The birds
He rolls around in circles, she says, To stop the universe. “There is in these circles perhaps some kind of permanence.” A swarm of birds fly round Like dust somewhere in Newville. There is no need for death to remain, she writes. The lines will stay indented in the sky And dust will fall always in the same pattern. “The birds they circle back.” (Or perhaps some different birds) To be incessantly where they are not. And feverishly we’ll sit at the edge of everything And trace these patterns in our hands. MOVEMENTS ON THE THEME OF PERMANENCE
i. Water laps at lashes the wall screaming soft music. The gulls calling they clutter the crying sky the flood rises. Four towers last to list above grey waves incongruous from the cabin until the hull scrapes stone below. ii. A fleeting glimpse a phosphorescence face-to-face and six feet between us. iii. One day he’ll realise When do you suppose O I don’t know six months Long time Sooner perhaps Will he say anything I’ll know from the colours in his eyes iv. Here we are on a boat again. Storm petrels flash black and white. The wake thickens. Control
Silken is the sound that sends the cat leaping, in a stroke of instinct and fur —as the cat skitters, I am reminded of the violin re-stringed and pitched below its habitual strain: in a minute- or now- it might resume its long-trailed slaloming at the scale I presume him to know best. A purr, muted, on the new gut-strings: the instrument unframes the dream-loose fresco spun across the room, and (as if it were a serious jest) the dancing in it: violin-tail and cat bending the bow in a stroke of silence |
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