P,P,TSE,S.H.

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

“Solitude, even among the meshes of war, can when it wishes
so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now
possessively.” GR.P.11

The “meshes of war,” blending bananas, fecund and life
affirming bouquets of memory mixing with desire and the
odors feeding a little death defeating tuber of poems:
precisely the commemoration of our inspired moments, which
are already often the commemoration of all that our being
has left of itself in past moments, the intimate essence of
ourselves which we exude without knowing it, but an odor
smelt later, Remembrance Of Things, of Mother tucking time
and space into the War, “my Mother is the War,” “ so
absentee,” “some cruel accidental resemblance to life,”
consciously connecting and combining commerce and carnival,
“a celebration of markets,” cruelly “reconfiguring time and
space into its own image”—a Pornography of “raw material to
be recorded in History,” “information, the only real medium
of exchange,”  “so that children may be taught History as a
sequence of violence.”

But not to despair, somewhere a poet is “Digging.”

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
        Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
        Through living roots awaken in my head.
        But I've no spade to follow men like them.

        Between my finger and my thumb
        The squat pen rests.
        I'll dig with it.”

I grew out of all this
Like a weeping willow
Inclined to
The appetites of Gravity.

----Seamus Heaney


Terrance