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Stacking a found thing
It could be anywhere
But why not anywhere
like a willy-willy
a spiral of dust
on the dirt road
by the rocks
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To the old station's house
round the bend and over the ridge
watching out for corrugations,
protruding, eroded stones
washed out enough
to smash the big end under
a boutique city car:
slow down, take care.
High blue sky with wind,
dust blowing over rocks.
Clouds racing, making dark seas
out of fluctuating ridges -
a cloud coming up over the skyline
like a wave breaking
upwards
onto a wave-platform. It changes
this small flat world's dimensions.
Fluctus. Ictus. The sea.
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The mind's invisible. It's air.
It's just being-here, whatever
you take for granted as part
of a step, a glance, a quick
trip in which you forget most
of what happens, but remember
a few things here and there:
sure, it's space, parrots calling, light,
at the back of a memory which
is never anything save memory,
a memory always coming into place
like a flood roars over sand when
there's heavy rain, or like the way
there's a perfect equation between
emptiness and space and thought.
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Because of the need for colour
and an image which stays in the mind:
not 'this lizard' on 'this stone,' nor
a lizard skittering on the brick steps,
nor just grey-green then pink.
This need for colour saturates the eye
with its requirements: try being
abstract with it, and you miss
wind-noise, your shadow, the
nervous tic of the lizard
running under shaking lavender
by the steps which lead from the patio.
In this, no thing is either big or small.
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You travel invisibly, whirling,
blustering, tearing things apart,
a vortex in grass flattened out
as if a derro's slept there overnight.
You're a corkscrew of dust and grit,
top-heavy like someone tottering
on high heels they cannot wear.
Flailing about, hands writhing in the air,
you are like someone hit by a spray
of machine gun bullets whose body
is tossed this way, that way, as
it's torn apart, blood-drops spinning
and spattering in the air, until
whoever it is - that crim, that psycho youth -
collapses like torn, subjected newspaper
blown about in a subway passage,
trodden underfoot. A scream, a groan:
a fear we all run from, a near miss.
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A scoop of dust
on the dirt road,
a shape like a dune's,
a snake's head rising.
A small moment, as
the wind lifts the surface,
scalpels up these tiny
gashes of smoke.
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