Saturday 29 August 2015

Shadow: Middle Sixties

There are few occasions that I have ever felt tongue tied, indeed my fluency has landed me in a variety of difficult situations, where silence might have been the better option!  However, I have rejoiced in my ability to weave words together and get drunk on the patterns that I create.
     It is, therefore, a disconcerting experience to find myself searching for a word.  When semantic jigsaws seemed to me to easy-peasy junior toys, it is unsettling, to say the least, when the words I know I know do not flow into their accustomed positions.
     As a Baby-Boomer (Leading Edge) and someone about to claim his State Pension, I do not, defiantly, feel as old as parents or grandparents: my dad played golf, I swim - a metric mile a day.  Proof enough to show that I am a younger person than my father was at my age!
     Or so I like to think.
     My Squash playing (or Paddel playing) days seem to be over.  I haven't played tennis in years.  Badminton is a fading memory.  And, OK, I live in a country whose first language is not English.  I no longer teach the subject, but . . . but I feel the loss of that ease of communication that I once had - for good or ill!
     With all the publicity of we Baby-Boomers (Leading Edge) getting to retirement and beyond, there is also a whole pathology related to the Golden Generation marching steadily into the dark.  We drink too much.  After a life time of getting free education up to and including university, we think that our life styles will continue indefinitely, with age being an inconvenience rather than a full stop.
     That being the case, any lessening in life style seems an unacceptable imposition from unreasonable fates!
     So my struggle to find the apposite word in ordinary circumstances gives me pause for thought.  And as soon as you start thinking, the whole reductio ad absurdam process soon get you to a position where Alzheimers snuggles closer and closer to your living fears!
     Finding the right word is always a problem in the writing of poetry, and you might say that writing a poem about the difficulty of finding a word is both an exemplum and refutation of the fear itself.  But, for the word that eventually emerges in the following poem, I always have to struggle - and I always wonder why.  And that 'Why?' is a heartfelt howl!

Middle Sixties Shadow




They’re not so imperceptible.

Those changes that you think tell you that
Things Are Not Quite As They Used To Be.

            The struggle to remember an occasional
and unimportant Little Word
whose ordinariness makes its evasion
all the more unbearable.

For me, the tell-tale sign,

if that is what it is,

is the repeated struggle just to voice
the Spanish word for omelette.

Which even as I write
still keeps itself well-hidden,
out of sight, behind
linguistic heights, which I begin to sense
are growing taller, crowding round, tectonically
as I attempt to speak.

What makes it worse is all the
consequential bluster of un-needed words
which scramble, boil and fry along
a silent tongue.
                           
I try to poach a synonym from what I know
or coddle metaphors to mask just what I don’t.


This poem ends because ‘tortilla’

has come back to me,
                        at last,             as soon
            as I stopped trying
quite               so hard to
            force it back


and,
after all,
perhaps it’s just
a touch of blindness
rather than disease

(or so I tell myself)

            just one particular arrangement
skittishly avoiding memory,

rather than the darkness
dressing up
in onion, egg, potato, fat –

to flavour my descent to


This is not the first time that I have used a lack or punctuation at the end of a poem to make a point.  I have tried to use line length and line arrangement to make further points.
     This poem expresses a genuine fear of mine, and my increased attention to it, especially in poetic form, is my way of raging, "against the dying of the light."