
It used to burn, especially in spring:
the sense that life was happening elsewhere.
Smudged afternoons when lilacs leaked their smell
past schoolyard brick, whole plotlines seemed to twist
just out of reach. Inside the facing houses
chamber on networked chamber rose … to what?
Some angel chorus flowing around the sun?
Some lurid fuck? ... For years that huge desire
simmered, then somehow ... didn't dissipate
so much as fuse itself to thought and touch.
Not an attractive state to be in, this perpetual state of regret and unexamined expectations, but it is a state of mind nearly epidemic among those for whom poverty isn't a source of their despondency, and for whom scents, sounds, tints of light or billboard slogans are triggers , launching points for them to go asea rudderless amid the ebbs and flows of unconstrained memory. This poem is a small gem, a perfect lyric of a mind trying to reconcile actual choices he's made in partners and occupation and location, with other he might have made, thinks,perhaps, should have made.
Though one would usually be compelled to elaborate too much, too long, too often in exploring this situation--what defies being named encourages the exhaustion of even the best writer efforts to tease a sense of exactness from such a state of perpetual , nebulous limbo--Campion sticks to poetic principle and gives us language that creates a sense of the interior argument. The external world is not banished entirely from his thoughts;rather, they intrude on his reverie, they bring back to his current obligations, duties, his willingness to pretend to be happy inspite of persistent regret.
You stand in purple shade beside your dresser.
And filtering off the park the breeze returns it:
lilac: its astringent sweetness, circling us
as if it were fulfillment of desire.
But not fulfillment. Just the distance here
between us, petaled, stippling to the touch.
Campion, again, writes well about what happens in the cracks between life's cushioning assurances, but he reads dreadfully, and the recording provided us reveals him to sound whiny, sniveling, limp wristed, a reticent and rattled drone of gutless pessimism. The poem is too good to merely be known for a wimpish rendition; even the most self indulgent of regrets should have a residue of rage smouldering, a flame of anger still consuming the last unspent piece of lumber. I offer here my version of "Lilacs". It's not definitive , of course, but I think it's interesting to hear it again with a different voice intoning the secret meanings and blurry subtexts.
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