This postcard has been in my collection since I was twenty years old, living abroad in England. I was visiting the Tate Gallery for the first time, and John Singer Sargent's "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" stopped me in my tracks. I haven't tried to recreate here what I felt then; only to let the image work upon my consciousness once again, and see what words come of it.
rose-fleet light
petal flame and paper
the ache that names lost things
unnamed until lost
-mjm
As an experiment in cultivating moments of poetry that wouldn't otherwise exist, I'm embarking on a project of postcard poetry. The brief is simple:
1) Find a postcard.
2) Look at it.
3) Write a poem about what I see.
The thrilling thing about a small practice like this is that, as a sideline to my "main event" poetry, there's basically no pressure at all. No huge time commitment; no need to be (or worse, appear) profound. No need to do anything really, other than follow a prompt (the postcard) into a space of poetry for a few minutes, and enjoy myself.
And of course, once you've opened a door/fell down a rabbit-hole into poetry, who knows where it might lead you?
This postcard depicts a vellum illuminated manuscript page from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale. I was struck by the fact that you can see the verse on the back side of the leaf through the skin of the vellum, even in a photograph made into a postcard.
word made flesh
written on flesh
flesh on flesh
read on flesh
word through flesh
word on word
flesh made word
-mjm