How to Write a Poem in Seventeen Parts
January 9, 2008*
Fibreboard people
Talk while
They walk in
Folded lines
Suspended over a
Chasm
*
Something unexpected has happened. After many years of rigidly adhering to the principle - or the practice let’s call it - of not doodling I now find that I habitually doodle whenever I have a spare moment and pen or pencil and paper to hand. Doodling and travelling by train inform the central questions of a life as ceaselessly mysterious to me as numbers. Office space has reached a kind of high tide; it laps at my body real as opposed to imaginary introducing itself as the true element of thought in tangled and wavy lines that seem to hang in the air for unexpected periods of inactivity. The thing is, I find them interesting. Not so much because these scribbles suggest a key to the unconscious as much as because they are simply aesthetic. Each doodle seems to represent a mental disengagement: a cessation of fatuity. Something that I could never consciously plan but that all the same emerges indifferently, whenever I stop for anything. Discontinuous. That is the virtue of these lines. The avoidance of linear thought. Nothing is represented. Just a bare tangle.
A thorn bush.
It is in the process that energy is concentrated, I find. Here is another image. A fireman’s hose, if I may. If thinking is to be compared to digestion than its product is energy; and energy is only energy as directed: like the water out of a fireman’s hose obviously but in order to spray, to put out, the ether.
A rose head.
The knock - the knock came at the door - at the door it came sharply. Three, like three fingers. Followed by a long silence. Steps on a tiled floor. As of heeled shoes. Were they angry? What were their thoughts? They sounded cold and heartless, those steps, like the cracks of a whip, but perhaps they weren’t; perhaps in that hollow sound one would find a warm heart, a smile? The pause extended. Three steps; but to another door. Rat a tat tat! Silence. Out the back window nothing but the trees and rain and the sodden ground.
A compass eye.
A pond green with algae, sometimes it’s as thick as flock wallpaper: or the green of plastic; such as a mat one finds in a gymn. One could almost walk on it. Today, after much rain, the green has thinned. Water is visible and clear, black under it, fresh and deep. Two ducks, mallard and female, make their way across it in companionable silence. The shoots of lillies mark their side of the pond like head-dresses.
The oiled feather.
*
Open shut
Horse
Trading lanes
Fibreboard people
Talk while
They walk
Tags: Drawing, Philosophy
