They have no sense of what they’ re looking at,
Unless the object moves.
(Or so he’ s read; who knows if that’ s the case?)
A painted bird’ s an empty analogue
To the oblivious cat.
And it is not his still familiar face
So much as that distinctive gait which proves
The master to his dog,
Who frolics for him like an acrobat.
Mauve mist-shadow cloaks the sky’ s
River-blurred, inchoate border.
Dawn’ s old story; and light tries —
Not the last time — to devise
Lasting order;
From first principles assigns
Laws to frame day’ s jurisdiction;
Drawing contours, shapes, and lines
From the nebula, it shines,
Strange as fiction.
Dormant are pinnacles and streams of the mountains,
Chasms and bluffs and crawlers fed by the dark earth;
Dormant are wild animals and that tribe of bees
And monsters out of the sea’ s dark syntax;
Dormant are clans of birds with wings that envelop.
The houses those suburbs could afford
were roofed with old savings books, and some
seeped gravy at stitches in their walls;
some were clipped as close as fury,
some grimed and corner-bashed by love
and the real estate, as it got more vacant,
grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called
for the exquisite lanterns of its seed,
and the land sagged subtly to a low point,
They gave the city a stroke. Its memories
are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.
Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century
and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget
now squares with another. If the word is Manchester
it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.
To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload
of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.
One and one make two,
the literalist said.
So far they've made five billion,
said the lateralist, or ten
times that, if you count the dead.
And fleetingly it seemed to him
That in between one eye blink and the next
Time paused, allowing time to be installed
Within that countless interim,
Coiled up, on hold,
A memory predicted and recalled.
Now, that weak muscle flexed,
All that contained him started to unfold
A range of clouds banked up behind the peak
Of that apocryphal
Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique
Burst of late sun
Projecting at the east’ s receding wall
A film of what the day so far has done:
A wind that tries to scrape
The breaking waves up as they run
Across the bay
And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape
In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;
And trees the wind has caught,
Which seem too self-contained to sway
When they are blown,
And only move as a pleasing afterthought.
Impossible to wield
The acreage of the fabric that unfolded,
Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field:
The distance from one Christmas to the next
When he was only seven
Was aching there; a foreign city flexed
Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven
About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded.
Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,
In which clear surface, just a little way
From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass
With languid ease, apparently unmanned,
Adrift along the day,
