The deepening groove

I found this poem as I was waiting for the video files to transfer to New York. I thought it reflected the psychologist's remarks in de Lisle's book.

Plumbing the Deepening Groove

That survival is impossible without repetition
of patterns is platitude - see moon rise or whorls in wolf fur -

but how explain the human need to reenact primal dramas,
even when the act perpetuates a cycle of abuse?

The boy who hides in the tool shed with buckle-shaped welts
rising like figs from his arms will curse his father,

and in turn beat his son. Like a wave anguish rises,
never understands itself before emptying in a fist.

The spurned daughter will seek out loves who abandon her,
self-will degenerating in the face of what feels familiar.

Childhood, seen in light of recurrence, takes on the heft
of conspiracy, casts a shadow across an entire life,

making it appear that nothing could have happened
differently, that free and easy is the stuff of semblance.

Then of the prerogatives, reclamation is principal,
to appraise the past the way a painter subsumes old canvas

with new layers of paint, each brushstroke unconcerned,
sure, dismantling the contour of what once was realised

so that new forms can emerge to contradict the suggestion
that survival is impossible without repetition.

by Ravi Shankar