'He has a man's gift for telling tales by fires'
A line from ‘Eavesdropper’, a poem by Ben Morgan from his sequence “Baba Yaga in Love” published at: One Hand Clapping: https://www.1handclapping.online/post/ben-morgan-a-poem-4
He has man's gift for telling tales by fires –
how he dropped his heavy tankard, seeing his wife,
flushed from rain, bird-flustered, at the tavern gate,
a shape so beautiful he sluiced his feet.
I turn to poetry to help sort and arrange my thoughts and feelings. I’m looking for a clear order of feeling and thinking, which comes from excellently formed verse. A strong poem offers an argument, and this stanza, from Ben Morgan’s poem, ‘Eavesdropper’, offers me the sort of clarity I look for on a day when everything seems to be falling apart at the seams. The narrative order here is so pleasing, as is the arc of the story.
Straightaway there is the clear announcement of the character who tells tales - the figure of Baba Yaga from Slavic folktales - with her gift for narrative ordering. Immediately I feel confident in what will follow: the more uncertain ‘how’. We all long to be told how to do things: how to spend our day, how to find a point of rest within ourselves, how to find our place in the scheme of things.
Here we find ourselves in a tavern scene, listening to tales beside a fire. The line before this one reads: ‘Whimsical he is, with a mind of smiles.’ Whim has no definite place, but toys around with whomsoever will play. Still, the poet-speaker already has the attention of his audience. This is a tavern-tale and we are swillers of beer.
Once I’m confident with a poem and found my place, I can take on that sudden swivel and twist towards the uncertain I long for: that moment when an image peters out of its own logic and I have to return to it again and again. That’s what I want from a poem: a sudden rush of wind under my feet. Invisible movement. A sleight of hand. A little bit of trickery.
But it must come at the right time and place — and it does — ‘a shape so beautiful he sluiced his feet,’ is beguiling and full of the shape of lines. I carry these lines in my internal logic-pocket from ‘the tavern gate’ to the shape of the speaker’s toes; and then in the mysterious art of sluicing which must involve water (or more likely beer) running through the gaps in the speaker’s feet — the toes again. The speaker gives us ‘feet’ but I see toes: a gush of liquid interrupted by five squat digits.
And in between all of this beautifully internal shaping there is the weight of the ‘heavy tankard’ which drops from the speaker’s hand as his heart flutters, we sense, we hear, in the beautiful compound ‘bird-flustered’, an image which stands in for the wife but also for the husband’s internal feelings. She carries a shape too, the shape of a bird, and the ‘heavy tankard’ which hovers just over her ‘bird-flustered’ self — in the line above — is a perfect yet dangerous compression of a heavy object with a delicate subject: a man’s uncontainable feelings for his beloved wife now spilling over.
(From “Baba Yaga in Love”)
Eavesdropper
Whimsical he is, with a mind of smiles.
He has man's gift for telling tales by fires –
how he dropped his heavy tankard, seeing his wife,
flushed from rain, bird-flustered, at the tavern gate,
a shape so beautiful he sluiced his feet.
Waded through the beer and made her wet –
her hand, I mean, by taking it. They laugh,
and I laugh too, wet pebble between thumbs,
new moth in the stable, with the wine-drums.
My night-gown tortures me: it is made,
almost, of nothing but the night. The milky glass
shows the thousand moon-beams in his hair,
small flecks of time that do not burden it,
but make it light as days must be for lovers.