BERNEVAL

With his impeccable horticultural acumen Richard Foerster takes the reader on a tour of a plant through both is parts in space and its development in time.

I first encountered the poem as the penultimate poem in The Burning of Troy. I then located it online in the Alabama Literary Review Volume 17 (Spring 2007) where I found it displayed in “couplets” or rather stanzas of two lines. For me, the sweep was lost. The white space lead to too much emphasis on the words at the end of lines which obscures some of the internal repetitions such as “seadrift” and “drift”. In the book, the poem is reminiscent of an ode with movements. The stanzas cohere as elemental shifts threaten to make the whole edifice explode — very like a poppy tossing its petals to the winds. But look at the endings of the stanzas for the metamorphosis is primely featured: “accidental loppings” “splendid seduction” “at a stroke, become” “rattling pods”. So the eye travels along the fuse.

Sometimes thinking about language means thinking about layout. The white space determines rhythm and whether or not the reader is invited to linger and simmer until the words are burned into memory crackling like brittle, rattling pods offered to a flame. One of these versions burns. The other sputters.

And so for day 1490
11.01.2011

Thomas Meyer
Essay Stanzas
“Kept Apart”
Invites us to contemplate the mythological.

Thousands of gods.
Worshiped. Adored. Adorned.
Then swept aside.

And then later, pages later, the interaction is particularized and the transitoriness rendered with even greater fragility…

[T]he goddess came down to earth
somewhat hesitantly.
And when she saw his face
blushed.
And softly stepped
upon his forehead
taking the form of snow.
A shower and silent mounds
of white petals.

A different book. Almost similar games with syntax and the cumulative effect of description.

Thomas Meyer
Kintsugi
“Open Door”

Lets it go. Seems to be enough
of whatever it takes.
What’s today? The road to nowhere.
Ever diminishing particulars. Not
like loosing memories. Losing
the pause in the day’s occupation.
A detail. An overlooked moment
recalled. That. That going.
Was going to leave it? Alone.
But turned. Decided no. Go on.
Unsure what was being avoided
then embraced—if that’s the word.

This reads almost like an interior dialogue of question and answer turning on the gentle attraction between going and losing: the semantic fields embrace each other.

And so for day 1489
10.01.2011

The reading of the poem benefits from the poet’s note:

“A Pot of Crocuses”: The women of ancient Athens celebrated the death and resurrection of Adonis in an annual springtime festival, during which they set out on their rooftops small pots of forced flowers. Because these “Adonis gardens” would soon wither under the heat of the April sun, the expression eventually was used to refer to any transitory pleasure.

With horticultural precision we enter the mythic.

the corms poke through the soil
like randy waking gods, their pale
phalluses swelling in the sun.

The narrator pivots from the flowers to observing a youth skateboarding who “slouched off / with raw, abraded palms toward home” and then muses upon gifting the pot of flowers to the mother of the skateboarder and thinks again of it — tripped up by intimations of ever-present mortality.

it wouldn’t have been for any promise

of beauty I had to offer, nor any
incorruptible idea of it,
nor even the cherished terra cotta
I’ve buried and retrieved these fifteen
years. For how could I have looked
him in the eyes, not knowing which
of these must end up broken first?

The pathos comes through in the imagined presentation of the gift, earlier in the poem. It impresses the viewer with a mooted dialogue:

Here, take these crocuses
to your mother, so she might forgive
the scarring a woman has to endure
to see a boy safely to manhood.
Instead, I stood there, wavering
with that crowded pot of spikes in my hands,
and knew if I had summoned him
it wouldn’t have been for any promise

And so we cross over into the concluding stanza and its retraction poised on the impossible question of the first to fall when we have been made so painfully aware that nothing lasts.

Richard Foerster. “A Pot of Crocuses” in The Burning of Troy

And so for day 1488
09.01.2011

Mind experiment. Thinking beyond thinking.

if you think of saffron
being crushed
or the pounding
of sugar cane
think of what
total annihilation
brings

“Kept Apart”
Essay Stanzas
Thomas Meyer

the dark watches
what the day
does at night
while the day
condemns the dark
for what goes on then
but the dark
simply laughs away
this scorn
bursting into flame

Out of void into dialectic. The lie.

The poet strays into negative theology territory
and with wry humour stumbles away again.
Pages apart.

And so for day 1487
08.01.2011

By a bedside in a hospital room

where monitors peeped like famished birds

Richard Foerster. The Burning of Troy. “Vigil”

And so for day 1484
05.01.2011

Gregory Orr. Orpheus and Eurydice

What is remarkable is the reinvigorating of the unremarkable, quotidian. The magic of myth is close at hand. Consider “The Entrance to the Underworld” and its location: the beginning of love.

You were looking in the wrong
world. It was inside
you — entrance
to that cavern
deeper than hell,
more dark and lonely.
Didn’t you feel it open
at her first touch?

Later in the sequence the reader is offered the startling simile of snake and bracelet clasp. Still intriguing how the mundane is transformed into myth. Simple pacing of language to lead us there.

A snake no bigger
than a bracelet
of braided gold
unfastened and cast aside
in the haste of love …

The bite itself — only
the pinprick
you might feel
stepping barefoot
on the open clasp.

In the first case, love is signalled by the metonymy of touch; in the second, it is explicitly named, but in a hurry, in haste, through its provocations. And that brief mention in the conceit constructed by the poem is so tiny, a mere passing: one line followed by marks of suspension. Fleeting.

And so for day 1483
04.01.2011