THE AMBULANCE - NEW POEM

THE AMBULANCE

I’d tend to draw it out

As something pregnant, freighted,

A thing that lodges in the heart

When seen, a bad luck image

That hurts the eye; meaning

Nothing ever very good, usually

Worse than that. Many moving vehicles

Carry ideas in their stride, ambulances

Tend to show more than they hide,

Flashing their bright yellow jackets

Of urgent care, implying pain.

You don’t fix what isn’t broken,

They say, as they speed, make way

For someone else’s trouble, yours

Can wait. We duly step aside, to see

Another world’s quickly departing emergencies.

But today, down the hall, where my window is,

An office now, jerry-built for Covid-times,

Stacked high with papers, books and debts

It’s hard to pay when sales are down,

And books stamped non-essential, hardly,

It slipped a blue swift bird of lights, velocity,

Across my line of sight like a beautiful apprehension

That the natural world, and the world we save,

Are, if not one, then almost the same, and this bird

I glimpsed, fleeting as any arrow shot through woods,

Was branching its own tree as it fled down

Streets to hit some target where they lay, to bury

Deep into the moment a stop or start, carefully

Like any flying creature lands, who also owns the air.

November 13, 2020

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

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"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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