By I am standing at the kitchen sink stuffing
chicken thighs with sage and wrapping them
in prosciutto crudo, and am thinking
how much cooking and making poems
are analogous when I hear wild geese.
From the patio I see perhaps
half a dozen skeins, like strings of molecules,
flying towards the sunset, calling, calling.
They can see the shine of the marshes
they are homing to, and, if they knew it,
the darkening bulk of Halkyn Mountain
and, beyond, the pink-grey shimmering
of the Irish Sea. Suddenly, as evening
shades into night, blackbirds – territorial
as any gentry – in the birch tree,
and the plum, set up their warning rattle
at a neighbour’s cat, white as a cloud,
prowling behind the rhododendron.
I return to the kitchen, reflecting
on alarms and valedictions in
darkling gardens and still-bright skies – the sounds
a poem makes – and turn the oven on.
pink-footed geese
HARVEY LILLYWHITE
December 15, 2023‘half a dozen skeins, like strings of molecules…’
Exactly!
Clive Watkins
December 15, 2023Another effective poem, David. It seems to me that the initial effect is to imply a distinction between cooking and writing poems – teasing out the exactness of the analogy referred to in the opening paragraph. After all, in writing poems, mostly you do not follow a recipe, whereas, in cooking, mostly you do: each iteration of chicken legs with sage and prosciutto crudo is surely intended to come from the oven tasting at least somewhat like the last! Further and contrasting stages in the underlying argument appear in the second paragraph. The geese are on their homing flight to a place that, even if only instinctually, is familiar to them. They expect to find the goal of their efforts much as it was on their last visit; for, by definition, homing flights are repeatable and in that regard, like cooking, are based on a set of instructions. The blackbirds, too, ‘territorial/as any gentry’, are also possessed by a sense of home. Finally, the prowling cat, ‘white as a cloud’ (nice touch), offers another implied view of the home-place. By a pleasing contrast, one might regard clouds as being typically vagrant and homeless – ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud etc. To this debate, the last five words serve up a curt conclusion: cooking is after all the activity of a home-maker.
I particularly liked ‘alarms and valedictions in/darkling gardens and still-bright skies’ – their multiple oppositions, which include of course an echo of Hardy’s famous poem The Darkling Thrush. One can plausibly maintain that The Darkling Thrush is a masterpiece of tonal and conceptual ambiguity; perhaps something of the same kind is going on here. Alarms and valedictions might be a motto for our age.
Am I over-reading this? I don’t think so. In speech that can be deceptively straightforward, at its best a Selzer poem articulates feelings and ideas that are often complex – indeed sometimes intriguingly contradictory.
Elise Oliver
December 15, 2023Chapeau, David! Not many people have poetic inspiration while stuffing chicken thighs at the kitchen sink. Personally, I have ‘other’ thoughts. I’m very confused by wild geese – the ones I see from my kitchen sink always seem to be heading in the wrong direction. Logically, you’d think they’d consider heading South for the winter, wouldn’t you? Lovely poem, by the way, and I’m pleased you remembered to turn the oven on.