The Magician

I showed her my soft side
and she took it in her arms
and turned it to stone
and broke it over my head.

19 April 1989

This has a lot in common with ‘Quality Goods’ (#625). I’ve always liked concretisation. One of the problems with poetry is that it’s often too fluid; it slips through your fingers. It’s a real puzzle why poetry’s not more popular than it is because our everyday prose is peppered with metaphors and similes and all sorts of clever figures of speech that we never think about twice about like the synecdoche. If someone said there’d been a message from Downing Street we’d never think for a second that a street in central London had acquired sentience and decided to communicate; we’d assume it was an announcement from the Prime Minister or a member of his staff.

It’s tempting to assume this is a poem about F. but I really can’t remember. An obvious reading is that this is me showing her a poem which she doesn’t get but I could be way off the mark.

2 comments:

Kass said...: ...there's an evil kind of magic to many relationships. A softness turned to stone and broken over a head is especially cold.; 18 May 2016 at 15:47
Jim Murdoch said...: I expect this is really about language, Kass. So many times I’ve said something in all innocence only to have my own words turned against me: “That’s not what I meant.” “But that’s what you said.”; 18 May 2016 at 21:13

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