Detour -GC

I’m looking forward to more talks about poetry, Sam. I can’t tell you how much I love that you write, not least because it is something we can share for the rest of my life… our lives. Because it is something that gives me layer upon layer of pleasure. One of the things we talked about last night at the pub, when we were talking about poetry, was how to say something without being too obvious. Poetry has an interesting dilemma – how to be original about things that have been written about since the beginning of time in a way without being so obscure people do not want to continue reading. There is no obvious answer – but it’s a good challenge to have.

So – this poem isn’t directly about you and Dylan and it isn’t about something that specifically happened, but, on another level, it is all about you; about the feelings evoked between father and son; how often that is evoked from something very simple… like a drive in a car with a broken heater.

Detour

Everywhere there is someone doing it worse
the woman on the radio is telling us. The car heater

won’t turn off and summer’s approaching;
if we’re not careful, my son says, we’ll fall asleep

and drive off this straight-as-an arrow road.
He winds down his window and throws

his arm into the warm Northern breeze,
looks at me and smiles
that black-eyed
long-fringed
smile,

brushstrokes of joy, timeless heart-deep leaps of love and as we detour along the shores, he says

the sea smells just as it should, like childhood.

Quote: "There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his children, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself." John Gregory Brown

-Geoff