Friday, 19 April 2024

Looking for Inspiration

 


Limbering up

 

It’s a cloudy morning in Mid-April

and after my diurnal walk around the park

to stretch my aging limbs

I return to my travel room, as I like to call it,

the one that has no actual function but performs several

and try to find a suitable subject for Calliope or even Erato.

 

Scanning the furniture, all of it second hand,

and therefore resonant with narratives

the cabriole legged table springs to the fore-

appropriate enough since a cabriole

is a scissors-like leap performed by a male dancer.

 

It was bought in the forties or fifties

somewhere along the Dublin quays by a friend’s parents

and sits now, centre leaf fully expanded,

holding up the internet and propelling me around the globe.

 

The sixties woollen blanket thrown across the couch

with its sombrero hatted figures, arms raised in what might be a Mexican wave

and legs gyrating to the rhythm of a series of musical notes

projects me into the upstairs room of a council house, circa 1967,

where I played Gene Pitney in vinyl and pitied the dilemma

of his spouse as he bailed out on her just 24 hours from Tulsa.

 

 

And apart from all this time travel there are the various prints on the walls

Parisian bouquinistes and Venetian canals, and postcards from friends

who actually did travel-You get the picture.

So you see the room may not be a suitable theme for poésie

but it’s not called the travel room for nothing…


Copyright 2024 Cathy Leonard All rights reserved

24 Hours from Tulsa


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