A Festschrift for Tony Frazer
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STALKING GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

 

I’ve been reading your diary and sniffing its flowerbeds 
The white violets are broader and smell of  April 15, 1871 
treading in my bare reader’s feet the sharper whelking and  
a more winged recoil in the leaves. I’ve left some of the days  
to themselves, unfinished like Spring, 1871,  April 21   
We have had other such afternoons, one today – the sky a
 

I’ve whisked past that specific (it was beautiful grained) blue  
and backwards to peruse you, in letters to your father,  
to read you caught believing, between him  16 October 1866 
You are so kind as not to forbid me your house, to which I have no claim, 
on condition, if I understand, that I promise not to try to convert  
my brothers and sisters  


and your superiors   Before I can promise this I must get permission, 
wh. I have no doubt will be given. Of course this promise  

will not apply after they come of age.  Closeness to a God penning 
the distance – grown child’s to parent’s soul – that’s as much  
like doubt as  faith   Whether after my reception you will still speak  
as you do now I cannot tell 


I can spell no comfort in my witness’s wince, though I spy onwards  
irreverent with chronology and plundering half-sprung authorship, poet 
to his pal 15 Feb 1879   When I say that I do not mean to publish  
I speak the truth.  I can wedge myself in between you, your mum and  
Marvell most rich and nervous of verse, not knowing who I was  
looking for in your bud-filled universe until via post-Herbert Vaughan   
27 Feb 1879  . . .  and even his muse underwent a conversion  
(for he had written before).


Amy Evans
From Shearsman magazine 30th Anniversary Edition, Issues 87 & 88 (Spring/Summer, 2011)
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