david-pollard
English
I was born under the bed in 1942 and have been a furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. I got my three degrees from the University of Sussex and have since taught at the universities of Sussex, Essex and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I have published The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience which was my doctoral thesis, The KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Edition of Keats’ Letters. Also a novel, Nietzsche’s Footfalls, and three volumes of poetry, patricides, Risk of Skin and bedbound (translated into Galician and Spanish). A fourth, Self-Portraits, is forthcoming. I have also been published in other volumes and in learned journals and poetry magazines.
[Las Meninas, Oil on Canvas, 1656, Prado, Madrid]
I am the first proud pronoun I
against the fear of my invisibility
each morning rising from
minor nobility like my parents
(no son of a converso – lies –)
into the light of mastery;
now as a Knight of Santiago
- the king himself painted the cross
you see in Las Meninas -
nobilitas is in the faces
royal with ancient lines
(you understand I did not
trade
am Moorish of Seville
and Portugal).
Not from the mind but back
into its expectation.
I see the work reflected
into the lens of sense
to supplement the work into the real
express itself by what
a slavish love of detail cannot supply
it was the power
to give them what they did not see
the scorn in lips
from ****** generations
bought by my brush
among them into monarchic trade
and what they thought as glory,
dwarves and all larger than life.
that painted me so high
those royal portraits by the score
keyed to the colour of fame
silvered and golden
mine.
Jan 25, 2012
Jan 25, 2012 at 7:11 AM UTC