Alone in the City

I’m a great fan of Edward Hopper’s art: those images of solitary people in city venues are haunting. There is so much emptiness, sparseness in his pictures; his people caged in the emptiness. I have often sat looking at reproductions of these, they move me; yet when I went to write a poem on a similar theme, it came out crowded: more influenced by urban jazz and its motor-junk sound than by those wonderful images.
Funny that, writing poetry is often more about letting it happen in your head than directing it. The subject matter seems to negotiate the furniture in your head and emerge as it will.

City Lives.

They shout into space,
answer each other like whales
across great haunted distances;
they never meet,
only sound waves ever meet.

Alone in their canyons,
hives,
shoals
they roar.
Rooms upon rooms
upon houses upon houses
upon streets upon streets:
roars spilling out,
spilling over,
spilling down.

A million sound waves,
a million discordancies
tumbling, surging,
pouring out
onto the streets,
into the traffic,
wheels, cogs, pistons:

the cannibal jazz
of cities.

Heightened Vision

Heightened vision. And seeing everything around you as part of the texture of your life.(Too much texture.) The minutest detail magnified, and considered like a tiny echo of the main argument in your head. This lucidity that can be part of the dam-burst of a lover’s quarrel.If you see it coming, get out of the way.





Seeing............

(part of my love story)

discarded matches on the pub floor,
reflections in gutters,
cobwebs in the corners of ceilings,
petals shed and shriveling,
railings’ wrought iron curlicues,
broken windows, tattered curtains,
carrier bags snagged on branches,
the moon running along beside me,
heron one-legged by the pond,
a glove on the footpath;

each fleck, speck, flaw in your argument;
every minute branded, second burned
as thoroughly as a pipe smoker’s match.


I would like to refer back a few posts to July 1st, Autumn Conversations; it seems I posted an earlier version of the poem, not the one that was finally published in the Sunday Tribune. So for anyone interested, I've made the changes.