The Fountain-Tree:
The Paradisal
Tuba

Opening (I.); Note; Close (VIII)

 

                                          

[Opening:]

I.

Spirit of Rain in the Glade, sad day
plucked at with cutting glances plays
The Lamentation Serenade to Plant-Life
on the stops as plot synopsis:

Glowing with your own original and ringing
        golden sense of goodness and
of innocence, you sing out volunteering:
        I will take the Blame, even as far as
Absence, and with Luck come back
        like from an errand to the shops.....

Note:

I claim a certain privilege in the criticism and interpretation of my poetry, and, very probably, I was one of the first to discover the meaning and the theme of my poem The Fountain Tree: The Paradisal Tuba.

It’s about a problem in theology, psychology and therapeutics: If you take the blame, where can you take it to? My current solution is Eastwood Refuse Transfer Station, where, I imagine, they’ll have a bin for blame; but there was a time when some more dramatic excursion was called for.

It is sad to relate, so I’ll keep it brief, but I passed some years being daily blamed for allsorts. Some of my faults, I never ever understood what they were, or what I might have done. At first I tried refusing the blame but, having grown used to chuckling at the view of my lifelong mental limitations----one skunk toke and I don’t add up----I thought I might accept the blame, and glibly toss it off. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was adding to my blame-burden. There was no admission, no apology, no craven humiliation, no utter abjection that could lessen, by the teenth of an ounce, the blame that came my way. I accumulated more than the planet could possibly store. I knew no way to palm it off.

It was only in poetry that I blithely volunteered to try, to find the place for disposal of the world’s heaped blame.

It turned out to be Morecambe Bay, with a cast of Levantine Demons.

Levantine Demons? I have never been near the Near East. You get ideas willy-nilly. Write them down. You can research them after.

When I contracted to take the blame, I had no idea where it might be deposited. I thought of mosses and salt flats. All muck can drain by the Mersey. If challenged, I could claim: This is purely spiritual rubbish. These demons are purely my own imagination, with a bit of extraneous reading rubbed in, and surely they must not exist. Oh no, they must, if Azazel is to take the blame, through to the great Hall of Abandon, on the shores and shoals of Sheol, and I’m thinking, Mersey, Ribble, Lune and Kent, and sundry other piddles. There is nuclear waste. Why not my blame?

An image of pure geography riddles
and detaches brain.
Post Mid-Life. Post a Palm and Archetype.

I looked today for graveyard yew, and found it.

                                               

[Close: the end of VIII.:]
 

Now at evening when The Tuba droops
        into the blue nocturnal soup,
The Phoenix sinks within itself
        and sleeps.

 

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