An Old Fashioned Traveller on the Trade Routes

I was sitting upstairs in a bus, cursing the waste of time, and pouring my life away on one of those insane journeys across London -- while gradually the wavering motion of this precarious glass salon, that flung us about softly like trusses of wheat or Judo Lords, began its medicinal work inside the magnetic landscape of London. .....The bus, with its transparent decks of people, trembled. And was as uniquely cremonious in propelling itself as an eminent Jellyfish with an iron will, by explusions, valves, hisses, steams, and emotional respirations. A militant, elementary, caparisoned Jellyfish, of the feminine sex, systematically eating and drinking the sea. .....I began to feel as battered as though I had been making love all night! My limbs distilled the same intersting wide-awake weariness. We went forward at a swimmer’s pace, gazing through the walls that rocked the weather about like a cloudy drink from a chemit’s shop -- with the depth and sting of the Baltic. The air-shocks the sulphur dioxides, the gelatin ignitions! We were all of us parcelled up in mud-coloured clothes, dreaming, while the rich perishable ensemble -- as stuffy and excluive as a bag of fish and chips, or as an Eskimo’s bed in a glass dift -- cautiously advanced as though on an exercise from a naval college. .....The jogging was consistently idiotic, it induced a feeling of complete security. I gave up my complicated life on the spot; and lay screwed up like an old handkerchief screwed up in a pocket, suspended in time, ready to go to the ends of the earth. O trans-Siberian railways! Balloons! Astronauts. Rosemary Tonks

Mine eyes have seen the glory of....

I have watched you crank the sun up in the morning, then drop it like a sandbag that raises the curtain as the house lights fade; I have seen you churn those waters up, then suck them back, or stop them with a freezing wind, monuments to their own motion, standing waves of ice, polar bears stranded without a radio, seals knocking their heads against the glass ceiling, trying to rise. I have seen you eat the scenery of a forest with a storm; raise a volcano in a vacant lot, hot lava swallowing the housing development; dry up the wetlands just when the long-legged heron was eyeing a fish; or, on the sunniest day – when the pastoral seems like a documentary – loose a swarm of locusts to devour the grain; set species against species, roll the dice, two stars collide: time’s assassin, I have grown tired of keeping your accounts, shaping a story from the chaos of your caprice, the endless invention of your unconcern; I tire of the argument, the contention, the attempt to make a plot out of quicksand and fog, to rouse the wind when becalmed, to comfort the dead with a song: ergo I request reassignment, a change of vocation, a more reasonable situation: perhaps as a maker of kites – something for the wind to take in passing, the sweet unravel of string, line’s pure invention – a part of speech, the monologist’s ersatz auditor, gone with a kite, back, into airy nothing, recalled: a local habitation, and a name. Eleanor Wilner

The Singers

They are not angels though they have the hollow look of beings bred on ether. There’s an air of cool removal from your life, the hawk’s indifference to the hare’s terror. You see it in their palms, raised casually against the fresco’s surface, as to glass of submarine or spacecraft, and you see it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass alone to unknown agony. The song they sing is merely time. Todd Hearon

On a Bird Singing In Its Sleep

A bird half wakened in the lunar noon Sang halfway through its little inborn tune. Partly because it sang but once all night And that from no especial bush’s height, Partly because it sang ventriloquist And had the inspiration to desist Almost before the prick of hostile ears. It ventured less in peril than appears. It could not have come down to us so far, Through the interstices of things ajar On the long bead chain of repeated birth, To be a bird while we are men on earth, If singing out of sleep and dream that way Had made it much more easily a prey. Robert Frost

The Little Canticles of Asturias

I And then at midnight as we started to descend Into the burning valley of Gijon, Into its blacks and crimsons, in medias res, It was as if my own face burned again In front of the fanned-up lip and crimson maw Of a pile of newspapers lit long ago One windy evening, breaking off and away In flame-posies, small airborne fire-ships Endangering the house-thatch and the stacks - For we almost panicked there in the epic blaze Of those furnaces and hot refineries Where the night shift worked on in their element And we lost all hope of reading the map right And gathered speed and cursed the hellish roads. Seamus Heaney

Blue Poison Dart Frog

Little gas flame sparking in the mulch Cog-tooth of a Scandinavian iris Micro-totem to a god of shyness Petrol bubble birthed from earthy belch Tree kingfisher chink, shorn off mid-brawl Driblet-beast from thirty fathoms down Half-exploded tear drop of a clown Alien seedling, sown amidst a squall Blot made by a buggered cartridge pen Bubblegum in Violet’s champion gob Goblin bleach got worryingly smart The genitalia of a very ill man Lightening caught and boiled down to its nub An arrowhead that’s softened to a heart Jon Stone