National Poetry Month - Day 25: Peter Blegvad

2 from Peter Blegvad

CATALOGUE OF FIFTEEN OBJECTS AND THEIR TITLES

          The Objects:

1. Cylinder of dust
2. Salt cross with a crust of iodine
3. Plank of pine
4. Loaf of rust
5. Hollow cone of tobacco which contains a tin coin
6. Pillar of yeast in linoleum jacket
7. Circular puddle of yogurt and neon
8. Arrow of ice wrapped in surgical gauze
9. Coin stacks, several columns - voltaic piles of gold-plated bamboo
10. Water in a Bakelite box, and a box full of oil
11. A yolk of leather in a tobacco egg
12. Citronella spilled in a spiral upon a blanket of fat
13. Mixture of paragoric and dew in a creosote cone
14. A disc of wicker beside a pill full of zinc
15. Figure made of two copper pyramids glued base to base with sap

          Their Titles:

1. "Silo"
2. "Referee"
3. "Threshold" (meant to be flat on the floor, part of a door none can see)
4. "Altar from a Metal Cathedral"
5. "Dunce's Trumpet" (for V.)
6. "Dry Cell"
7. "Lunatic Mirror"
8. "Signal from a Memory"
9. "Ladder of Kings"
10. "Ransom to Secure the Release of a Mother and Child"
11. "October Seventh"
12. "My Uncle's Monocle"
13. "Fuel for a Tiny Machine"
14. "Two Equivalent Forms"
15. Quote from Swedenborg to the effect that angels fucking shed light

--

APRICOT

Very early I clearly realized the pleasures of seeing and song. I learned to sing at an early year. In the cot I recall my singing about a certain thing I saw. I recall a song in the key of C concerning a thing seen just so.

I sang: "A-P-R-I-C-O-T abbreviates Attain Perfect Realization In the COT."¹

I sang: "Cot contains certain shining irreducible contributions. So does the charnel. So does the Ferris-wheel gondola."

Singing words devised for seeing "through not with eyes"²

"I am not I when I see"³

"I is another⁴
Words devised to peep into the gone or the coming were shunned by me. I referred to a single moment. Early in a clearing I recall my singing songs of my seeing things just so.
I sang: "A net, a gem at every node, in each all others shining show - Whole kit and kaboodle lit by an apricot's golden glow."


1 - Unidentified cabaliste, Speaker's Corner, London 1972
2 - William Blake
3 - Gertrude Stein
4 - Arthur Rimbaud
--


These can be found, set to music, on the album credited to Peter Blegvad, John Greaves, and Lisa Herman: Kew. Rhone. It was initially released in 1977 and twenty years later re-released as a multimedia work on CD-ROM.