You have to let me share this
with you. Bachelard, explaining his phenomenology
of houses, and specifically, a light in a distant
window that looks out at you.
He’s quoting Baudelaire, whose long apology
for auto-immolation brings him to de Quincey
reading Kant: “Is it not true
that a cottage concentrates the poetry
of winter?” He describes a valley hide-away, and since
he’s dreaming about opium, the heavy draperies
that shut the seasons out. It’s interesting
how, in Bachelard’s abstractions, images
look out at you this way, from shapeless
murkiness, like cattle looming out of mist
to breathe on you. That image is Nick Messenger’s.
He wanted you to be the vehicle of this.
Nicholas Messenger has been a poet all his life, and a painter on and off. He won the Glover Poetry award in New Zealand in the 1970s, and has had some one-man shows of his paintings. He has worked as a teacher, of science, art, and languages in High Schools in New Zealand, and for the last nine years, as a teacher of English in Japan.