The Poetry of Magical
Where things just happen.
The blue-beaked parrot lands
on the hummingbird feeder
that dangles from your ear
and begins singing like Pharrell Williams—
a voice that drops veils of gauze
around sunrise. Suddenly the mountaintop
where you stand unrolls its green velvet
and you walk down into a land
you once knew but that changed overnight.
You believe it more because you are
here in the piazza of nobility,
dragging your rusty sword
into furrows behind you.
Red and yellow blossoms pop open
and transform into fruits
grabbed up by the hungry children.
There is no real logic, only a shared pretense. We agree on the rules, but poetry breaks them in concentrating on the senses. Like magical realism in fiction, poetry takes us deeply into an inner world where a rising fountain alters time and the passing wind speaks of worlds hatched from pebbles. It’s our world but in a dreamlike mood. Our neighborhood on a floodlit stage where anyone may enter: Othello, Joan of Arc, yourself as Zeus.
Poetry and magical realism are more like life than life. We usually roll along on logic that masks an ineffable yearning, but we don’t know for what. That pull can feel like a deep-hued passion without an object, or a blurring of many feelings together into a nameless intensity. I think of it as where poetry starts, that pull, that twilight or dawn, where the stars grow immense and tell us ancient secrets.
I’ve always been in love with magical realism, and books containing magic and poetry. In my literary life, I first turned to poetry, where things become other things so easily. They are familiar, yet more vividly alive, and with a new strangeness. One of my early favorite poets, Dylan Thomas, luxuriated in this world, notably in his luminously magical play, Under Milkwood.
Young girls lie bedded soft
or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux,
bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the
organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the
bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And
the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,
and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed
yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly,
streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
