'Whimsical he is, with a mind of smiles.'

‘Eavesdropper’, from “Baba Yaga in Love”, a sequence of poetry by Ben Morgan, published by One Hand Clapping: https://www.1handclapping.online/post/ben-morgan-a-poem-4

I like to return to poems. Good poems need a return, as Odysseus eventually returns to Penelope after 20 long years. In a crude sense this is what The Odyssey is built around: the return to home base after a pause; a re-reading of the original setting. I am always telling my students to read and reread. Re-reading is essential; we must move through the layers of language in order to reach home, something like understanding. Poetry encourages us to think through syntax and syllabic stress; small units of meaning that often seem to sit in the wrong order but in fact produce meaning by and through our readerly interventions into this order/disorder. As good readers we are expected to move things around and carry parts over: this syllable, that syllable, to add and join and cohere. To bring the story together, to cross those years of intense separation that poetry can hold down in a single line.

The line above is the opening of the poem ‘Eavesdropper,’ by Ben Morgan, to which I am now returning. It summarises a certain kind of settled-in feeling, a form of contentment, the confidence of someone who knows how to play. Poetry plays, beginning with syntax, and so here we land immediately on ‘whimsical’ as a developed state of being, followed by the subject and its verb. The order of things is important; a confident poet knows how to play (whim comes from the root of whimwham which means fanciful object or toy) and this is a poem of story. The character’s internal state has already been settled. We know where we are. It is time to play.

A man sits by a fireside telling tales whimsically: he is a whimsical man and his internal state is full of smiles. I added ‘full’ to the line as I typed it up, but in fact the preposition ‘of’ is more important, because the speaker or teller of tales has already determined, not only the content of the tales themselves - his material - but the mood in which these tales will be delivered. ‘Of’ is a preposition of place and belonging, also of direction. We are travelling through and into the mind of the speaker as he smiles mentally, because story-telling is his bliss, as it must have been for Homer. It is his gift and these are knowing smiles.

(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.