DUCKED EVERY MODULE

DUCKED EVERY MODULE

“The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, and from without.”
 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)

ducked every module
on Romanticism
during my
English degrees

and yet maybe
that is exactly where
my antipathy
to the movement
must have
originated from

kind of imagining myself
a poet, sort of poet, or
something not
too far from that
as I wandered down
towards the River Tame
(tributary of
the far more
famous Mersey)
stretched out
to the East and West
and South
the Pennine Moors
Bronte territory,
roughest, toughest, most desolate
part of England

still
  a ways to walk
to get there

and me for now
meandering riverward

slipping through my neighbour
crazy Gordon Shelley’s
immaculately
      mown garden

passing the tiny glade
of wild narcissi
     (dangerous lure, that
purity)

and down into the hollow
graveyard for one single
completely
    broken piano

its innards spilled, everywhere
rods and hammers
and scattered keys

leit motif
   for someone’s life
if not mine entirely

try to duck things
and they still
get to
nail you
one way or’t tother