This poem was written because I should have been writing something else. Not, this time, for the Open University - though the next extended essay is waiting for finger on computer keys even as I post this - but another poem. The idea for the poem came to me as I was swimming and had disappeared by the time that I was changed. The only memory left was of loss!
However, the one thing that I have learned is that writing, writing anything, is better than writing nothing. Sometimes I can write myself out of an impasse by talking about the weather and so on.
The basic inspiration for this poem was dull people. I don't really know if they are truly dull in their lives, all I could see, as I was drinking my tradition cup of tea after my equally traditional swim, were people just sitting there. Not even talking. Just being.
While people were being, well, people and irritating me because they were not doing anything exciting and worthy of commemoration in a poem, I couldn't help noticing the single palm tree.
The weather was not wonderful. It was almost sunny, but the light had that brittle quality when it hasn't really decided what to do with itself. There was an occasional breeze which didn't do much to the people at the tables, but it had a dramatic affect on the fronds of the palm tree.
I watched, fascinated as a dance that would have put a troupe of professional belly dancers to shame. I was particularly taken with the fact that a single gust of air, presumably from one direction could produce such an interesting variety of movement in a single tree top, almost as if there were half a dozen winds just aiming to make the palm more interesting!
And in our cafe area nothing happened and nothing moved.
It was the contrast, that I have mentioned before in my poetry, between the dynamics of a heavily constructed area of glass and concrete and plastic and the world (no matter how constricted by human activity) of the natural that I find interesting.
Also, the fact that everyone, apart from myself, was ignoring the frenetic exhibitionist display by a tree taking every advantage of an unimpressive breeze to produce what I describe in the poem as an 'exultation' also struck me.
I hope that the ending of the poem does not seem like something added for what I describe elsewhere as 'gravity', but as something which the poem leads up to. How far that is true, is of course, up to you and your reading of what I have written!
By the way, although today actually is Sunday, the poem was not written on that day - hence the first line!
It depends on what you want
to see
Today has something of a Sunday feel.
Uncertain and transitional.
A time waiting for something else.
As though this space, this ‘here’
is just an ante-room, a vestibule
for something more significant.
The people all looked posed:
set tables and set chairs;
as if they’re waiting for a script
to give them back the lines
they do not speak.
The random breeze is brisk,
but nothing moves in this
constructed space, until
a young man’s hand
runs through his hair
and liquefies his scalp.
But that soon falls
into its lacquered place –
and all is still again –
with just a
twitch of
stray, tie-strings that bind
the giant parasols to rigid poles –
inverted exclamation marks –
forcing eyes towards a tree,
dwarfed by perspective,
distancing the outside view:
a
palm.
Alone
with
wrinkled, crumpled,
frond-scarred trunk
with the bulging pineapple
of old leaf base, with sheath and petiole,
cross-hatched with fibrous hair.
Flamboyant, sprouting-fountain-firework.
Every youngster’s crass attempt
to crayon-capture a strange tree
placed on a yellow blob
within a scrawl of blue.
What we feel as a push of air
is made more various
by palm leaves’ tilting vanes.
No unity of action here,
the green-splayed crown
becomes an exultation!
Each open fan, and one to one,
a dance in ragged symmetry.
The topmost fronds are synchronised,
they take the force along
spines curved and serpentine.
With flipped back heads
they spit derision, silently,
into an empty, placid sky.
The time-won, chaos
of the writhing tree
mocks our own swift
methodicality,
as we seem neatly sat
or slumped.
Now that I look,
I see that we’re contained
inside the tables’ gravity.
At some far distance
we must look as if we’re dead:
just meteors inexorably trapped
somewhere within a universe
that mostly thinks,
if it should think of us at all,
as if we were not there.
I have also completed a new version of Poems in Holy Week. The last set of Poems in Holy Week, called Clocks of Dust were published in Flesh Can Be Bright, this year's set called Rites of Arrested Time will be published in the next volume of my poetry called . . . the eloquence of broken things . . . which is scheduled to be published in early Spring of 2017 by PRAETORIUS BOOKS.
praetoriusbooks@gamil.com
