THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR

One word one word and then another,
one word and another, waiting for the
light to come stealing in, you ask what
is it that love dares the self to do?

All he wanted was to put his shoes out
in the moonlight.  To hear music be the
saint of laughter again.  And all that
time rehearsing his lines in the dark;

the love-mess of it all – when so much
forgetting is always about remembering;
on the long walk backwards to meet
himself coming the other way, but didn’t

It’s just that I’m made of clouds, he said,
so many of my words have lost their
happiness. That endless dream of being
awake forever and there is no one there

How the longest day of the year keeps
getting shorter.  And I am too much alone;
if you love me will I love you too, will you?
It seemed to matter that there was no
marvellous music anymore:  all that he

could hear one word one word and then
another, waiting for the light to come
stealing in, all that he could hear was
how he lives in the buried talk of others;
inside the long history of goodbye

(c) Michael Harlow

~ published in “The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap” (Auckland University Press) 2009

Reproduced here with permission

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About the Poem (& the Collection): The Poet’s Note—

“Poems that ask what it means, in the face of the absurdities and shadowy things thrown up by life, to ‘risk delight’; and what that might mean when we are looking-out and listening-in for a language to say something about how mysterious we are to ourselves and to the world

Poems that are lyric moments of recognition of what happens when we stand up and speak in front of ourselves and others; you could say a way of ‘being restoried’; a way of letting ‘words dream again’, so that making the ‘invisible, visible’ is at the heart of what the I call the ‘persistent imaginal’.  From this ‘the poem springs’

And there are poems that come calling on and celebrate the ‘privilege of ordinary astonishments’–so that one day ‘a single original carrot shall be pregnant with revolution’ (an echo from the painter Cézanne)

Poems that acknowledge and reflect on how it is always that the ‘light lies down with the dark’, however various the shuffling  weathers of the heart turn up loss and death, time and memory, despair and delight; when ‘forgetting is always about  remembering’

And on those occasions that poems return to that inevitable and archetypal mystérion, what is it ‘that love dares the self to do’?

A poetry that rests on and enacts the belief that we need to ‘see the sounds and hear the words’, so that despite every dark thing there is in the world, there will always be music, when ‘words sing’ poetry makes intimate everything that it touches ( there is always the distinct possibility of romance’, and more); naturally, poetry wants to go to the heart of the matter.

Michael Harlow”

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About the Poet:

Michael Harlow was born in the USA in 1937 to a Greek father and American–Ukrainian mother. He travelled extensively in Europe and lived in several other countries before arriving in New Zealand in 1968, where he has lived ever since. In 2009, Michael Harlow was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago and the inaugural Casselberg House Artist in Residence. “The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap” was a finalist in the 2010 NZ Post Poetry Award.