A PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The poet considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing reality. All language is, for him, the mirror of the world. My own poetry mirrors, grows out of, many things. Fleeting, fleeing, reality I try to catch in many forms by means of words. One thing, one reality, I deal with is reconstructed memories of actual persons, places and things. It will take the rest of my life to continue the reconstruction. -Ron Price with thanks to Thomas Francis Lombardi, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone, Susquehanna UP, London, 1996, pp.12-13.


Like some getaway car, shooting fast,
slick along the highway, back, back,
to some place forever young and fresh;
it could be the future, except I know
it so well, some colours of the mind,
like the movies, only I’m director and
everything, caught for a moment right
now, sharp editing, drifting out over
the surf onto the open sea, shining in
the sun all the way to the blue sky: where
can I begin and go where the camera can
not go, where no man has ever gone before,
and boldly? Perhaps, those Eskimo kids in
the fall of ’67, when I was young and on fire
with the torch which Thou didst kindle, with
burning snow and cold day after day, until my
brain did burn with some electrical buzz, knockout
blow, and I slowly recuperated listening to the top
forty on a.m., counting screws in a workshop and
eating cabbage frequently: my first prayer book gone.1


1 I gave my first prayer book, a blue 1954 American edition of Baha’i Prayers, to the first Eskimo in the District of Franklin to become a Baha’i on 29 May 1968: Josephee Temotee.

Ron Price
10 January 1997