Under caverns move
Stars on an unlikely shell
The house of autumn's bell
Crest and dented in magnetic driven sand
A shore crossed with footfall
Mirage
Journey into the west
This exo-cabin
Ex of a giant creature's distant sleep
Belongs to straw fields
Wealth that crept up behind us
The descending party
Of night-fall years ago that I remember
Is this?
Life wanders around in synaptic patterns
Forms circles within a heavy snail's home
Smart characters of
Exhilation
Awaken a
Daddy long legs long in breath
Well-read between pages of the time it takes to be dead
But alien in a bottled world
It cannot fly away from
Here
A click is life and death together
Beneath the carbon echo drone
Neither burn alive but for the shapes of numbers repeated
Nor rightfully expired; I try to forget
But virtual memory makes everything a trade
Ink seems to cower from
The worms cannot dream under it
New conversations flow
Without gathering dust or settle
But where's the mettle
In only ever saying 'I know'?
Hyperlink beyond the recent
Walls the sea knew better than I and time
Saw them built and yet decline
So: I did
But do not now for knowing
Wage sharpened war against roof the and run out into nothing
Hope for
Some fluid architecture
To build my eyes again in difference
And the tactile scattering of rain
For without death to be over
About 'Over'
ReplyDeleteIt may be apparent that one of the things I like about poetry is code making and breaking. It's a model whereby ideas can be formed but never reported, and that's partly the fun of it. You never know quite what words will sound like or mean to anybody else.
However, I had in mind certain jumbled themes when writing 'Over', which I'd like to put down while they are still fresh.
The main image; life beneath a dome or shell, came to me via Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Giant bug-like creatures , consisting mainly of a collosal thick shell spotted with plate-eyes, threaten the human race whenever they stampede out of their natural habitat, the toxic jungle which covers much of the planet. Amongst the human population, these 'Ohms' are understood only by Nausicaa, a young girl able to communicate with them, and calm their rage. Early in the film, she discovers the shed shell of an Ohm, and the idea of a giant insect's exoskeleton forming an inner vacuum world by setting firmly down in some recently wave-washed sand begins the poem.
The next verse sets the shell in the context of an outside world; footprints in the sand represent both the journey here, and a journey that cannot be taken once trapped inside: a journey west; for freedom (in the world's principle paradigm) and for the sunset - but only imagined, a 'mirage'.
It follows to establish that inside this dome is a world of memory, of a past; some occasion somewhere else ('straw fields') much cherished ('wealth'). But as in Nausicaa; oxygen is a problem. In the toxic jungle, spors from mutated plants growing from a polluted soil make the terrain lethal for humans and their fragile crops. Underneath the shell; there is no flow of air to the outside, living world. One is held in stasis by the past which beautiful though it may be, is also suffocating.
The week when I was composing this, I was without a mobile phone for the first time in many years, and the following verses build on the opening while taking up the matter of communication. Emails and texts are natural in this stasis-zone; as they are no sooner created than disappeared, and the feeling behind what might be said does not stop to linger; so much so that it feels barely created at all, like performance detached from audience or response. Under the roof of past-protection, there is no creation or destruction of new worlds or relationships: 'the worms cannot dream under it'.
By contrast, in my job at Special Collections/Archives, Leeds University, I am surrounded not only by people's work in text, but the life that surrounded it, in notes, letters, photographs, objects etc. These things have a lifespan in themselves (which we prolong by keeping in safe storage) but naturally, the paper will yellow and the ink wull fade.
This communication lives longer before it dies; as known to the daddy long-legs, trapped itself in stasis for years between old pages. Technology has brought us convenience, but the written correspondence which marks signifant events and emotions is now more easily lost; insofar as it is simply not expected to be kept.
ReplyDeleteSo beneath the arc, the suffocation of a specific, overwhelming past denies the opportunity to create new pasts, to live and die again. This timidity (lack of 'mettle') is done with electronic, statistical safety, that words shall not be kept, the past known and controlled in advance, and thereby no regret created, or mistakes made.
In this, nostalgia creates a dangerous caution: preventing time to flow in its natural course and allowing times, people, places and events to arrive and depart. Nostalgia, instead, diverts this flow into a reservoir.
The final verse describes what happens when the reservoir becomes too full and overwhelming; the desire for escape. In the poem, this is to escape the shell-dome, and to escape the habits of repeating electronic words into something more tagible, like ink, and handwriting, with the unpredictability of patterns formed in rain.