D.A. Prince
High flight
By chance, a jet high-flying chalks
a line angled over three century-old Scots pines
under a level bank of cloud at 45ยบ
to a slab of cumulus, providing
an empty triangle of sky.
Only for a moment. The chalk line shifts,
slipping behind the pines. Geometry
slumps into falling clouds
and a feathered, breathed out, blurring line
like the white dust memories of maths.
It’s never proofs that remain, but how
our rough books were pink, fat and furred
at the edges; how we had to show
working out, something you got marks for,
even if the ending came out wrong –
although, later, this was never
how it happened. Now you get there any way you can –
bending the rules, watching them
break up behind you, breathless,
and unstable as the reckoning of clouds.
D A Prince lives in Leicestershire. Her third pamphlet, Keeping in Touch, was published by Pikestaff Press in 2002.
Page(s) 30
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The