Sometimes the cosmos appears to break itself

Round 4 thoughts (after a lot of thinking and thinking and thinking)

Paul,

As you already know (but others perhaps do not 😊) my response to your round three’s selection of “The Mustard Tin” is “November”.

(Since it wouldn’t be fair for you to do hard time all by your lonesome self for IP infelicities, you’ll see that I have decided to follow your lead by making available the poem as an image. Maybe we’ll share the same jail cell.)

The collection you are using for your selections – Longley’s “The Weather in Japan” – has elegies for the recent dead, some for those in more distant wars and conflicts, and all of this has particular potency in the voice of a poet from Northern Ireland. The last poem you selected appears to be about the dying of a mother / mother-in-law / grandparent. Each line starts iambic but then pulses into something else, like a heart’s dot-dash-dot that is coming to its end. Your selection led me at long last to deal with the way sudden death and absence appears in several places in DeFlitch’s collection, specifically the rupture caused by suicide.

Throughout the round I was thinking constantly of our mutual friend TK, a gifted writer and photographer. TK’s death — which we understand to have been self-inflicted, but for which we have no sure knowledge — and their absence and their silence feels like an incident of divine iconoclasm. The coming silence in “November” after the “woman’s voice echoes” captures a bit — and only a bit — of this.

I felt even more dissociated than usual when doing the word analysis of the poem:

The image of “telephone wires hover” in the poem, the time of day, the hopeless aspirations in the poem (looking upwards, keeping promises) — all of these led to the following:

which is an image made at night with flash on my mirrorless digital camera, looking up from my front sidewalk on the night of a full moon, the inkjet print transferred onto some heavy printmaking paper using an alcohol-gel technique. It’s the kind of image that I think would have moved TK to their happy state of wonderment.

I really miss TK. I know you do, too.