked his ear.
> ‘Don’t disgrace
> yourself, dear.
>
> Not so fast.’
> Unfailingly
> he’d draw back
>
> a while,
> a little while.
>
> 5
>
> One at a time
> each grape
> found its way
>
> from the stem
> in his hand
> to his open
>
> mouth. Munch
> and gone. Next!
> So the bunch
>
> green from the
> greengrocer
> freshly rinsed
>
> refreshed him.
> Elegant
> the bare stalk
>
> remaining
> in his hand,
> like a stick-
>
> insect standing
> many-legged
> and still, while
>
> its prey or
> enemy
> is confirmed.
>
> Lingering
> tongue-tastes,
> syllables,
>
> rest, stasis.
>
> 6
>
> The bed-sit of Venus!
> For her brief stopover
> she needed only some
>
> rented place with
> a good bathroom
> and a balcony and
>
> of course a bed.
> Once installed she
> voluptuously
>
> sprawled waiting
> for encounters.
> Which duly came,
>
> homage was paid,
> tribute exacted,
> grateful visitors
>
> went their various
> ways, content. Sic
> transit gloria bed-sit.
>
> 7
>
> It looms like
> a glitch in time,
> or do I mean
>
> ‘borrowed time’? -
> which we may feel
> once pressed,
>
> we all live on.
> Shall we ponder
> the lender?
>
> Or make do
> with the loan,
> expiry date
>
> unknown,
> nearing that
> glitch in time.
>
> 8
>
> In his tiny cottage
> in Biggar near the Border,
> Scotland’s senior poet
>
> and contrarian said to me,
> coughing over the whisky
> we’d brought him, ‘New Zealand?
>
> Ye have poets there, I know.
> But why imitate Auden?
> Take the long view. We’re
>
> in the nineteen-sixties...
> the Enlightenment was
> Scottish - Hume and all that.
>
> Light! - you know, don’t you,
> Goethe’s dying words were
> Scottish: Mair licht, mair licht!’
>
> Quoting himself as we left:
> ‘Deep surroondin’ darkness
> is aye the price o’ licht.’