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from Dunedin Sonnets
Offset connections to the real,
it’s not a center you can make yourself,
attempting veracity and true feeling,
words come out this way
interpreted sweet or sour, the touch of maybe.
I yield to power as you push off
into strangeness. I catch up on reading
the post modern hour. I train the imagination.
I moved in here. I gleaned the myths.
A domestic episode lengthens in shadows,
the details of naturally lit rooms,
art’s stable home, all in contrast to life’s sometime monochrome,
love drained of colour,
I’m fading into age with flowery bursts of fulsomeness.
You know I searched for you,
how language is the sea that unites us,
I saved your footprints in the frosty meadow,
I addressed a loving embrace
to the present in the past
no getting back the feelings and beliefs,
oneself suspended in meaning
the touched surfaces of skin, the satiny imagining,
the golden promises of flesh.
What is love if not an enigma
and all for love the dreams of conquest
and all for love the dreams of freedom,
an open archeology of the life I lived,
the missed prompts, the muffed line, the mysterious
Resplendent mundane necessity,
almost forgotten jottings of a local neighbourhood,
picture postcards, rhythms scored by chance
all the artist’s eye locates in place,
a poetry of landscape, neither real or ideal,
but moved by the will of art,
just so, to believe, provincial coincidence,
marks off the suburb, a preference here,
a way of unique expression, bric-a-brac
of might have been, aspirants to power,
transposed by ideal placement.
Three cheers for Charles and Andrew,
Yvette Williams attempts a broad jump record,
in front of the Royal Box.
The jazz of cool space,
a time to be inside and see whatever view
a person is, unfixed and turning.
Life is a taste, a warm face, someone who stands for him or herself in place
as a hero or heroine.
To stand up and count for men and women
a building institution or an outstanding mission
to represent us most perfectly human, reprehensible, maybe
mean and greedy I do not dream you said.
I do not have wishes beyond entitlement.
I stand agape, believing in both myself and yourself
dreaming awake in the dreams of God
dreaming for you, taking you up
in the uncertain lullaby of my life.
[work-in-progress, previously uncollected]
© Rob Allan 2004 |
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