D/I/A/L/O/G/U/E/S/ (With: - Duchamp) Poem by Dónall Dempsey

I was a sad young man
on a train

a train
(a train)

always a window
on to something else

being transported
through Time & Space

landscape passing through
my dreaming face

real rain
falling on my reflection

the train travelling
through various states of the soul

again to this star.

“Again to this star! ”

I thought
I thought
this thought

dreaming of you nude
ascending & descending

staircases

you changing
the condition of my being, even

stripped bare
my life
this anaemic cinema

a series of swimming lessons

without ever
touching water

memory itself
a painting on glass

that cracks
thought…fractures

“Again to this star! ”
“Again to this star! ”

I urge
myself

my face
hurtling through the darkness
of this lonely night

sleeping softly
against the glass

always a window
onto something else.

****
Spin off from the latest May Ray/Duchamp exhibition at the Tate Modern…reading again a book of entertaining interviews I got in New York twenty years ago the poem I simply took all the phrases and titles of works that appealed to my sensibilities and strung them together to describe my original train ride into the Big Apple all those years ago.
I adore Man Ray and Duchamp for their sense of wonder and wit and the humorous way they have of letting the art find them and manifest itself through them.