Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, STEREOSCOPE, by PAUL GERALDY


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

STEREOSCOPE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I don't want to see them. Take the negatives
Last Line: Don't make it an historian.
Subject(s): Memory; Time; Travel; Journeys; Trips


I don't want to see them. Take the negatives
Away—you think they yield the story of our trip!
My souvenirs are more beautiful as it lives
In memory, my dear.
You'd drive them off, trying to bring them near.
Take away that slip
Where everything shapes itself—and dies,
Where the past, the charming past, cries
For its color, its fragrance, its music ... and instead
Some beastly cruel detail lifts up its head
And grows important. My memory
Is more faithful, knowing how to forget.
Doubtless the lines are not so clear,
The contours not so perfectly
Rounded, the ornaments indistinct. And yet
On the surviving souvenir
There is the taste of love.
Memory has held my joys;
She yields them at my slightest call;
Their sweetness, their savor, the depth of their sky.
I have but to ask, and the wished-for moments fly;
She has kept them all, all.
What magic she employs!
The intoxicating odor of the pine wood by the sea,
The smack of the wind and the open in our kisses on the hills,
The village, the fork in the road where we
Had such an argument one day; the chills
Of the bitter journey back;
How I scolded you for being cold and brutal
All through the hour you spent—on purpose, futile,
Selecting post cards from the rack. ...
And then the tears, and pardon. And the church, the house, the bicycle rides
Blossoming forth in our pendants of honeysuckle. Everything,
Our feasts, our songs, our tears, our tides
Of gray days, and our golden perfect days,
Come on the wing
Of memory, bright
With their own sun's rays.
Do you think so much is held in your stereoscope?
Don't you find them deathly sad, the white,
The black, the precise deluding features,
Measured coffins where the past is caught alive
But held so tightly that we can't contrive
To get it out! Show our friends these sarcophagi
Where some of our moments are entombed. They'll stare:
"What fine country! What a coast! What a magnificent tree!
What a cute little place! Did you really live there?"
Then they'll laugh at an awakward posture of mine. ...
Amuse yourself; let the trip shine
For them. But for me—
Those dear places, those so, so pleasing walls,
Those limits where your thousandfold vision calls,
Let them be:
Don't show them to me; I'd never see them again.
I have marvellous pictures in my head,
And all these documents would leave me none of them.
Memory is a poet;
Don't make it an historian.





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