Were I to stare into an open fire by Paul Muldoon
Were I to stare into an open fire
as my father did in his own early winter twilight,
I would not be waiting for it all to be over
between the real world and the imagined world;
I would not be telling from the flames those hitherto untold
plains, peaks, pixies, pookas, and other brainchildren.
‘Were I to stare into an open fire,’
Yeats had opined, ‘I would see beyond the Chilterns
between the real world and the imagined world
a certain village in Oxfordshire
where my son spent his first three months, or four. . .’
What I myself would hope to encounter,
were I to stare into an open fire
between the real world and the imagined world,
would be not the hissing of an orange-beaked gander
nor a woman of the Bedouin
peeping out from her coal-black ‘house of hair’
but fire itself. I would want no mere fancy to come between –
between the real world and the imagined world –
were I to stare into an open fire.
Paul Muldoon’s most recent collection of poems, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, was published in 2024.
A recording of Paul Muldoon reading the poem is available here - https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22545842/