Poetry

Spring 2008

 

 

Graham Duncan

Standard Time

We fall back to gain an hour
of darkness, to grope there, feel
our way till spring takes the hour
back and light returns to disturb
our adjustments, nearly catch up
to ourselves again, a hard go,
really a reverse, self shifted,
in a new light now, new shadows
molding façade and ground, but old
in feel and ache, just one reverse
after another, just what we
need, we tell ourselves, to go
ahead, conceding to time our
notion of progress, marking time
our way of getting there, what we
call here, back and forth, back and
forth, under the pendulum, here.

 

Notes for a Self-Portrait

Begin with the harmonica,
the one the adolescent played
on dismal days of fog and rain
as he stood outside the front door
(that opened in) and just inside
the weather door (that opened out),
and not any old harmonica,
this one a Hohner, a super
chromatic (twelve-hole) beauty
with a sharps-and-flats slide
(the right hand's forefinger
in control), both hands cupped
around the back to mute, pulse,
or flare the notes coming out,
the music prompted by the sorrow
of being, of thought, the tongue
learning how to parse and play
a tune, to syncopate and blend
the rhythms of breath, emotions
groping through emerging murks
and frights of thought — the dawn
of thinking's random, endless flow,
its self-reflexive puzzles,
then of music's saving substrate
under word's or logic's limits
of saying or taking hold.

 

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