I read god is love.
I read love just happens to
us, arrows thick and
fast out of nowhere.
On the page I read these words
the shadow of the
wings of a tiny
transparent being moves a-
cross the printed page.
Marginalia
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Glosses on texts by William Desmond
As we read this poem, we are not necessarily sure whether the verb ‘read’ is present or past tense. So we imagine the scene in a kind of suspended time with the poet both now and in hte past perusing the page. So when the verb ‘moves’ in the final triplet arrives and we find outselves more certainly in the present, we recall the preceding triplet ‘On the page I read…’ but this suspension is not resolved. Instead however of the dialectical movement between seeming opposites of present and past we may come to inhabit the poem in the time of love where vivid memories of the past, preceptions of the present, and dreams of what might ahve been or perhaps in soem wwway might be, all blend. For me this gives the poem a particular poignant itensity.
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