Living with the Truth Stranger than Fiction This Is Not About What You Think Milligan and Murphy Making Sense

Wednesday 25 February 2015

#497


Time II



Time is a dog which haunts you –
         is a wolf which stalks you –
         hangs, like guilt, round your neck
         dragging you down to the grave.

Like Light it allows you
         to perceive only a little –
         lays bare Man's mortality.


16 October 1978
 
 

This poem has never been published before. Light appears in many of my poems, thirty of my adult poems (i.e. the poems from #453 on), and I suspect will appear in a lot of the juvenilia too. Light is, at least in my head, synonymous with truth and in my early poems both are often capitalised. Not sure where I picked up that habit from. It wasn’t from Emily Dickinson because I’ve only read her recently. Clearly I’m doing it to give additional emphasis to the words so I’m a little surprised I didn’t capitalise ‘guilt’ here too. The dog is the same one from ‘Stray’ and he appears in other poems too. For a cat person there are a surprising number of dogs in my poems. I would guess too this is the first time I use outdents to signify the beginnings of sentences. Not really needed here though as the separate stanzas do that quite nicely.

Tenement-Dog-Marc-PoKempner

Marc PoKempner, "Tenement Dog," 1974,
Chicago Photography Collective, Chicago

4 comments:

Kass said...

"...time, like guilt..."
"...dragging you down to the grave."

At my age, it's more like galloping than a slow drag.

Nice poem.

Jim Murdoch said...

My father told me time would speed up as I got older, Kass. I thought he was havering but the older I get the more I find the days pass like hours. What’s interesting to me is that I’d write a poem like this when I was still in my teens.

Kass said...

Yes, I suppose you have always been interesting.

Jim Murdoch said...

I would like to think so, Kass. Other adjectives have been used over the years.

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