Ivan Head: ‘On Reading Continuous Creation’

On Reading Continuous Creation

I always knew he was onto something
even when I only partly understood.
A phenomenology of self
hovered in what he wrote.
Perhaps he looked for that in other poets,
even those to whom his editorial arrow pinged line 2
with the words ‘the poem stops here’.

There is some Edith Stein in it
whom Fredy Neptune did not meet.
What seemed to him, seemed right for readers
in his rippling wake or smoke haze on the field:
co-killers of the black dog as bloodied
and wrecked as sets of guest linen tout ensuite,
or as St Veronica’s handkerchief.

Though mostly gone, reading him has not stopped.
Another continental intellectual wrote about the stream of being
(that clever metaphor approximates)
that might peter-out in sands of desert nothingness,
or not cease but rise and flow more fully,
beyond any golden web of sparkling water droplets
or in the spring-back binder on his vacant desk.

Ivan Head