Arthur Seymour John Tessimond & his poetry

Claude Monet: Soleil Levant

Dear Friends and readers,

This week on Wompo, a friend put a poem by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond (a difficult painful life the man had) onto the listserv. I thought Daydream so beautiful and want to remember it so place it here:

Daydream

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.

Then another friend found this one by Tessimond on cats:

ClaryCat at my study window

Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned

To rules or routes for journeys; counter
Attack with non-resistance; twist
Enticing through the curving fingers
And leave an angered empty fist.

They wait obsequious as darkness
Quick to retire, quick to return;
Admit no aim or ethics; flatter
With reservations; will not learn

To answer to their names; are seldom
Truly owned till shot or skinned.
Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.

(It’s not really fair to cats as their inner life is affectionate and attached to “their person,” and it imagines people who are not kind to their cats; this projects a hard world like Basil Bunting’s.)

And one more which my first friend put into an anthology of love poetry she has translated and is publishing:

Not Love Perhaps

This is not Love, perhaps,
Love that lays down its life,
that many waters cannot quench,
nor the floods drown,
But something written in lighter ink,
said in a lower tone, something, perhaps, especially our own.

A need, at times, to be together and talk,
And then the finding we can walk
More firmly through dark narrow places,
And meet more easily nightmare faces;
A need to reach out, sometimes, hand to hand,
And then find Earth less like an alien land;
A need for alliance to defeat
The whisperers at the corner of the street.

A need for inns on roads, islands in seas,
Halts for discoveries to be shared,
Maps checked, notes compared;
A need, at times, of each for each,
Direct as the need of throat and tongue for speech

A photo of him

All of the poems made me think of Jim; I believe he would have liked these and sympathized with the man.

This week I bought myself the uncut, 6 part mini-series of The Trip, a semi-comic film of Steve Coogan and Bill Bryden traveling through Yorkshire together. I look forward to watching it slowly. I also discovered this week that Matching Prior is imagined as in Yorkshire. I like Trollope for that too.

Sylvia