Learning poetry.

Sunday morning, and the pressure is on. The only way to learn poetry, is under pressure. Which is why it is not attempted with any sense of purpose until today.
The poem is there, on the board - we have read it, but it isn't ours. We don't own it yet. It still belongs to Apollinaire or Tardieu or Prevert. It's unknowness, up there on the board, is its admonishment to us. So we take it down, take a deep breath, we mouth the words to make them ours. We put each other off, so exile ourselves to either end of the room and pace, like actors learning their lines. The words metamophose into forms, they change dimension, they entice ideas and images out of our heads;
Le poisson scie a des soucis
le poisson sole
Ca le desole.
A rhythm generates itself. It's becoming our own;
Mais tous les oiseaux ont des ailes
Meme le vieil oiseau bleu
Meme la grenouille verte
Elle a deux L avant l'E.
We try it out, we test each other, we taste the words. They are almost ours;
Laissez les oiseaux a leur mere
Laissez les ruisseaux dans leur lit
Laissez les etoiles de mer
Sortir si ca leur plait la nuit
Laissez les petits enfants briser leur tirelire....
Head in hands, so thet the outside world doesn't disrupt the chain of images, which in turn would alter the sequence of the poem, which is almost, almost our own...
Sunday morning, high up on the slopes of Parnassus.