The Slight Obtuseness Of High Breeding Poem by MARINA GIPPS

That iron blackness of the chestnut trunks.
Always, something soft and tinted,
all that I do not remember in great detail.
Nothing shakes my opinion of this book,
not even the windblown parasols of trees
for I am as old as the decrepit woman at a cottage door
whose only tresses are the wig of an ill-fated play.
White or black, the color neither blanched nor deleted.
As if the runnels of gears inside that old smith-corona,
backlashing the spit of red ink ruining another murderous line.
Always, the unwarranted, as that same elderly fawn
crochets the sweater the hue of a flayed peacock
when writing of love is no longer an option.
What do I wish to live for?
Every sentence I utter is none other than a clever experiment.
The queasy undergraduate scratches his pimples
in awe of my ill-informed lectures…All this, until
my vulture neck hills come down, feigning exhaustion
when it is ennui to see the doldrumous lines in newly imitative ways.
The heart has many colors…How innovative to rearrange
the furniture of a room where one writes, sharing and discerning
one’s tired breath. This is the love that makes the brain impatient to eat again.
Awind blowing through the trees that hindered the shower
downpour on all of us learned, yet useless, dry pupils.
Nature will never teach us the tidings of a tempestuous joy
found in virginal green grass as bright as Ireland…
And so were her bespectacled eyes from what I gathered
as I read her over, slumbering into my own dejavu.
She never felt love. I see that now. How many of us
see that love is not felt if we close our eyes long enough.
There must be some weight, something in tonight’s breeze…
to lift us, gather us away like a little fox sneaking off
with the lost acorns of ideas into this odd, watery night.

for Virginia Woolf