about the site

the author

titles

first lines

essays

translations

acknowledgments

abraxas press

Note on April

An example of my ideas on essence and versions.  I’ve made some changes to the first version of this piece.  First I had to work out what I meant.  I once went through a stage of accepting automatically phrases felt as ‘given’, as by a muse, without asking what they meant.  I’ve since recanted and now alter old poems if they are rescuable but unnecessarily obfuscating.  I evidently associated April with Dionysos, who was allied to satyrs and was in some stories lame, hence ‘He drags his goat feet’.  He also changed in the spring into a lion, thus ‘my big, yellow cat’.  In the ancient world, the influence of Dionysos was immense.  He still suggests a substitute for Christianity, which hijacked some of his stories, like the wine miracles, the ascension into heaven.  However, you’d have to journey two thousand years back to the inception of Christianity to know how good an experience the then contemporary ‘pagan’ gods, such as Dionysos, and their the related ceremonies, could provide.

This poem is a mix of arcane allusion and simple story.  My ‘arcane’ is not really erudite.  I had the usual books.  Robert Graves was one point of reference.  The lines

                                April is a sound after silence,

                                a satyr with a grip on new life,

could start a page-turner, echt erudition or not.

Alan Marshfield

top of page                                                                                 April