Saturday, April 11, 2009

Three poems from a virus-struck time, and self-portraits in the new toaster. There doesn't have to be a point...

Feeling much better, thanks.

Three bits and pieces from the time.

Early

Thresheld, standing between the mist
and the brown, unleavened content
of the house, when a bird comes,
circles, its wings lapping slowly,
then resolves into the haze.

Morning myopic, blurred, its shape,
movement, nature, all slip
between my vision's fingers.

Grudgingly grateful, I accept
the gift of unknowing.

[Too many drafts, can't tell which is best. The curse of needing to know what birds are...]



Idling

Cutting nails by the bedroom window, dropping
the ragged crescents into the mauve plastic bin,
I enumerate my fingerprints: left,
three right loops, one to the left,
with an egregious whorl on the wedding ring finger;
right, four leftward loops and a double one right on the index.

My sight hops, skips and jumps out of the window,
to dug earth, tree and cloud shapes.


Honey and water

Honey and water, simple, a simple,
hotter and sweeter than blood.
Makes no claims, no demands
to heal, raise, restore, drive out the invader,
or furnish with riches, just offers
kindness.


~~~
The old toaster summarily threw the trip switch twice and was equally summarily dispatched to the waiting room for the déchetterie. The hot-cross buns for Friday's breakfast had to be grilled on the stovetop. It's replacement is twice the size, which means no more juggling keeping one batch hot while preparing the next.

However, when divested of its packaging, it proved to have a dent in its otherwise flawless stainless steel surface. Mild gnashing of teeth, but toast for the weekend was more important than driving all the way back to the supermarket to grumble about it.
And I became beguiled by the interesting distortions the dent produced, and tried to capture them.





I have dreamed a couple of times lately that I have forgotten the camera, left it behind somewhere. Absent minded and inclined to forget my head as I am, I never, touchwood, have been known to forget the camera, I take good care of it.

But I am forgetting to use it, or just not bothering with it as much. I am beset with the sense that either the pictures are pointless, or I've already taken them, there's nothing new. I toy with the idea of upgrading, getting something fancier, in the belief it will renew my motivation, which is probably a mistake.

I think the dreams may be saying I need to redress this, and take the pictures anyway, that I and the camera are missing one another. Hence daft pictures of dented toasters, and maybe other equally inconsequential things to come...

10 comments:

Zhoen said...

A charming flaw.

I have the same photo-reluctance.

I challenge you to take sensory photos this week, what do you see, taste, smell, feel, hear?

The Crow said...

In both the writing and the photos, I see delightful, revealing glimpses of you! Because of that, I'm glad the toaster is dented.

:D

Granny J said...

As the dented toaster has told you, nothing is inconsequential to a camera. Pay attention to the dream and keep your camera busy peering every which way.

Lee said...

It's the imperfections that make life interesting!

Roderick Robinson said...

For reasons that have become irritating to those flicking through my blog, I paid much more attention to your poetry and was rewarded. I doubt I could have written "egregious whorls" but the impulse to do so is presently struggling like one of those elusive green shoots. Playing with five-dollar words is a possibility and the delight. Better still, you prove that any subject is just another possibility, the mundaner the better. Nail cutting, yes! I am tempted by a metrical account of coughing but perhaps hypochondria represents a step too far. However a poem about French hypochondria, a topic woven into the national character, would be goer and The Spectator would buy it. Clenching my teeth, may I ask how long the nail-cutting one took?

meg said...

Delightful meander.

Dave said...

I love those three poems, Lucy, and the photos too. Great post.

Lucy said...

Thanks.

Z - that is an excellent idea, which I shall take you up on.

Crow - It works just as well anyway...!

GJ - yes, as you so often show.

Lee - Yes, I wasn't really bothered by the dent!

BB - I look forward to you poems! I wondered of course about 'egregious', but thought that in a whimsiacl poem I could get away with an OTT word. I was perhaps ,most concerned about confessing to owning a mauve plastic bin, which is perfectly serviceable but sounds awful; such reluctance though often is an indicator one should include something! How long? Well it's always hard to say isn't it? Not too many drafts for that one, it was only a light one, but you think of an idea at a certain moment, jot down the mnemonics, come back to it, think some more, write a bit more, do some editing, edit again when you finally type it... I don't really note the time or remember the order of things...
French hypochondria, hmm. I could write one perhaps for my neighbour when, as the archetypal creaking gate hypochondriac she finally drops of her hinges. I don't get ill very often, but find I get rather interested in it when I do...

Meg - Thanks, nice to see you!

Dave - now when I come to think, I may have plagiarised you on the nail clippings... I seem to remember you ahd a good response to yours, and said perhaps you should work bodily functions into your poems more often, to which one of your longterm readers replied that no-one worked bodily functions into poems more often than you did! But thank you.

Dick said...

Delightful poems, Lucy, all three redolent of your equally delightful photos - serene, personal, minutely observant. Listen to the dreams.

Sheila said...

I can't say that I would have recognized you in the toaster photos, to be honest.