TUMBLING DOWN, TUMBLING DOWN
I like to be able to move around, to incorporate as much as possible, to make sense of the world, to grapple with language and life, to discover what might emerge from a language which is beyond me, to be changed and to change others, modestly. I never know where a poem is going to end. I take a tangential, oblique, an indirect approach to the political, often by means of the domestic. -Paul Muldoon, Irish poet on Books and Writing, ABC Radio, 17 March 1996, 7:40 pm.
In October when we thought
the world might end I’d moved
down the road to Dundas with
my folks. I’d touched a warm,
very flat breast, my first,
just before Kennedy and Kruschev
were warring with words and our
world in that crisis in Cuba where
Castro had made a name for himself.
I was so young, so fresh, so new,
so unaware of all this international intrigue
that was taking us to the edge of oblivion.
I was not even aware of the least significance
of my pioneering to the next town in these
earliest days of a Cause in Canada. It is easy
to get used to lack of awareness, even when the
world is tumbling down, tumbling down.
Ron Price
17 March 1996
