Poem: The Same River, Twice?
Books & Poetry
This week’s Poet’s Corner contributor, Carol Rumens, looks at the eternal but varied situations of love. In one poem she considers love over time and geographical distance; in another, the poet’s risk of love for words themselves, to the exclusion of all else.
The Same River, Twice?
Grey spring again. A year since I first loved him,
she writes. What is it mocks us at those moments
to make the love-word easy? It shouldn’t be easy.
She could tear it all down to a childhood crisis,
admit to nothing but a book, a voice,
an anxious public face. She could argue: love creates
itself. It’s faith, not wages. Some people
feel God like this. She’s tired of praying. Love,
when the name occurs, is already spring, already
dust-sick fall.
I was walking beside the river
in a place I knew I’d leave within the year.
And now it’s a cycle-track, and the heavy river
not the same. (But the sky is almost the same –
smoke and pearl.) And it still surprises me,
as if it had just occurred. I think it’s a form
of remembering, love. There. This shouldn’t offend
your rational, ethical gods. You know spring happens.
This was the year when I remembered you often,
and all my mental workings settled round you
like the fragile industries the river breeds –
not generating fortunes; often not breaking even.
And If It Was
If it was only for you
all along, all the time, all the way,
and nothing was left of our brightest exchange
of brain-light and blood-sugar; if
it turned out to be just for the flirt and the fling, the great luck
when it worked, when we came, and I caught
the whiff of your sweat, like human sweat,
and your glow, saw your feathers and hair
flare like an Inca head-dress, though
no more than a match-flame, over and out, not catching
anyone’s fire but mine, any time but now,
would you forgive me, words?
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Carol Rumens lives in north Wales, between the island of Anglesey and the Snowdonia National Park. She is a Fellow of the UK Royal Society of Literature and a current Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her most recent collection of poetry, her 14th, was “De Chirico’s Threads” from Seren Books in 2010. She has also published translations of Russian poetry and is a regular contributor to Britain’s Poetry Review and The Guardian Books Online.
Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to poetscorner@solsticemedia.com.au. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.
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