Poetry Thursday

After listening to an episode of The Verb about Scottish poet Don Paterson (born 1963 in Dundee) I got it into my head that he'd written a nice poem about breathing. The search for that (imaginary?) poem led, somehow, to a review in The New Yorker of his 2009 book, "Rain" (which, incidentally won the Forward Poetry Prize). In that article is part of a poem about the poet's son -

My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run 

in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,his hand shakes, and he screws it up.  

The shake’s as old as he is, all
(thank god) he can recall
of that hour when, one inch from home,
we couldn’t get the air to him; 

and though today he’s all the earth
and sky for breathing-space and breath
the whole damn troposphere can’t cure
the flutter in his signature.

It might be complete, just there, but The Circle  has more to it ...

But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark 

and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target also draws our aim –
our will and nature’s are the same; 

we are its living word, and not
a book it wrote and then forgot,
its fourteen-billion-year-old song
inscribed in both our right and wrong 

so even when you rage and moan
and bring your fist down like a stone
on your spoiled work and useless kit,
you just can’t help but broadcast it: 

look at the little avatar
of your muddy water-jar
filling with the perfect ring
singing under everything.

Not the poem I'd thought I'd heard (and am still searching for), but even better....

Footnotes! (and images)

1. Krishna's arrow? "Mistaking the sleeping Krishna for a deer, a hunter named Jara shoots an arrow that fatally injures him" says Wikipedia, and gives this illustration (rather dull compared with the usual colourful ones) -

2. The fourteen-billion-year-old song of nature? Ah, that would be the cosmic microwave background ("the afterglow of the Big Bang") -