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Keith Jebb

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evensday

(2/2/2000)

so he put the throat-mike round his neck turned it
all the way up took the glass of water and swallow
ed crashing the surf’s roar through the hall

a thing like persistence of speech slight rewind
I catch what I just missed after I accept the com
pliment the name not mime but yours

so if we were in real life what would be happening
would the groundhog see its Brocken spectre in
the morning mist and ice America would

chinese paper japanese handmaid paper telephone
wires feather fishing fly pastel Tom’s grey mane
tinnitus punchinello nose wink that’s not a

pump puma pimento pampas pompous spam poem which I
cannot tell the quotes from what I wrote trawling
beyond the surf what don’t wash up and as

the present drives itself onto the beach choking
on the Jonah of identity the gaffe-hook of pre
sence the harpoon of memory the of of of

there hasn’t been a day like this over eleven
hundred years since Alfred saved London’s bacon
steadied the state-ship a bretwalda no

less and scholar translator spreading the verna
cular for God and on 28/8/888 the last evensday
in the world as he would know it did not

muse beyond the mead-halls of his legends on a
time he’d dwarf his very self in memory so vague
he haunts it like a ship haunts fog

and surf falls over blindly in the un
imaginable fog-horn’s ubi sunt that wails
your Christ has not returned and some

wait still

 

Page(s) 86

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