The Friday Influence

Evening on the Farm – Bert Meyers

Time for a jacket now,

and to put my hands away.

I must learn from the stars

how a field should look.

But one by one, bright children,

the stars rush downstairs

to meet my horses and hay

with an astonished eye.

***

Tomorrow is Poem in Your Pocket Day and I have taken it upon myself to pass out poems to my co-workers.  I have selected who gets what in terms of their respective astrological signs (told you I was a geek).  Seeing as I don’t work with any Pisces, and I simply marvel at the poem, I am choosing the above as my selection.

The late Bert Meyers was a master of images.  His collected poems, In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat, is essential for anyone who enjoys not only great images but solid lyric poetry.  As Denise Levertov points out in her introduction:

“It is a mark of the most profound poetic instinct to comprehend, in the act of making poems, the degrees of analogy: and so to avoid muffling the perception of coalescence, which demands metaphor, with the word ‘like’; or, on the other hand, failing to note resemblance with the appropriate figure of speech, simile…Meyers’ intuition in this…seems to have been faultless.”

You see this mastery in the lines above: how easily “bright children” is followed by “stars” tumbling downstairs, all of it leading up to that “astonished eye” at the end, the words evoking an image through sheer magnetism it seems.

***

In other news, the open mic was a bust.  Nuff said.

I have, instead, taken to reading aloud the Rimbaud I’m in the middle of.  It’s colorful, to say the least.  We’ll see if it helps.  Here are some choice lines of his that took me back to dark times in Texas:

I made up rhymes in dark and scary places,

And like a lyre I plucked the tired laces

Of my worn-out shoes, one foot beneath my heart.     (from “Wandering”)

***

What will be in your pocket?

J