Richard Blanch Poems

The Pleasures of Self-Consciousness
‘I could well forbear't.’
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Gold comes in many forms: all of them hymned
Carolled and forced into lyric shapes
By wordshifters, poets, prosaic apes
Of god, straddling the language, thrusting, rimmed
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‘At home even the walls help….’ (Anna Karenina)


Boundless space entices
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She is more than a mist drifting across,
More than something to seek sideways, aslant,
In the corner of an eye. But why, then, does
She so easily vanish? Why does a glance
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Time finds a glowing yellowness, a gold we thought was endless spring.
Gliding seamlessly along habitual ways she seemed to linger
Even to climb, quietly, with no urgency, by our side,
With noiseless stillness. Indeed we scarce moved. Higher and higher
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Unfurling the mind’s filaments feels good-
Freeing them, letting grass-green and wind
Shred them over the fields,
The hills, the cows, the undulant woods,
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The sun was bright, the leaves aglow
When I was young, long, long ago

When life did not pass in a bang and a flash
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At last! This loveliness does it! How the air glows!
Something special mounts out of the shrubbery.
It flows over me, all round the garden. Ah me.
Who could have thought it? Even my toes
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Relationships are strange things: elastic,
Inexorable. Meshing graceful flesh
Or mingling minds-
Lovers or friends
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Or a Taste for Texting.
How modern technology and culture take the stress out of epic questions and the danger out of mutual ingestion.

The messages fly under a thumb, flexed
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