'Caruso' poem #10

'Caruso' poem #10

John Bjarne Grover

It is a warm and late spring afternoon.
We're sitting in an outdoor restaurant,
this pretty woman here, a copper moon,
and me - she's looking up, inserting spoon
for eating, like a poem of Lavant.

She's talking of the nature of her call.
A bus stop is not far away from us.
A very young girl in red overall
steps out of bus, is rescued from a fall
by handrail holdon and adults outside the bus.

Our bodies talk the language of the germans.
'Natürlich gleicht er aber, aber er wurde...'
She's talking as they do in sunday sermon
or in a later film of Ingmar Bergman
of type as in the christian cave in Lourdes.

Many of the restaurant guests around us
cannot be there at the place the same time.
So, we thought, maybe we should have found us
in a new place or new time and to ground us
for new poetic metre or new rhyme.

The children came arunning with the sceptre
as I stood there before the roadside poster:
One had a carrot, one beside it, one who leapt here
for nearly running into me who stepped here
like slices of a loaf in family toaster.

The water fountain's locked in half position.
It's dripping just a little all the time
with handle raised up to the high volition
of a violinist whose heart's ignition
is in the bow and string of the sublime.

'Caruso' is the first part of the red metre book 'My mention e Anna' - the first archetype: It is the 'man-on-wagon' archetype. I personally believe that the book is a biography of the life of Enrico Caruso. If one counts word-by-word against day-by-day of his life, this poem will be the period from mid july 1898 to mid august 1899 - that is the year (infancy) of his first child - out of eventually three.