Three Poems by John Ridland audio

Poet and Novelist

The poet is reading a novel.
One line, then another line,
They are all linked!
It’s all in there--”The German columns
advancing like banks of clouds.”
They make a sense which
escapes him.
That brother
who was left behind with an uncle
in the third chapter
turns up now, trying to recapture
his heritage.
The poet,
intent on the vanishing
charms of a heritage,
its music,
its verbal cadence,
had forgot all about him.

The novelist has read three novels this evening already.
He picks up a volume of poems. He begins at the beginning!
He is astonished by all that is left out.
There are no moon, no shoulders, no conversations.
Ideas? Yes, but he was taught what Mallarmé
Told Degas: “It is not with ideas that one
Makes sonnets, but with words.” He has always wanted
To depict that scene: M’s apartment up one flight
Of tall stairs. The furniture, the windows--the paintings!
My God, the Impressionist paintings all over his walls!
D’s physique, mesomorphic, paint-flecked.
And the outlines of figures Degas sets against his walls!
The novelist is nothing if not an enthusiast.

Around the poet the ghost of his novelist
Hovers upside-down like an image in a shiny doorknob.
Wherever he goes, it goes with him,
Glossing his ample margins with invisible notes.

                        John Ridland

Published in Ploughshares (1982).
Copyright © 1982 by John Ridland.

 

For Little John Approaching Three

   What bird pursues its shadow
Down the rolled valleys of your brain
No specialist presumes to explain.

   Those fields which lie all fallow
No plough’s sharp tongue can ever turn,
Whatever seeds fall there must burn

    In gay intensities of joy
Or chafe to the dark scrapings of sorrow.
No crop is looked for there tomorrow:

    That yellow hill, soft banked
Waves with bright weeds, not fat combed wheat.
A silver rattle grinds your teeth.

    All is one day, the same,
As if God bid the world to exist
But for the opening of his fist

    Which then closed tight and slammed,
Total and drastic as a clot.
A wild colt crops the wild weed plot.

     How clearly the doctors have explained,
Although the first birds poised, they met
Their shadows, and did falter, yet

     Recover briefly, before descending:
How early the gay bats come out
To wheel and flicker and cavort.

Published in And Say What He Is: The Life of a Special Child (1975).
Copyright © 1975 by John and Muriel Ridland

My Old Girlfriend's Name in Another Poet's Book

That girl who burnt me so––and I mean so––
Turns up in yet another elegy
Twenty years after she left them––all those poets
Who knew her, colleagues, students, father, sister,
Divorced or estranged husband––and twenty years more
Since she left me treading water in the Caribbean.
Her mind had been tempered and her body youthful.
Now she's no more than traces of ink on paper.

And what she led me towards, and yearned to show them,
Everything that outlasts a life––The Arts––
And everything that makes A Life––love's touch––
Everything that she tried, and failed, to clutch––
That whole of which she hoped to seize the parts––
Lingers a little space in mind and poem.

Copyright © 2006 by John Ridland.

Biographical note—John Ridland

Born in London (1933), brought to California at age 3; attended Swarthmore College, spent two years in the US Army in Puerto Rico; earned an MA in English at Berkeley, and a Ph. D. from the Claremont Graduate School. Started teaching English at UCSB in 1961. Edited The Little Square Review (1966-1972). Published several books and chapbooks of his poems since the 1950’s, and poems and reviews in many magazines in the US, UK, Australia, and Hungary, beginning with The New Yorker and The Atlantic. With his wife Muriel wrote And Say What He Is: The Life of a Special Child (1975). Translated a famous Hungarian “folk-epic” poem, (Shándor Péturfi’s) John the Valiant, for which he was awarded a gold medal from the Arpad Academy in Cleveland.

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