Romanticism – poems 2 die for

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

FRESH FRUIT

On the farm
I wonder

about the ideology
of a tree

the entire tree:
roots, leaves, branches

cannot
escape asking myself
what haiku currently
courses
through the flowers

Of course
    this is (dear reader, I
do recognise) a
category
   mistake
of the first order, and will
no doubt, none too late,
be brought
   to my attention amidst
much
wild snarling

and thus forgive me
my contextualizing in a poem
how much theory
pervades
everything (truly
it is in
its nature
to be an invasive species)

and Fall and Autumn and
all those mellow feelings
much
written about

some ode or other
that leaf to dead leaf
is
remembered

all the wherefores and whys
as to how
this system getting greener
came
not just
to be but
into conscious being

ruthless and polite both
stuck in a rut this day whilst
supposed
of infinite variety

and my voice
estranged, coming back

to me alien

as if
freshly arrived, in awe of
all capacity to
shift the
word of perspective

see things differently.