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15 Sept 2023

Tim
Kiely

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New Moon

Sep 29th

Aug 31st

‘And it was never really
the same after that’

After Ron Padgett’s

Love Poem

                        … no blue and yellow morning in which 

                        your stretching spine perfected itself 

                        and their skin was rosy; no night where their hands 


                        were wind and moonlight over your valleys; 

                        no listless work evenings; no changing of the sheets;

                        no sitting apart to decompress 


                        as the flat hummed gently. You were always flame 

                        even on the low-burning days;

                        the fruit you took at their well-known lips 


                        was always sharper. And the recall 

                        of all of this says there is nothing 

                        either ignoble or easy 


                        about the simple attempt to tell it:

                        coming back to the bench in Congo Square 

                        the greens are deeper, the stones sashay


                        in a different rhythm, newly alive 

                        each time it happens. It was never the same

                        after you were asked, and you said ‘yes’.

Behind the poem...

The title of my poem comes from a line in Ron Padgett’s Love Poem; a poem used to such tender, arresting effect in the 2016 Jim Jarmusch film, Paterson. Both the poem and the movie spoke to me about the ways in which ordinary life can be alchemised by poetic language – and that seemed to me the perfect jumping-off point for a poem about a moment when the texture of my own life altered dramatically ... when my fiancée (now wife) proposed to me.

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