Poem 279

I really like this poem – though it’s a little bit obscure … the Pardoner is from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a man who deals in splinters of the true cross, bones of saints and other dubious relics … I’m using it to think about what happens after a marriage ends, how there can be a power struggle over the public view of the relationship and its demise – history belongs to those who write it and whoever gets their story out most effectively wins the battle of representation … so here the Pardoner’s ex-wife outmanoeuvres him, beats him at his own game, disseminates her version and successfully takes the moral high ground … he sees what was his live relationship, organic and complex, rendered ossified and two-dimensional, the fault now and forever attached to him and his truth defeated by accepted and received ‘history’ (the irony being that this is exactly what his bogus cut-and-dried theology has done to the living blood of the Christ story – see Poem 224 and Poem 103 for similar musings on this theme …

( I like the colour of this poem – three mentions of yellow and one of gold – and the impression that gives of musty anti-life … also the sense the Pardoner gets of being pulled apart, not owning his emotional body, blocked at every turn from moving forward yet aware there is now no live way back … )

The Pardoner’s Divorce

She is rattling my bones
in a tin
             all the dry relics
of our time idiot stations of our cross
grossly blown into a motorway

she outsold me
two competing reps she seized
the vital country
                             spun ahead
on roads where poplars
pour down yellow dust
she mail ordered me
until I change hands
and change hands
                                  knuckles of mine
and splinters all yellow relics
wrenching me to every coast

I enter the dark room of a stranger
and there is my fragment
framed in gold

old friends draw back the curtain
to show the shrine in each
of their houses the varnished bone
they have all received
                                        they say
go back

on the road black smoke
I touch my chest
that love and fresh memory
that could so easily
well up blood
                        is dried skin
    
                        a yellow lantern light
                        tight and parched as a drum