Paul Rossiter
DIFFERENCE & REPETITION
In a field that slopes to the cliff edge
a farmer stops his tractor at the end of a furrow,
turns off the engine, sits, and watches the sea
as the south-west wind buffets his cab.
A cultural geographer, the wind in his face,
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty in his pack,
walks along the coast path, thinking:
There’s nothing really to say about the sea
except what we already know from looking at it –
it’s always different, always the same.
The farmer paints on Sundays.
He tries to paint the sea, to capture the way
waves behave as they break – but how to do it?
no two waves he’s seen were ever the same.
The geographer reaches the headland,
takes notebook and pen from his pocket
and writes on a wind-ruffled page:
Or, rather, it is composed of innumerable differences
so finely different that their
incessant production is also their apparent erasure.
SEA-CHANGE
brine-pits
and broom-groves
cloud-capped
dew-lapped
and dove-drawn
ever-angry
ever-harmless
heart-sorrow
honey-drops
and horse-piss
inch-meal
lass-lorn
never-surfeited
sea-marge
sea-sorrow
sea-swallowed
sight-outrunning
spell-stopped
and still-vexed
thunder-claps
thunder-stroke
up-staring
urchin-shows
wave-worn
and weather-fended
PYTHAGOREAN
straighten the bed clothes on rising
and smooth out the place where you lay
spit on your hair clippings and nail parings
destroy the mark of the pot in the ashes
don’t look in a mirror by lamplight
don’t stir the fire with a knife
don’t turn around at the border
for surely the Furies are following
struck bronze sings with the voice
of the daemon captive within it
the Pleiades are the lyre of the Muses
and the planets are Persephone’s dogs
In a field that slopes to the cliff edge
a farmer stops his tractor at the end of a furrow,
turns off the engine, sits, and watches the sea
as the south-west wind buffets his cab.
A cultural geographer, the wind in his face,
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty in his pack,
walks along the coast path, thinking:
There’s nothing really to say about the sea
except what we already know from looking at it –
it’s always different, always the same.
The farmer paints on Sundays.
He tries to paint the sea, to capture the way
waves behave as they break – but how to do it?
no two waves he’s seen were ever the same.
The geographer reaches the headland,
takes notebook and pen from his pocket
and writes on a wind-ruffled page:
Or, rather, it is composed of innumerable differences
so finely different that their
incessant production is also their apparent erasure.
SEA-CHANGE
brine-pits
and broom-groves
cloud-capped
dew-lapped
and dove-drawn
ever-angry
ever-harmless
heart-sorrow
honey-drops
and horse-piss
inch-meal
lass-lorn
never-surfeited
sea-marge
sea-sorrow
sea-swallowed
sight-outrunning
spell-stopped
and still-vexed
thunder-claps
thunder-stroke
up-staring
urchin-shows
wave-worn
and weather-fended
PYTHAGOREAN
straighten the bed clothes on rising
and smooth out the place where you lay
spit on your hair clippings and nail parings
destroy the mark of the pot in the ashes
don’t look in a mirror by lamplight
don’t stir the fire with a knife
don’t turn around at the border
for surely the Furies are following
struck bronze sings with the voice
of the daemon captive within it
the Pleiades are the lyre of the Muses
and the planets are Persephone’s dogs
© Copyright Paul Rossiter 2020
Paul Rossiter was born in Cornwall in 1947 and has lived in Japan since 1981. After retiring from teaching at the University of Tokyo in 2012, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in English-language poetry from Japan, whether written by Anglophone poets who live in Japan or by Japanese poets who choose to write in English; the press also publishes some translations of Japanese modernist and contemporary poetry. His own most recent books of poetry areTemporary Measures (2017), and On Arrival (2019).
