San Miguel de Abona
When, on one occasion, W.H. Davies met with Walter de la Mare, de La Mare asked him how he wrote his poems. ‘A plain and simple question’ thought Davies, to which he responded: ‘First an idea comes to me.’
‘What do you mean by “an idea comes to you”?’ replied de La Mare.*
Not such a simple question, it seems. Process never is.
Were I asked how I write my poems, I would probably lie — lying not out of a desire to deceive but as a result of the fact that when people talk about how they do things they simplify and totalise. Poems often come to me when I’m walking, but not all poems, and not every time that I’m walking. There has to be something in the air for them to come. Something that is at the back (or the fore) of the mind, and something that stimulates a bubble of thought to words: a wave, the flight of a bird, an association that words in their own strange way latch onto.
Poems also arrive in hushed places: the bath, the bed. And they latch in the same way, on the back of a thought. A phrase comes, two phrases, a few lines that I repeat over and over so as not to lose them as the ‘poem’ builds. It is only when I have more lines than I can hold in my head that I jump from the bath for a pen or scribble the lines down in the Notes app on my phone. The words that are sung in the head are generally recognisable in the final poem and they lend it its rhythm; quite often though, what is first scribbled down is clumsy and would blush to call itself a poem.
Poems also come when I’m reading poems written by other people — San Miguel de Abona is one such poem. It is the first poem that I have written in a long while.
A month back, I was reading The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin. Like a good many of Merwin’s collections, it is full of the past. Reminiscence. I must’ve been thinking about that, and about what might have prompted Merwin to write, thinking about how perhaps for Merwin the past was both a haunting (good and bad) and a building block. You start with the past, think about the past, something concrete; words come and then words do what they are apt to do in a poem, that is they take on their own life. Beneath the poem there is, perhaps, some ‘truth’, an unspoken narrative, but mostly a poem is a poem. So, reading Merwin, I pictured something concrete from the past: the view from the roof of a house in which I once lived in San Miguel de Abona, Tenerife. Words came. What they left behind is fiction.
The poem was a month between coming to words and ‘completion’. A month during which largely I forgot it.
San Miguel de Abona
From the roof you can see
over the plaza the church
whose bell it seems is always
ringing to another island
asleep in its sea and hear
crickets thrum the hot night’s
song though they’re frogs
she declaims saying magic
like love has its moment
whilst downstairs there’s
that smell of someone
else’s summer the house
limewashed
crumpling its skin
* Davies recounts his meeting with de La Mare in Later Days, a follow-up of sorts to his book The Autobiography of a Super-tramp.