Cruising the Thames, Nellie

[chrisann]

Tolerant of yarns, palms open
to words: Skeins,
raw, diaphonous folds

of colorless radiance
spill off cue, somewhere
far past the flicker.

The peripheral deep. Margins,
blighted and watermarked,
settle indifferences,

until words spin out into wide
grey currents, no infusion of gold
to steer them back, just a mist

at the mouth, and so few who push past
its pilgrim constructs of science
and faith, its distraction of deeds

that rivet fools to time, space, time.
This is how I enter the heart,
drift implacable surfaces to find

stillness that holds no center.
The soul's dumb watch,
a night-shift of stars that shatter

the rivulets, strike the helsman down.
As Nicodemus saw such light
to make him know his God by night,

so does this sordid business of words,
strung and held to a high minor-D,
allow us our choice of nightmares.

When the rod strikes and the heart
rings of this--nothing
underfoot--with the candor of revolt

the sadder, wiser apostles will gather
their stains, dregs, spoken names:
his Thames, their heart, her Nellie.

[dyerfrank]

There is a Novella by Joseph Conrad online and others have taken it up, even a photograph on flicker. A menage of thoughts, feelings and ideas mixed up with a garbled history of the Belgium Empire in the Congo. It starts off in England, gravitates to Brussels and ends up in that great or former great Congo River. During the journey the author meets head office and a doctor who thinks he can measure madness with a tape measure, he progresses to Africa and finds great number of natives employed in nonsensical work to no avail and he is stricken with this terrible despair. He tries to repair his broken down ship, using iron tools and opposed by the ignorant masses hiding in the jungle, but finall he comes to a place and then to a hut to find a book that is worth everything to him because it is real and not imaginary. This sound slike the holy grail in that all men seek this reason for living and when they die without finding such a book they die in darkness.
You have teased out some references to religion, and this seems to be your golden light. You despise the written word yet are obliged to use it in this attempt of a poem. The modern way of poetry is to present to the reader a puzzle to solve and to encrypt. And you have encrypted it well except for those passages and allusions to scripture. Nicodemus searching fearfully for his salvation by night, out of darkness into light.
I suppose in our worse dreams we will rattle around such thoughts and emotions that you propose in this poem. I long for the reality and fables of our Indian poet on this board who tells such delightful tales of a lost India, some sound quite crazy but we are on familiar ground there and enjoy the eccentric. Your poem is rather like the painting 'The Scream' and he used no words for that.
best wishes on the board

[Billy]

chrisann, this is the poem for me:

This is how I enter the heart,
drift implacable surfaces to find

stillness that holds no center.
The soul's dumb watch,
a night-shift of stars that shatter

the rivulets, strike the helsman down.
As Nicodemus saw such light
to make him know his God by night,

so does this sordid business of words,
strung and held to a high minor-D,
allow us our choice of nightmares.

When the rod strikes and the heart
rings of this--nothing
underfoot--with the candor of revolt

the sadder, wiser apostles will gather
their stains, dregs, spoken names:
his Thames, their heart, her Nellie.


I don't have to understand a poem--I don't understand this one--but I hope the poem has interesting language and sound. I'm not getting a lot of that in this poem. The last line befuddles me. I googled it and found an article about a Ford Thames that seems to be called Nellie by its owner. The part I've posted above has something I can put my teeth into somewhat.