Sunday 22 August 2010

On Edwin Morgan and the Kamp

A rare thing

yesterday in the Kamp
that brown feeder
burbling its winding way
down through the iron hills
of Lower Austria
in search of the Danube
I sat down on a small rock
and eating my lunch
my cheese and pickle sandwiches
I watched a school of shadows
hovering lazily over the gravel bed
and for some reason that I still cannot fathom
I found myself musing on Eddie Morgan
and his concrete verse
and acrobatic Sprache
when allofasudden ...

I saw an armadillo clad crab
a white clawed crayfish
as it turned out to be
a rare thing
and it was there and then before me
slowly crawling along the shallow bottom
passing the shadowed school
pointing in unison upstream
in the sun-flickered brownness of the water
the crab's whiskers waved in a swirl of currents
and its bold white pincer flicked always
rightways in search of Etwas
and finally doing so
from under a stone ...

where it would patiently wait

______
gw2010

7 comments:

  1. For some reason I can't fathom either I can sense the association!

    Made my mouth water. I'm now resisting the temptation to make myself a cheese and pickle sandwich.

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  2. I listened this morning to CD of Edwin reciting some of his poems amongst an interview with Michael Schmidt. The computer's first christmas card was especially entertaining.

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  3. Thanks Dominic. Resist no longer. Give in to your cheese and pickle temptation, be kind to your salivating digestive juices.

    Thinking back on it now perhaps there were 7 fish and they represented the poets, the so-called Big 7. A bardic school if you like. I know this sounds a little bit biblical but it's not meant to.
    And then the rare crab along - perhaps he represented an idea, or ideas of one of these poets, a way to go, whose time as come - as we like to say.

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  4. Well Gerald that'd set you up for the day :) and what I like very much are the man's eyes - they are like a jollybolly Santa's - as you think you remember them from Lewis's or some such childhood store - it's when he looks up to camera after reading a poem - it's that almost childlike enthusiasm for what he is doing that you see in them I think.

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  5. and its bold white pincer flicked always
    rightways in search of Etwas

    I did enjoy this delightful picture of aimless searching...

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  6. Jinksy, Is that it perhaps, we're flicking around in a river of aimless searching? What a profound thought. And I haven't even made the bed.

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  7. I love your choice of words. I had the same sense of motion watching fish in a mountain river, while my boys cast their flyrods.......
    your poem MOVES!

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