THE BROWN RECLUSE

When @ 18, a freshman in college, I read a poem by one of my professors, John Crowe Ransom:

BELLS FOR JOHN WHITESIDE'S DAUGHTER

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study Astonishes us all

Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,

For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!

But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.

This poem was unlike the more classical work that I was to later emulate in my own writing. More in the Dickenson style.... elusively simple and ironically melancholy. It transcended the maudlin sentimentality of the read-on-the-toilet Reader's Digest poetry that was stacked beneath the toilet paper dispenser in my mother's bathroom, and opened my mindset about poetry. Natural and stylistically transparent and so much more accessible than the work of Pound or Eliot, that I admired so much, it flows from a wisely understanding heart. My own work is more guarded and stilted, evolving from the poesy of the 17th and 18th centuries, tempered by my love of Eastern philosophy and aesthetic and my preoccupations with the thought processes that divulge the words and schematics that manifest from within emotional thinking, embarrassingly Rorschachianly spilled to the virtual parchment.

Live At Bliss Gardens by Kourosh Dini