Maybe because I'm worrying an adult/youth poem of my own I find myself caught up in your varied music—the movement, line by line, from tentativeness to the rhythmic solidity of "she will be"—a sort of anxious solidity: the knowledge that the future will happen to the niece as it happens to us all, and it's unlikely to be pretty. Wonderful!
Thinking of Dick Hugo’s Triggering Town: If I had my niece around more often, I wouldn’t need any other stimuli to knock my not so innocent "adult" senses dead.
Having said that, thanks for sharing your adult wisdom on this one!
Speaking of time, here's some background on this old oak table. It was built last summer by a friend out of the original 200+ year old roofing from Sebastian Barker’s house in Sitochori, a village about 30 minutes due northwest from Meligalas; when Sebastian bought the house thirty-years ago, he had a new roof put in according to the original plan and gave us some of the dismantled timber about ten years ago. The slabs and beams had been left exposed to the weather in a corner of our garden until our friend volunteered to use a portion of them to make the table.
Here’s what Sebastian has to say about the restoration of the house in the author’s note from his latest book, A Monastery of Light: The Sitochori Poems, published by The Bow-Wow Shop, London, 2012.
“In 1983, inspired by the modern Greek poets, I drove to Greece and brought a ruin in the mountains of the south west Peloponnese for £780. The original building dated from 1789 but it had been a ruin for 60 years. With the help of the villagers, led by Agathon ‘Rathana’ Liatsos, I re-built the house. They and I saw to it that the restoration was done according to the old traditions. I became intimately familiar with every stone, beam, tile, pipe, wire, and so on, making up the fabric of the finished building. The inside lining of the new roof, for example, was made of bamboo. There was a garden of 500 square metres, much of it cactus. This was to be my home from home for the next 30 years.”
In that shadow of a doubt there lurks the hard truth about so-called adulthood.
ReplyDeleteThe iron links of the chains that bind us are forged in that same endarkened dumbfoundry.
It all comes down (alas) to a question not of whether, but when.
Maybe because I'm worrying an adult/youth poem of my own I find myself caught up in your varied music—the movement, line by line, from tentativeness to the rhythmic solidity of "she will be"—a sort of anxious solidity: the knowledge that the future will happen to the niece as it happens to us all, and it's unlikely to be pretty. Wonderful!
ReplyDeleteThinking of Dick Hugo’s Triggering Town: If I had my niece around more often, I wouldn’t need any other stimuli to knock my not so innocent "adult" senses dead.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, thanks for sharing your adult wisdom on this one!
Judas flowers on
ReplyDeleteOld warped oak
Time's treachery is very beautiful in this picture.
Thanks, Duncan.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of time, here's some background on this old oak table. It was built last summer by a friend out of the original 200+ year old roofing from Sebastian Barker’s house in Sitochori, a village about 30 minutes due northwest from Meligalas; when Sebastian bought the house thirty-years ago, he had a new roof put in according to the original plan and gave us some of the dismantled timber about ten years ago. The slabs and beams had been left exposed to the weather in a corner of our garden until our friend volunteered to use a portion of them to make the table.
Here’s what Sebastian has to say about the restoration of the house in the author’s note from his latest book, A Monastery of Light: The Sitochori Poems, published by The Bow-Wow Shop, London, 2012.
“In 1983, inspired by the modern Greek poets, I drove to Greece and brought a ruin in the mountains of the south west Peloponnese for £780. The original building dated from 1789 but it had been a ruin for 60 years. With the help of the villagers, led by Agathon ‘Rathana’ Liatsos, I re-built the house. They and I saw to it that the restoration was done according to the old traditions. I became intimately familiar with every stone, beam, tile, pipe, wire, and so on, making up the fabric of the finished building. The inside lining of the new roof, for example, was made of bamboo. There was a garden of 500 square metres, much of it cactus. This was to be my home from home for the next 30 years.”