Toying

I am arrested by two words.

toy river

The juxtaposition creates this tension between the small and the vast for it is not a stream nor a creek but something larger, a river. And "toy" brings one to the miniature and a rereading of the whole line to try and grasp the contraries in context:

A toy river running the wrong way,

Some disaster threatens to flood and so we return to the lines on either side:

As in a block of ice, and time is at once
A toy river running the wrong way,
And a little rain that sends us into the house,

Ah ha, time figured as a river — that's familiar but it is falling from the sky! We need a whole stanza (and we suspect it will leak).

The garden where the humus begins
Is shorn away, embedded in my memory
As in a block of ice, and time is at once
A toy river running the wrong way,
And a little rain that sends us into the house,
Spelling a cul-de-sac.

And then there is the greater context of the poem and that of the collection and that of the works and the life in a tradition. All coming to the same point of no exit, a simple cul-de-sac, however it is avoided by taking shelter from the rain, twin to the wrong way toy river, the one that induces us to come in and read the words and listen for the notes.

From Medbh McGuckian "East of Mozart" collected in Marconi's Cottage.

And so for day 892
23.05.2009