I’ve been bothered mightily in recent weeks, between long winter sleeps and longer winter coughs [almost gone now], wondering if my creative coals have slept softly, too deeply, and burned so low that no amount of gentle wafting with my little paper fan can spark them back to life.
I’d got to the stage where I was contemplating getting into collecting stamps and, possibly, painting little Welsh scenes on pebbles. [Don't worry, both urges are slumbering deeply once more.]
It needed a very special kind of fan, though, and I’d quite forgotten where I put it and how to wield it.
Both things got sorted in my head this morning, seemingly by accident if you believe that such events can ever truly be accidental.
I picked up a slim volume of poems–Public Property, by Andrew Motion–and, following the habit-trails of many years, started leafing through it. At random I came upon In a Perfect World:
I was walking the Thames path from Richmond
to Westminster, just because I was free
to do so, just for the pleasure of lightsluicing my head, …
… The mouth of the Wandle stuck
its sick tongue out and went…
and more and more, from triplet to triplet, measuring the way peacefully and in perfect solitude. A lovely poem, a gem, as are so many of Motion’s poems. Typically, he falls over in the last stanza, with two faulty word choices, the first of them inexcusably smacking of cliché.
And… that’s all it took. My head is working again, with the fore-brain buzzing from phrase to phrase, picking its way as carefully as I know how, trying to avoid treading too much on sick tongues. And my left foot, far from echoing the tremor of my right hand, seems to be ticking merrily along in a rhythm that could almost be iambic if it were not for the occasional dactylic stumble.
Yeah. Home again, digging dogs and stroking the warm backs of favourite cats.
I’ll be fine now.
