Je commence à y voir clair.

01. I would have been nine had I been born on time
02. but decades passed and Eliot wrote on
03. and the plover rested, angel to the ferret
04. and left no stern atoned, no field untilled
05. until a footnote marked its pocking flight
06. and the ferret breathed in sulphur and expired. (1)

07. Le clair de lune brought clarity I wrote
08. and lunacy I lived for all my worth,
09. yclept out Ford my room and board to God
10. and tenancy my station while on Earth.
11. Not that it frangled. Rank was knot I pulled
12. and Gordian my gorgon, George B. praised.
13. As Cecil, a half brother, kept the B.,
14. I dropped mine off the balcony and braised
15. the ferret, nothing-waisted as their wont
16. is, though the hocks are tastier than rat,
17. and rats who walk on broken glass are prone (2)
18. to every corporal attitude except
19. that yclept as prone, and I’d lie if
20. I sold you squirrel as rat hand ewe wood stew.

Footnotes:

Je commence à y voir clair = I’m beginning to understand

La clair de lune = moonlight

I would wager that, given seventeen hours, bread, manchego cheese and three bottles of Navarra (two white and chilled, one red and not), I could write thirty-four pages of footnotes ‘explaining’ the references in this poem.

Thirty-four pages!

But I wood knot wont tow reed them <g>

Footnote 1. ‘and the plover rested, angel to the ferret / and left no stern atoned, no field untilled’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3) ‘CHORUSES FROM ‘THE ROCK, The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven’, lines 100-102: ‘Only the wind moves / Over empty field, untilled / Where the plough rests, at an angle / To the furrow…’

Footnote 2. ‘and rats who walk on broken glass are prone’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3, again) ‘THE HOLLOW MEN, A penny for the Old Guy’, line 9: ‘Or rats’ feet over broken glass’

Footnote 3. TSE = T.S. Eliot, a poet who wrote these incomparable lines: ‘In the room the women come and go / and talk of Michelangelo.’ (footnote 4)

Footnote 4. . . . – – – . . . – – – . . . Maybe you will continue these footnotes for me <S>