there is something we can talk about
Wherefore profanity’s Emory Cloth caress,
you’d never like me
for more than about a day,
rough in the chat and soft in the sack
like me, too many poems (and this is one)
ache to tell you something:
the peaches are rotting,
the dock is lose of its pilings,
the veranda is collapsing into the lake;
so be warned (there is enough fact to go ‘round).
We agreed on your jet tresses,
us sweat-spent in your tawny quarters,
as I thought of The Alexandria Quartet
the island, the inventions of summer,
Clea in some colonial bedroom
but there’s not one truth in this passel
of wonder for an author,
a temporally correct racist, sexist, imperial European,
a writer of some renown,
punctured by Sappho’s j’accuse,
Durrell, a favourite of my high school crew.
Later in ever-correcting circles
some of us swapped him out for Ondaatje
but the tug of the tale remained,
like the taste of you ten years on,
a desert of ground cardamom
a forest of drenched cedar,
the sour burn of Salal berries on my tongue.
August 15th, 2009 at 9:55 am
I can’t claim to understand this poem, or most of the others on your site, my experience of poems being rather limited, but I will say that you have kept at it, and seem to continue developing with words. You seem to be able to conjure up phrases that ring, or at least jingle, if that is the right word, with ideas and pictures, and I like your poems about trees and natural sights and sounds. I tried reading Durrel some years back, but found him rather heavy going. I don’t know much about Ondaatje, except for that one he wrote about a baseball player called Jackson, but “the tug of the tale” is very clear.