A Writing With John Clare

A WRITING WITH JOHN CLARE


Taste told me it is from a place
across the river from what animals call heaven
but we, lacking a teacher to breathe such
inspiration deep into our rough nature
can’t be sure that what the ordinary
weathers bestow, tho generous
the way nature’s gifts so often are
with terrors and beauties, isn’t enough
to kill a man with longing
where a taste of the other side
is suddenly given, a light that warms
the dull ideas we have of the soul
and its business, and forces instead
a kind of balsam from our lowest places
to flow upwards in us, with some
chemicals working with that enchanting
‘thusiastic glow. Now this chemistry
that throbs inside the bosom, this sulfur
ardent as goldfinch here or meadow saffron
is just what catches fire when the curious eye
decides that what it sees
beyond what it can see is
where the whole animal must go,
the me of me, and each of its glances
opens a strange door, wind rushes out
that smells of all we need, a gleam
in there on beautious things that give delight
objects not of earth or air or sea or sky
but are here too, earthier than dirt,
meatier than flesh, some engines beyond
the senses that bring the very senses to
inside-out themselves and go beyond
their simple seeing, the sound inside the taste,
the endless mountain vistas that open up
in every touch. Beyond the border
of the eye that lives in the sight is that sweet
as yet invisibility that is the actual power
that compels the bashful mind to relish
what it sees – but all is night to the gross clown
– we need to close our eyes to read nature’s
unfolded book, and in that doubled seeing,
sight hiding inside sight, the animal goes
wild with pleasure, pleasure, which is our
single purpose in a grieving world.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005