The Sweeping Gesture
in the sky was final above
the hospital that was the colour of bread.
The pigeons cooed and made a home
under the fire-escape. Emptiness
like a permanent echo
remained in the streets, although the ghosts
of punks and panhandlers hovered
in the improvised bazaars,
stepping between photographs of limbs
splayed and bronzed, or torsos
uniformly ‘god-like’ in repose.
Another classic scene. The question arose:
‘If the people in the city dress as if
for the beach, what do they wear at the beach?
What pleasure is there in continual
freedom from restraints?’ The grid
is dropped over all colours and complaints,
and assigns to each its portion and locale.
The wind lifts the trash a little way to where
the sun sears the rose leaves, and a hand
reaches for the warm drink that was cool
a moment ago. - O air,
for some weeks absent from these shores!
It is too early to leave and far beyond the point
when departure would have made a difference. You
sigh at this but continue packing anyway:
‘On the island there are trees, and above them
are houses open to the slightest movement of the air,
and red-winged birds come to rest
on the weathered railings of their decks; under
the trees tunnels run from the ocean to the bay,
and all day long we see what comes and goes away.
Only, over Babylon, a dull cloud hangs.’
So much for letters home
(the kind that are never sent).
There must be more to it than heaven or hell,
our dirt and their purity, something
that could stand contradiction
without collapsing in a frenzy,
but you are already more cool and distant
than a waterfall: you were never here,
never belonged in these streets and avenues
when a single tree’s survival seems
a miracle, - and they are here
in thousands, the planes, the honey-locusts,
veiling the high cornices of rusticated
tenements, the smiling capitals of wealthy houses.
All the other places that come to mind
(possible locations of other lives
that might have been ours with a change of luck)
are neither exotic nor blessed:
they too are what we call home, -
towers and bridges, wild flowers, boulevards
mountains and demolished smokestacks,
and however far away the singer may be
the song still arrives with news from the hotel
of the red quilt a mother stitched with stars.
It is time for these things to be part of
understanding,
for mere opinion and impotent rage to diminish
to a murmur, a background harmony like the sob
of an off-stage horn, time for the art of illumination
to be revived in golden air. Already the small, blue
ferryboat puts out from the dock towards home or
the city.
Minutes of silence are observed with every dawn
and the buildings grow taller with news of each loss.
magazine list
- Features
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- Angel Exhaust
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- 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