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."

Back to the trees!
          As the season pass I keep to my determination to look closely at the changes that I see in the trees which surround me (well, on one side) as I drink my after-swim cup of tea.
          Spring has produced quite a few pages of notes, but not many poems.  This poem is based on ideas in my notebook and it links to thoughts that seem to go through many of my 'Tree' poems.
          The basic idea in this poem came from simple observation.  The newly laid concrete which now surrounds the surviving trees in my local leisure centre is an idea canvas to pick up the shadows of the trees.  I was surprised to see that the shadows did not exactly correspond to the actual trees.  The shadows were as if there was not vegetation on the branches at all, just the jagged lightning / of twisted trunks - the light seems to be ignoring the new growth entirely.  When I looked more closely I could see that there was a sort of blurring to some of the branches which had new leaves on them, the shadow of which reminded me of the depiction of sound waves - those vertical lines threaded together by a horizontal median line.
          I am also fascinated by the speed of growth.  The trees look different every day now that spring is accelerating, but our lives are too fast to see or hear the growth while it is happening and we are observing.  That is the paradox that I try to suggest in the last few lines.
          This is a sonnet like poem and I worked to keep the lines to the necessary 14 because I felt that the form had something to say about the content.

New leaf

The too-small, rubbled green has

not found fulcrum taut enough

to bend around in moving air. 

The season’s grind and push thrusts

decoration on the twigs; stuck on

as if to give the right impression

for the time of year.

The sun attempts to scorn such ghostly growth:

stark contrasts thrown by midday glare

on blank cement are jagged lightning

of twisted trunks – but branches now can

shadow etch as the articulating growth

draws sound waves on hard ground

for eyes to hear what dull, closed ears cannot.

 I wonder if this poem is too obscure and the central (for me) image of the shadowy sound wave too difficult to discern without explanation?  Not sure.  Perhaps I'll read this one to the Poetry Group and get a reaction from them.