Some News From Another World
"For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgiven, even love." - W.H. Auden[1]
Adrienne, I am growing tomatoes, the last of them, before winter ellipses all warmth from the days. And in their shade, along with the earthworm, a burrowing silence drills and drills.
I know this enthusiasm for earth, and its vegetal matter we - a framer's grandson and a musician's daughter - don't share. But love for me is an extension of this hard labor, the weight of which I carry for joy, a sowing, and its delayed reaping, if weathers permit.
I bend over the green stems with their fumy smells as I grow colder at the edges, a haunting like the blackness of an icon's eye. What music did I expect to give you, one who can play Bach blindfolded; arias in airy cathedrals when all I know how to do is chop wood?
But if I manage to keep my sanity and these tomatoes from pestilence, when this season is done and bones of this world are embraced by ice, come by for some stew and silence. And in the shadows of fires we can try to remember those memories we will have forgotten out of love.
for N
[1] from Auden's "Canzone"
My Poems
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Bombay Beauty
come by for some stew and silence
I like this very much. It's a tense I favor in my own writing as well: come by for some stew and silence. / And in the shadows of fires we can try to remember those memories we will have forgotten out of love."
Present, looking forward, to a remembered past.
BB
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If you write
let's see some of it too! That said, I sometimes wonder if what I write has a consistent "voice" in the reader's ear?!
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since you asked the question. i think you have a "consistent" voice. my preference tends to be emotional consistency inside, external inconsistency - although i have been gradually moving away from that as i like myself more and more and seeing that internal and external consistencies are matching better. achieving external inconsistency is a deliberate and conscious thing. extracting the words from another person "for me it is like being an antropologist from mars. i force myself to use the grammar of a foreign language, a language that others may find instinctive". still, as a reader, i do like your consistency. please do not change, or at the very least, keep coming back to your internal consistency every once in a while. it is quite pleasant.
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