Edward DOEGAR
THREE poems
ODE AS GRUDGE,
THE YOU’RE NOT,
& AN EFFORT, AS IN
THE YOU’RE NOT,
& AN EFFORT, AS IN
ODE AS GRUDGE
to the moon. Messing with the baby
blue, diminishing returns too soon.
Save me. White thing. Recipient
of yearn. Reflective brute. The you
that pens these clarifying tendencies.
You’re nothing to the obliterating
day, the blindingly obvious
who-needs-a-fucking-metaphor
for this. I unwelcome you here,
patron of irony, swish peddler
of the implicit. Knowing winker
at the contradiction. Always around
for a round of applause. Silence
employed. Pushing the work rate
of the clean white page. You’re so
heroically against the black. Tragic
star of inactivity, who ponders
to precision, to the obligingly pathetic fallacy
that, that, that, there, always there, there above,
demandingly indifferent, ever only differentiating
from itself, this never knowingness that
dwells in every ritual perhaps
THE YOU’RE NOT
from here meets me in the mirror, the shock
not being my own face (obliged into its objective
travesty, its all-too-familiar anything but) but
the reflection I’m not faced with, that you are
or might be, a nearer, fairer summary than
AN EFFORT, AS IN
intention’s pit stains on display, the sense
of stumbling short, achieved, the stoop
to measure the narrowness of loss, its so
much, its no more no less than then now.
But to stop there would be to say what?
Something about trying, in spite of oneself,
to undermine the race, those presumptions
that I can’t avoid making, that what then
Edward DOEGAR is a poet and editor based in London. He is a consulting editor at The Rialto and was the commissioning editor of the Poetry Translation Centre between 2018 and 2021. His pamphlet FOR NOW was published by clinic in 2017, and a text written in collaboration with the artist Shakeeb ABU HAMDAN will be published by Kelder Press in 2022.