with downstairs whispers heard
as shimmering non-language.
Outside dead leaves blown
into regular heaps with machines.
Pass the boarded up houses
on Pershore Road.
No clues. No getting past
the patina of as it is for now.
Might there be a clue to be found in this somewhat rain-shredded billboard on Pershore Road?
ReplyDeleteYou may be on to something there, TC. Certainly, the patina seems to be peeling away.
ReplyDeleteThe weather would seem to be eroding a good many illusions these days.
ReplyDelete...shimmering non-language
ReplyDeleteI must be resigned to shimmer there--love it.
Thanks for writing this.
patina/now
--this is what I like about your poems--I could never guess them, interrupt their sentences to finish them for you...
Thank you, Susan.
ReplyDeleteIt's the opacity of unsorted reality puts it past the superficial limpidity of the mechanical. The leaves weren't ever going to be properly dead, there was always going to be that memory of irregular disorganized life in them, until the machines came along.
ReplyDelete("We" have these godawful noisy senseless machines called "leafblowers", doubtless you have them too -- they burn up fuel and growl and snort for hours on end, and when it's over they've merely moved the leaves from one side of the way to the other. Of course the "property owners" who pay the squadrons of "illegal immigrant" workers to do this service are never about when it's going on... but one assumes it helps them to feel properly orderly and sanitized in the wake of the event. Controlling nature, making it do what one wants -- is there ever any other social objective any more?)
ReplyDeleteHolding on to the "memory of irregular disorganized life", something to set against the official, the sanitized, is a devotion to give yourself over to (without expectation, of course).
ReplyDeleteThose senseless machines were the same objects put to work here. Nature is already turning about and biting us on the arse; she's not one for the managerial class.