Rescued poem # 2: Undercoat

One scrawled in a journal from about four years ago. Odd, I thought those shelves were older than that. A bit domestic maybe, but it has a sense of time and place which I like


Undercoat

Steadily, with long strokes
I apply the undercoat
To the cheap board we bought
I’ve sealed and primed it
And I’m turning it into shelves
For the study of this
Our first home

For our work
Your planning for the futures of others
My plots and recipes

On the radio there’s a man, 93
Recalling the songs he sang at 35
And as I paint
Steadily, and with long strokes
I wonder if I
At 93
Will recall the shelves I painted
At 35

FN 15.2.11

There'll be a few of these as this process continues. The death of my brother six years ago sparked a lengthy sequence of poems, a few of them made it into the 'official' word file which still languishes in the something I have to do something with pile. Far more are scraps in notebooks. It's ironic that such a scrap is the first one from that particular bout of writing to see the light of day.

FN 15.2.11

No, not the sudden
Insistent requirements of rain
Pitching the memory
Maps of the county
Through the outlying limbs
The tilth and clay until reaching
The hard
Shales and grits
The geometrics of your death
Patches on maps it’s

Raining here
The drumming on the flat roof
Can you hear it?

Digging in the crates

I've written before about the sheer overwhelming amount of text there is in the world (at least I think I have, I should have anyway, I think about it quite a lot), and I've been reflecting on that as I've been going over old work.

As someone who feels compelled to write, but not necessarily compelled to do anything with it, I have over the years amassed a vast amount of journals, notebooks, old word files in the dustier corners of my hard drive, all filled with poems, stories, half poems, half stories, ideas, occasionally the odd line that I liked.

I've been going through them, i rather felt bad that something might be languishing in one, half-decent but long-forgotten, it's been an interesting exercise. I'm calling it "rescued poems" and as and when one gets rescued, I'll pop them up here. It's the least they deserve.