poem – Page 44 – don't confuse the narrator

squaring the spiral

It’s Sunday evening and I still haven’t posted anything on the blog this weekend. I’ve been out and walked and taken pictures – it was the most glorious morning here today – but I haven’t written anything. There are too many impossible tasks to deal with at the moment and the words seem to have slipped through the cracks.

So, with impossible tasks in mind, I thought of squaring the circle, and from there it was a short jump to this photo:

And from there it’s a short jump onwards to an old poem which has appeared both here and elsewhere on the web before, but seems relevant enough to justify reposting:

Elliptical Thoughts

The lives of parallel lines are uneventful:
no sudden twists or unexpected turns disturb
their single track monotony. And yet they dream
of non-Euclidean space where rules are bent
and of that infinite horizon where, at last, they’ll coincide.

Concentric circles, on the other hand, have
no such hyperbolic hope. They know their limitations.
Destined to be solitary cranks, they circumlocate,
make roundabout excuses and observe their fellows
from a distance. They never socialise.

timber!

I went for a walk the other evening and found my path blocked by a tree.

There are, of course, a host of literary connections I could make: Birnam Wood; the Ents of Middle-Earth; the “very, very country dance” of the Narnian trees that Lucy dances her way through to reach Aslan in Prince Caspian; the trees that “walk[…] down the side of the cutting” in the landslide scene of The Railway Children…
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in Catalonia II

L’Escala: thunder blue,
the Mediterranean
beat her lace-frilled cuffs against
the coast’s ridged washboard rocks
while the cobla band played on
in brassy silence.

You’ll find a couple of other poetry fragments from my recent trip to Catalonia if you click here.

memories

Spring pours sunshine
through the woods to dapple
on my polished shoes.

I hear birdsong echo
children’s laughter; green
is a scent, a taste
fresh on my tongue.

(The opening lines of an old poem.)

pigging out

el museo del jamón

The Ham Museum is a shrine
to swine: crimson haunches hang
in the swelter of strip lights; fat leaks
dripping into plastic cones while
an unobtrusive bustle of barstaff
serve the gathered worshippers.
With ritual gesturing, slim-bladed
knives skim iridescent curves.
Glasses are raised in veneration
of marbled flesh, and wafers
of translucent succulence dissolve
as devotees discuss the mysteries
of the world.

The (draft) poem is loosely based on a chain of bars in Spain, while the pig in the picture was photographed some time last year sitting on a table outside an English restaurant/wine bar/pub… Actually, I’m not sure what the Almanack should be classed as, but it’s worth a visit if you are in the area. It caters for a rather wider range of tastes than does the Museo del Jamón.