It occurred to me some time ago that the game of chess was a likely and good metaphor for talking about any number of life experiences. Particularly, since in itself chess is quite a mysterious a palette of colourful moments of moves. For me, the ideal field-of-time for the language of discovery. I am far more interested in poems and prose-poems that go in search of discovering how it is we are so mysterious to ourselves and the world inner and outer that we live in.

The poem in fact grows out of a time when I was as a dedicated amateur teaching two of my sons the game of chess. Discovery and fascination naturally attract each other. Also, the early and sustained sibling rivalry with my older brother was in play. I was at the time quite bewildered and fascinated and confused about this family relationship stuff. My brother as ‘King’ is spot on, since in fact he claimed the title of the ‘anointed one’. From the psychological side.., how else can we talk about such things as the dynamics of family relationships but to acknowledge that families like individuals are driven by unconscious and conscious motivations. Projection is a wonderful thing.

The Queen is the One, indeed she is the reigning One. And no fancy footwork here to note that from the earliest recorded history in faery tales, myths/mytholo drama, poesia, and the long recorded corpus of dreams, the feminine has been the prize. It’s universal that is to say archetypal stuff.

This poem makes use of these realities based on years of reading, and years working as a Jungian therapist. In any case you use what you have, and it’s how one uses it that makes a difference. How else to get close to the heart of the matter? Of course, I had very little idea what was going to happen by the always open end of the story. Not knowing is wonderfully useful in making a poem discover things to say. I want to be surprised, sometimes even a little astonished to see and hear what the unconscious turns up. To close with the only thing I can say is that it is the nature of language that one word is always flying to another word to see what happens. How else would we ever be able to make a sentence be what it is. Dear old William Blake came at it from another and ’slant’ angle: ‘What was once imagn’d is not a fact’.