Poem 155

I don’t remember writing this poem and coming across it couldn’t believe it … I did this? I did this in 1984 in the midst of writing a crazy three hundred poems that year and I didn’t do anything with it, didn’t even put it in my end of year portfolio? WTFF? …

… but I know what my thinking would have been – this is Yeatsian in form, also early or mid-phase James K Baxter but decidedly not what was fresh and all the go in the poetry journals of the eighties … those Greek mythology references definitely not the way to cut a swathe …

… but time has a way of levelling everything – a hundred years later or even forty years later who cares any more? So I’m working in an old form, a classic form – but I nailed it …

… hats off to you young man, I think this is amazing …

Charybdis

Odysseus's arms must have ached
clinging to the trunk of the fig tree
when the guzzling mouth of Charybdis
drank down to the roots of the sea

his feet couldn't find a resting place
and the branches flowered out of reach overhead
his gaze fell far down to the black snaky streams
that writhed on the stinking seabed

Odysseus's wait was ended
Charybdis spewed back his wreck
but I begin to see that a turn of the tide
is more than I can expect

a seamless cliff a withered tree
when you go away from me