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Franklin Square II

I love to walk in the damp fountain air
Watching those irreverent, inverted pissing geysers
Plummet on the great Man, in broad daylight streams

Lost in the ice, what would he give?
For such temperate relief as this.
I breathe in the moisture and look up at the sky of polarized dreams.

All is well, and I fill in the day, with the great slanted colour of rain,
I don’t care if the wind is wild in St David’s park
And sidelong blows, lead trees gracefully astray

You wander into a café and stare
At your body like a word on a page
And it begins to lose some sense

Beauty was otherwise engaged
When I called her for a definition
And the lexicon mirror,sinister seeming.

But, look – beyond the smeary pane
And the world’s gleaming
The pavement, aflame.

And, You're still there.
In the sun warmth of a dappled table;
Where the great statured man is,

His passage in pain, tales gnawed at,
By the history of retreating ice
Is like the mystery of that fountain

It's rippling surface dispersing his image
To the very edge of it's plane
Like a story, lost in fragments, time and again

Last few words: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin's_lost_expedition
Editing stage: 

Comments

An interesting write... lol - I love how you describe the statue with its water fountain - just what the poor man probably needed... too late eh? - definitely can be seen as irreverent

But who 'you' is in stanzas 4, 5, and 6, is lost on me ... I'm obviously missing something...

great descriptive
love judy
xxx

'Each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as They are.'
(Rudyard Kipling)

I love the way the geysers seemed to instantly invoke that image of irreverence too. The 'you' in the stanzas mentioned is really a you in the collective blundering tourist sense - the definition of people looking into things, at things, on things - trying to find meaning that is relevant to their everyday lives in a city like Hobart. The image I wanted to convey was that of tourists gathered around the pool of Franklin, with it's pissing geysers (yes, it should have been geysers, not geisers, although I was playing with "Geezers" in the cockney sense) and watching his image (and story) ripple out to the edges of meaning. Sort of :).

Well I hope that clear some of it up? I will probably revive/revise it, each time I walk past the statue.

Thanks for your comments, they were much appreciated.

Love to you too!

Chris.

Chris Hall - Tasmania

Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's stores.

author comment

for clearing that up for me ... I appreciate the poem even more now
xxx

'Each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as They are.'
(Rudyard Kipling)

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