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Note
on
Taurus
My second zodiac poem, Aries was the other.
I took the attributes, according to a book I’d acquired, of a
birth sign, and use these to flesh out a type.
I didn’t expect a grand design to emerge; it didn’t, so
zodiac poems didn’t become a sequence.
This is an archetype
again, related to the maternal waitress in Rye.
I must like mother-types. We
may have to invent them because they aren’t so easy to come by, even
as mothers, though I think I was lucky.
Could my own mother have been more encouraging and selfless?
I don’t see how. Perhaps
I just missed her. My
Taurean is larger than life, however:
talking
of her sons, gone, revealing no malice
to
the fixed earth which has interred them
with its residuum of lighter tares.
She
is solid stuff, like the earth itself, taking the longer view.
Sleave: an obsolete
word: a slender filament got by
separating a thicker thread, echoing Shakespeare’s Macbeth on sleep,
‘that knits up the ravell’d [tangled] sleave of care’.
Mac. 2.2.38.
Alan
Marshfield
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