dis-orientation (2)

Max Ernst, Cage, Forest and Black Sun (Cage, forêt et soleil noir)

Poetry is, to a much greater degree than photography, the art of the moment - of the enigma of suspension, deviation, dis-orientation.
I know of no other poet who has so movingly sung of the perplexities of the suspended moment and its disorientations than David Gascoyne. And were I to name the poem I keep returning to like an obsession, it would be this one:

THE CAGE

In the waking night
The forests have stopped growing
The shells are listening
The shadows in the pools turn grey
The pearls dissolve in the shadow
And I return to you

Your face is marked upon the clockface
My hands are beneath your hair
And if the time you mark sets free the birds
And if they fly away towards the forest
The hour will no longer be ours

Ours in the ornate birdcage
The brimming cup of water
The preface to the book
And all the clocks are ticking
All the dark rooms are moving
All the air's nerves are bare

Once flown
The feathered hour will not return
And I shall have gone away.


from David Gascoyne, Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), p. 43.