Incident

 I look across the table and think
 (fiery with love)
 Ask me, go on, ask me
 to do something impossible,
 something freakishly useless,
 something unimaginable and inimitable

 Like making a finger break into blossom
 or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes
 or remembering tomorrow.

 I will you to ask it.
 But all you say is
 Will you give me a cigarette?
 And I smile and,
 returning to the marvelous world
 of possibility
 I give you one
 with a hand that trembles
 with a human trembling.

Commentary

Find me a guy who thinks like that, the madness and the wry tenderness… realizing the awful depth of his love, the contrast between that glorious pitch of passion and our unmagical surroundings. Reminds me of Yeats in Adam’s Curse( yearning to love her in ‘the old high way of love’). I love the touches like ‘marvellous world of possibility’… discovering the romance of the real. What’s absolutely wonderful about MacCaig is the way he always, always brings out the underworld of dreaming, of the fantasy billowing beneath the even surface of the everyday.

— Amulya

The Wondering Minstrels, poem #699 · 16 February 2001

Guest poem submitted by Amulya Gopalakrishnan

Fair use

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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.

James Dowell · 16 February 2001

im sitting here at work, already clocked out, looking at email. and i see another poem here for the 16th. something ive never read before and the authors name is meaningless to me.

and i read and read. exactly too marvelous for words.

the words crack open a little window inside me, like im longing to breathe again, to feel life not this other thing that so often seems to take its place, and for a moment- and its really just a moment- everything is new again, everything is alright. love is just a glance away…

thanks.