The Poet

After several years he
turned to his old themes
assuming he had missed the
answers or perhaps there was
more to be said.

I found him there.
Cold and confused –
he almost didn't know me –
hiding himself in the dark.

"I blinded myself, you know, because
everything I saw looked the same
and I got tired of looking.

"I realized how ugly,
like an open wound.
And like an animal
I'm drawn closer."


27 June 1985

This is not really a poem about sex despite the fact ‘Personification’ (#587) was completed on the same day. It is a poem about the nature of attraction. When you think about an attractive person you imagine one of the beautiful people. But that’s only one form of attraction. Moths are attracted to light. Flies are attracted to rotten flesh. Apparently sharks are attracted to death metal music. Poets are attracted to… well, it depends on the poet. Larkin said that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

My wife and I were in an art gallery many years ago in the East End of Glasgow. Hanging in the window were a number of tiny portraits, all by the same artist. Carrie said she liked one in particular and I asked her which one to which she replied, “The sad one.” I couldn’t tell from that which one she was on about. To me they were all sad and I told her so.

I’ve always resisted using terms like inspiration and muse. You can’t avoid them but I don’t make too much of them but for those of you who do have a Muse, which one is it? You see we talk about the muse, as if there’s only one but there were actually nine and none of them was the muse of sadness.

There is something attractive about sadness though. We buy sad books and watch sad films knowing they’re going to make us sad and we’d feel cheated if they didn’t. Sadness is like sourness. Something tart every now and then can be a nice change. Not everything makes me sad but I do seem to have a talent for seeing the sadness in things. I wasn’t always like that but as we grow our tastes change. I still can’t stand Guinness through.