1. COSMIC BLOOM

Someone told me recently that I was ‘one big metaphor’. They had a point.

One of my brothers has a PhD in astrophysics. I once asked him how his research was going and he replied, ‘It’s been a good month. I got a result.’ What was it? ‘Twenty-five million light years plus or minus twenty-five million light years.’ Fifteen years later, I am still thinking about what that might mean.

He was sent out to an observatory in the Australian desert to observe his particular corner of the cosmos. It rained for the first time in a hundred years and the skies were so cloudy that he could not see his stars. Meanwhile, flowers that hadn’t been seen for a century were emerging outside the observatory door. The desert was in bloom.

How was I going to resist this? Even though IT DIDN’T MEAN ANYTHING. And how could I properly understand what he was doing when I did not have the required maths?

Writing poems is as much about learning what is not enough, what is not the poem, as it is about retaining susceptibility (and you do need the courage of imagination to let yourself dis-integrate so that, like Frost, you arrive in the world of the poem as if you had ‘materialised from cloud or risen out of the ground’).

The more something speaks to you of poetry, the more you must search for, and find, whatever it is about the desert/cosmos/bloom fandango that speaks of you.