The reign of clear surfaces (2)

Two days down of the thousand years reich of my personal lebensraum and all is well so far, in fact becoming clearer and clearer- with only some 363,000 days to go to keep it that way.

Discoveries: unanswered letters; projects vanished into the past with not even a skid mark; postcards from the unknown and the dead; a greater order among certain of my papers than I had remembered; on the other hand a greater disorder among other of my papers than I had remembered; books I had forgotten I had; photographs of self thought suitable for public use cached in plastic wallets; first class postage stamps (ten of them) in two partly used booklets; magazines containing my work in terms of poems; magazines containing reviews by others of myself and by myself of others; magazines I seem to have kept for no reason; newspaper clippings of things I must have thought interesting; conference and festival packages complete with notes; small notebooks with names addresses notes remarks and unused lines of poetry; poems by others photocopied for use in classes or workshops elsewhere; letters received that ought to have been filed elsewhere (Cambridge University Library has the letters but there are more here, still some files of them); picture postcards unsent (three postcards I bought at the Serpentine Gallery have just gone up on my university office door, including a pure black one with the legend 'spot the dog'); some cassette tapes and some old floppy disks for old computers; brochures and maps referring to travels; one old etching by me, dated 1981, of Perdita in The Winter's Tale handing out flowers...

And then my father's things, now stowed upstairs waiting for new shelves and cupboards...

And then the cassette tapes that we have just stored on our brand new cassette shelves (lots of old radio programmes of mine, but also some fine recordings of Plath and Hughes and Betjeman and Larkin reading, all used for educational purposes - and forgotten pleasure)...

And the miscellaneous old maps and paperbacks, some in Hungarian, more books I had forgotten I had, a couple with corners that look as though they'd been gnawed by mice or possibly rats, but just as likely by Pearl who eats paper and card by way of revenge...

*

I imagine life as some kind of sea-going vessel of reasonable size hauling behind it a series of ever more leaky boats full of such odds and ends, the last ones fading off into the distance in the fog. Once could cut them loose. One could simply cut loose. That is always a notional choice.

But that is the given condition of life anyway. Why turn it into a willed gesture? Let the poems be the things that are cut loose. Let them cross whatever seas they happen to be floating on, trailing whatever they trail. One arrived yesterday to be edited today. Go little... whatever you are.