Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Can a poem be really all that impregnable?

As Jung very aptly describes, " [the poet] must resort to an imagery that is difficult to handle and full of contradictions in order to express the weird paradoxicality of his vision". By vision the great man hadn't meant to align significant poetry with religion. The visional has a much deeper parentage than that. And by image he'd had more in mind than ordinary sense perception, the stuff of which mediocre art is ordinarily made anyways.

I once saw the truth in this when, on reprinting an old poem entitled "Charcoal print", I tried (stupidly enough!) to keep a whole complex of feelings separate from a  charcoal print that had evinced it. As if, ensconced in verses, the subject of the portrait hadn't really been all that "difficult to handle". And, almost a decade later, as if she'd disappeared altogether. I thought I could look with complete equanimity now on the storm that had generated it.

I will say one thing about it, however: the vision's never looked so revelatory to me almost a decade later.
____________________

Charcoal print

I lost the blackish-white, luscious, in a word
  & see now under coal eyes
lips that scowl (if charcoal lips can!), a neck stretch

 She'd try to see me, too— 
  for she's angular, keen & all that, from hairline to chin
but cruel as a crow's underwing; luscious
  & neat down to a blind hem

I lost that, too

There must be something, after the carnage 
  in a brow's spectral ash,
or smudgy nose, at the least, to connect with
  (& save me from the storms)
Can the blackish eyes have ever been right?
They weren't;

  I felt the collapse

Sweetish-grey is the near absent nose, her upper lip
  that didn't crush entirely,
sparing viewer but didn't let go of me, either
  No wonder the many potential poets, 
me among them, see her go, too, sweetish one
  with black rose in each eye,
crude pasty brow

 Problem is she's written in it, in blackish-white,
  already a role (that of 'loved' or 'not') 
you get the minute you look

Which I did & then lost

  And stout skies, outside my window,
flat-bottomed & heading steadily for shore, whenever I looked,
  let me know it!

  Rigid, adored in charcoal, & she let me know it


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