Poetic Ambiguity(1998.8)-----R.H.Peat
Poetic AmbiguityR.H.Peat-----1998.8
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
-Albert Camus
I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
-Abraham Lincoln
Ambiguity:
Can we be sure of intention when the unconscious speaks as well as the conscious? Are we ever free of the connotative when we push our meaning toward the denotative within a single poem? Can we be free of our own blindness when it looms up in the sky like a moon in the night? Oh, I come to this shoreline of reflections to look at the moon upon the licking waves; I come to see the beauty of other footprints in the sand wandering off around another cove. A boldness imprinted there at the edge of a great ocean. Blood and flesh are ambiguity, yet it hangs on bone and works up a tremendous lather at times. Is it any wonder that poems of great feeling dance under our skin; fly out of our hands like escaping insects into buzzing lands all their own? Never be, too surprised by what someone else might see in the kaleidoscope of twisted depth. One jiggle and the jingled picture is completely changed. Six legs devoured into eight. Close in breath--is giving a whisker to the whispered wind. Who knows what leads the mud-worm though this single clod of moldy earth. If the wick is just touched by the match their is plenty of light. If the complete realm of feelings were all definite things that we could communicate, we wouldn't have to strive so hard to capture their fleeting flitter in enigmatic words. Yet the green lacewing in the darkness with all its long necked grace still comes to the bulb to be burnt night after night. And I see their single dangled wings in flimsy webs of hidden spiders that like to build in the cracks between the molding and the siding of the house; dusty gossamers all around the lit door. If there is a key that opens this luminous entryway; it is neither the light-bulb nor the darkness that surrounds us where the lacewing dies in the heart of it all.
At the lit doorway
A green wing dangles upon
an unseen cobweb
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