(Final major edits to poem completed 2004 March 02 Tues.)

This poem came to me 2004 February 26 Thursday while sitting on an isolated park bench on a glorious warm beautiful breezy autumn kind of day in Cheesman Park in Denver. It was actually late winter but the brown leaves everywhere made it seem like autumn. I had spent perhaps one hour in the park in sprititual contemplation that afternoon, as I often do. When I had sat on the bench looking west, I took to reading my book Surrealist Love Poems (edited by Mary Ann Caws). I had read only the long and compelling forward titled "The Poetics of Surrealist Love", underlining great discoveries that inspired me. Then I was reading through a few works such as Andre Breton and Louis Aragon. I had also been listening to the song Both Sides the Tweed sung by Mary Black (Celtic Tides album) on my MP3 player wearing large headphones. I had heard the song many times before and many times that afternoon as part of a programmed trilogy including An Innis Aigh (The Ranklin Family) and E Horo (Mary Jane Lamond). Just as Both Sides the Tweed had ended again, I attempted to change the selection to J' Attendrai (a French song) but it would not play. Suddenly the battery of my MP3 player had died. I think it was the death of the battery that focused my inspiration.

I put down the book feeling richly alive in the beauty of life and deeply inspired by the sweetness of Mary Black's voice and the message of Mary Ann Caw's writing. I had been moved by all things that afternoon such that I could only be alone. I knew at this moment that I wanted to be a surrealist like never before. I had been largely surrealist as a writer for many years. But mostly in the bent of darker varieties writing about horror and madness peppered with dark comedy. This moment gave me inspiration to make love and sincerity the center of all these other varieties of surrealist writing that I have dabbled in for decades. Not that love is new in my work. But now I know that sincere romanticism (in the 18th Century context of the word) has a central place in my life.

I proceeded to write Autumn in the Park not only out of the inspiration mentioned. I felt confident that I could write a good surrealist love poem and wanted to put myself to the challenge. Roughly nine hours later, just after midnight I typed and edited my handwritten poem to completion. But then I subjected the poem to hours of further edits on March 2.

Coincidentally the poem also became intended as an extension of a story I have been crafting for years, one of many. This particular story has a working title of "Sunny Brook", the name of a nursing home where a very old man is confined and continually "escapes". He becomes the object of romantic attraction in the heart of a very young woman who finds in him both a father figure and a lover. The physical aspect of this love, if any, is both ridiculous and innocently comic and hardly carnal on the part of either party. Nonetheless the relationship slowly becomes profoundly intimate. The old character is essentially a rebel who defies the stifling regimen of the nursing home, performs comic pranks and runs off to explore all the unfinished glories of his own youth, essentially reliving them. The odd pair meet and click instantly, to the frequent and cruel ridicule of their separate peers, calling into question the whole meaning of any deeply personal love as well as the sanctity of anyone's inner beauty.

Related links:

Mary Ann Caws <MaryAnnCaws.com> -
The Mary Black Home Page <Mary-Black.net> -

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