RonPrice
Jun 12, 2006, 02:46 AM
A BALANCING
Something which one could call ruminativeness, speculation, a running commentary is going on unnoticed in us always and is the seedbed of creation...It is the lumps and trials that tell us whether we shall be known and whether our fate will be exemplary, like a star. -John Ashbery in John Ashbery: Modern Critical Reviews,, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House Pub., 1985, pp.180-181.
Twenty years ago I passed along these roads:
dried out and free from old entanglements.*
These same fields ran to the horizon on and on,
on and on with the Nine Year Plan just ended
and fences shaping everything in sight
along this road to Gundagai in early spring,
as the sun warmed my cheek
like a piece of bread in a toaster,
with blue sky for a ceiling
under the roof of the universe, silent.
The hum and chatter of the wheels,
music of this sphere, backdrop,
as I gazed at her shiny brown hair and soft hand-
touching my eyes like rain on this dry endless road,
going home past these fields of cows and sheep
which keep doing what nature has trained them to do
and I do what empathy and distance reinforce,
a balancing of unresolved and conflicting elements
which threaten to tear me apart, but which I know,
from experience, I will resolve sufficiently and
which I will find relief from, from restraint,
in a process known as writing.
Ron Price
10 September 1995
* first marriage had just ended.
Something which one could call ruminativeness, speculation, a running commentary is going on unnoticed in us always and is the seedbed of creation...It is the lumps and trials that tell us whether we shall be known and whether our fate will be exemplary, like a star. -John Ashbery in John Ashbery: Modern Critical Reviews,, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House Pub., 1985, pp.180-181.
Twenty years ago I passed along these roads:
dried out and free from old entanglements.*
These same fields ran to the horizon on and on,
on and on with the Nine Year Plan just ended
and fences shaping everything in sight
along this road to Gundagai in early spring,
as the sun warmed my cheek
like a piece of bread in a toaster,
with blue sky for a ceiling
under the roof of the universe, silent.
The hum and chatter of the wheels,
music of this sphere, backdrop,
as I gazed at her shiny brown hair and soft hand-
touching my eyes like rain on this dry endless road,
going home past these fields of cows and sheep
which keep doing what nature has trained them to do
and I do what empathy and distance reinforce,
a balancing of unresolved and conflicting elements
which threaten to tear me apart, but which I know,
from experience, I will resolve sufficiently and
which I will find relief from, from restraint,
in a process known as writing.
Ron Price
10 September 1995
* first marriage had just ended.
