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Alistair Paterson

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On reading Robert Bly’s Selected Poems while sitting at a desk near a calendar bearing photographs of boats and the shadows of boats on water

On the calendar is a boat sailing
its sails are transparent, white with the sun behind them -
are membranes as of leaves, dried
and fallen in autumn:
and these are images common on your continent
where there is an autumn - a real autumn -
‘fall’, as you call it, presumably because of the leaves …

Trees and leaves, water, the language of poets
which I’ve forgotten (perhaps never knew)
and with them these pictures of boats -
boats and autumn and at the end of it all, this book
(your book) which reminds me of meeting you
somewhere in upstate New York, near Buffalo after a reading
in October, in autumn, the American ‘fall’...

You will have forgotten it (the reading)
and the irony of it, of a postmodern, a poet
of the seventies and eighties strumming a guitar
with such ease, such indifference - ‘folksy’ if that’s the word - and
reading from the Elizabethans (Donne and Marvell)
as exemplars of the way to do it -
of the way it ought to be done …

And whoever they are the people in these boats
in these fore-and-afters, brigantines, square riggers
who wander vast distances, the blue of the sky -
whoever they are it’s almost certain not one of them
attended your reading in Buffalo:
jongleurs and poets they wander the sky and the blue sea
alone forever, forever alone ...

 

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