Things
I fumble in my mind for things
long lost in an upper attic.
I can no longer read the words
I wrote. What does this mean?
At night I dream of things
beyond my reach. My fingers
clutch but cannot clasp
those clouds that clutter.
Who, oh who, the owl cries,
can free the mice that nibble
through my mind and set me
gnawing at my own soul?
Once upon a time, a long
time ago, I thought I saw light
at the end of the tunnel.
I travelled on a ghost train.
The light I saw was a gaslight
ghosting my mind with fictional
fantasies of an illusive kingdom
that would never be mine.
Elusive, these memories of things
that never were, but might have been.
Will o’ the wisps dancing shadows
on the salt-marsh of my unknown life.
Commentary:
Memory loss. I guess it happens to all of us at one time or another. One of my long-lost friends visited yesterday and between us we could hardly put two consecutive memories together. Every other sentence was punctuated with a pause – ‘Now, when did that happen?’ ‘What was his name? I can’t remember now.’ ‘Me neither.’
I am not particularly worried by such happenings. I am a poet and a story-teller. Sometimes, I forget the truth – so what? – I just go ahead and reinvent it, tickling it here, sticking a spot of paint there, adding a word or two, or a magic moment. I often remind myself of Oscar Wilde when he created a magic moment of verbal ingenuity – “I wish I had said that, Oscar.” “You will, Roger, you will.”
Best of all, even in those moments when personal memories fail me, literary magic returns. I think of Dylan Thomas and his words spring to my mind – ‘time has ticked a heaven round the stars’. Wonderful. Or Francisco de Quevedo ‘soy un fué, y un será, y un es cansado.’ / ‘Tired I was, tired I am, tired I always will be.’ My own translation from the summer of 1963 when José Manuel Blecua introduced me to the poem, or rather Blecua introduced the poem to me, in that summer’s courses of the UIMP.
So, according to this theory, even when you feel lost, you are never really lost, because there are an enormous number of people living inside your head, who who will step out from the shadows, when needed, and give your memory a little boost. But don’t get too carried away. Think too of José María Valverde and his poetic premonition: ‘Pobres poetas de hoy, destinados a ser polvo seco de tesis doctoral.’ / ‘Poor poets of today, destined to be the dry dust of doctoral theses.’ (My translation).
Dust to dust and ashes to ashes – ‘Serán ceniza, pero tendrá sentido. Polvo serán, pero polvo enamorado.’ Quevedo, of course. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. You might need me to help you with the translation, though – ‘Ashes they’ll be, but ashes with feeling. They will be dust, but dust that burns with love.’ (My translation, with a little bit of exaggeration [sorry, don Francisco!] just at the end.)
rogermoorepoet 