Untitled statement for Grain

“Is not every child who dies a natural death slain by an angel?” So says William Blake. If an angel informs my poems then it is just such a one as this. Not at all the simpering coy creature who adorns so many greeting cards.

Yes, an angel sat on a window sill, beckoning with flaming fingers, encouraging the young poet to fling herself headlong. An angel, of course, is not god and therefore cannot command but may indeed cajole and deceive and flash as often as he/she wishes. An angel may even get behind you and push you off a cliff, perhaps taking the form of a mother pterodactyl teaching her offspring to fly, or at least to soar on the upward draft of the wind of the mind.

What does the poet need – what are in fact these wings composed of? One is the intellect, the other the imagination ... or one is language, the other meaning ... or ...? The important thing after all is that they beat together, that they are a pair and, if not perfectly matched, then at least in some way balanced; otherwise the soaring spirit will suddenly stop and spiral down to the death of the poem. Sweet is the poem and terrible its fall. Poor limp thing can it ever be revived, or will it survive as a mere zombie of a work?

To those of us whose curiosity drives us to read all about the imagined worlds of physicists and astronomers, how poetic indeed are the many ways these scientific minds construct our universe. But then what is this universe constructed of – or with? Stardust? Speculation? Deduction? The universe, I may say my universe, could be expressed as one single poem, but one read by innumerable minds: a universe therefore as repetitive and various as the thorns on a bush, the fins on a shark, the blots and curves of the inimitable Mr. Mandelbrot’s set. A fractal, a poem, a dream – do we get a choice? I, of course, being a maker, choose the word.

(1998)