THE HISTORY ITCH.(Poem)

(after George Ewart Evans)

 
   1. 
 
   To live like a brilliant idea 
   outside our given time, 
   to live, warm as a thought 
   inside the time another lives, 
   we like these things and can't have them. 
 
   And still I watch three women 
   as they push their flat-irons 
   in and out and round the truculent fabric, 
   and as each iron cools, 
   they heft a new one from the stove. 
 
   It is the goffering on petticoats they press; 
   and each (the oral history tells) 
   may take them half an afternoon to finish, 
   so intricate is this menial work. 
 
   They are chattersome or not 
   around their broad table. 
   The exact idiom of their speech, their gestures, 
   the very promptings of their thought 
   are natural to them as their shadows, 
 
   and must elude this picture, not utterly, 
   but as a gist eludes translation 
   as water catches but will not hold the light. 
 
   So their afternoon light behaves 
   as they can know and we cannot, 
   so their strange clothes abrade their flesh 
   as ours do, as ours do not, 
   three working ...