Here's a prose style version of the same theme, Lance. Neither better nor worse, merely different, in effect, if not intent.
My mother was on a train one day when I came to visit her in the nursing home. When I gave her the ice cream cone I'd brought her, she abruptly warned me that the train was about to start up at any time. "What train?" I asked, caught off guard. "The one I'm on," she declared, with her usual inability to suffer fools... "Where are you going on that train?" I asked, intrigued by the travel imagery that so often marked her dreams. I knew that I should feel sorry for her, lamenting the sad loneliness of an old woman's mind in a deserted nursing home. But frankly I felt more fascination than sadness. There was nothing pathetic about this woman before me. She was riding the rails that afternoon, "on the road," as footloose as Jack Kerouac. Tooling through the high desert toward Santa Fe in an open box car, her hair in the wind, sucking up the miles - I didn't feel an ounce of pity for her. "I don't know," she answered my question with half a smile. "They don't tell you much here."
(Beldon C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes)
I think that final stanza is a really remarkable riff on the nature of reverie: how the world we are cast into becomes a world we re-cast within ourselves, "caving / Inward to this bead / Full of its own dry light". I've always been intrigued by Merrill, and now like Michael I have been given a solid introduction of great promise. I love the poem.
Nemo
|