OTI:five poems and notes:6/4/16

Open To Interpretation

Fog

In the day is grey gloom eternal,
The Black Ship pales,
A faded ghost in the great fog
Over all the ocean.
From the shore,
The constant roar,
Workaday waves
Again again again.
The neon sails and rigging sag,
Dimmed, dripping cold dew.
The Ravens and Gulls
Indistinguishable.
Colorless, the Parrots'
Visits quiet quiet too.
Last night, where were you?

Saxophone

Oh! A surprise!
Your bejeweled
Black glass saxophone
With gems from many lands
And keys to many doors
Your jazz hands open.

Conceit

It's not just my conceit I sail on,
Who do you think all these black mirrors are for!?

Cloy

This sucks,
You can see me,
But I can't see you
Least I cloy too close.
Well, what doctor's exam
Has ever been equal!
Continue!

This

It ain't like I got nothing
And pushing a shopping cart,
You know?
Look,
I got this
And this
And this!
Three thisis!!!
What?
Oh, we're still in the store.

Notes: Oh, I made a discovery...I let slip that I scribble, write poems, to a new friend, and we exchanged favorite poets...me among my offerings!...but it is Robert Graves and Laura Riding I think much of...and new friend offered Pablo Neruda, who I have read some, and thought to read some more, and too to revisit Riding and Graves, trying to see what comes up browsing such...oh, I'd just lamented not having met anyone of late to share literate talkabouts...so, that too...a discovery!...but the discovery I made has to do with the progress of Open To Interpretation...from the first, I've been adding things to added things, building up things that I've wanted to point to in the notes, but didn't have the word...brb...

quote

Her poems “are highly compressed, intellectual, disciplined, and possess a number of other virtues no longer much in evidence. . . . At their best, they have some of the concentration of language so memorable in Emily Dickinson, while the syntactic difficulty and elaborate conceits [T. S.] Eliot did so much to revive have been practiced in her poems with remarkable effect,” remarked James Atlas in Poetry magazine.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/laura-riding-Jackson

end quote

Conceit was the word I was looking for!!!...In Fog are all these conceits, that are being made up in OTI and built and added to...gotten so I can't look at a computer/cell phone screen without thinking how clever I've been!...conceited!...what a great word!...conceit conceit!!...and to my new friend, Graves and Riding are new, so I wondered if maybe Graves knew Neruda, so there a common interest...so googled Robert Graves  Pablo Neruda, and the search brought up Alastair Reid, a poet new to me...he was Neruda's translator, a fine poet in his own right, and friend and rival to Graves in Majorca!...a connecting one of those small world things...anyway, back to the discovery...keep in mind the 'black' in the conceits of OTI...brb...

quote

Cat-Faith


As a cat, caught by the door opening,
on the perilous top shelf, red-jawed and raspberry clawed,
lets itself fall floorward without looking,
sure by cat-instinct it will find the ground,
where innocence is; and falls
anyhow, in a furball, so fast that the eye
misses the twist and trust
that come only from having fallen before,
and only notices cat silking away,
crime inconceivable in so meek a walk:


so do we let ourselves fall morningward
through shelves of dream.  When, libertine at dark,
we let the visions in, and the black window
grotesques us back, our world unbalances.
Many-faced monsters of our own devising
jostle on the verge of sleep, as the room
loses its edges and grows hazed and haunted
by words murmured or by woes remembered,
till, sleep-dissolved, we fall, the known world leaves us,
and room and dream and self and safety melt
into a final madness, where any landscape
may easily curdle, and the dead cry out...


but ultimately, it ebbs.  Voices recede.
The pale square of the window glows and stays.
Slowly the room arrives and dawns, and we
arrive in our selves.  Last night, last week, the past
leak back, awake.  As light solidifies,
dream dims.  Outside, the washed hush of the garden
waits patiently and, newcomers from death,
how gratefully we draw its breath!
Yet to endure that unknown night by night,
must we not be sure, with cat-insight,
we can afford its terrors, and that full day
will find us at the desk, sane, unafraid --
cheeks shaven, letters written, bills paid?


--Alastair Reid
from Inside Out:  Selected Poetry and Translations.  (c) Alastair Reid, 2008.  Polygon Press.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/corey-morgan-turner/national-poetry-month-cat-faith/10154061303050603/

unquote

A fine poem! (at least the first stanza!), but look what he did!

so do we let ourselves fall morningward
through shelves of dream.  When, libertine at dark,
we let the visions in, and the black window
grotesques us back, our world unbalances.

He has the Black Window!!!...and I must credit, as he was ahead of me with his conceit, I hadn't gotten that far with mine, yet, and will now incorporate his...RAL!...a fine discovery!...oh...Saxophone where Textophone...the price of being clever...Saxophone is better!...heck...blued text!

:)

DavidDavid