What is your past without its fantasies? | The trenchant
question you thought of, but never asked? | From the pen, spring blossoms in strands of air | swirl | A cargo of leaking chemicals | mixing | lilacs and herons on the estuary | Pasternak and Mayakovsky | huddling and letting loose | pottering | conspiring | strange combustions
She’s a million writing nibs, the ink | cocks cities and Gaul | bright, helpless golden | vanes | their lots are much the same | to spin at the weather’s bidding | She
You have lied yourself into ardour, into honour, even into authority | The small fort of the future | too remote, you’re forced | back into allusions and | all the fallen bastions of your past | the furniture scattered around the rooms | of ruined illusions | Your boots and the road both wait
Into a well, they drop all the forks in the paths | you never took | a brittle, beggars’ lightning
Au fait with ignorance, you catalogue fifteen types of border | Choose a footstep on a northern road | Oceans, puddles, waterbeads | True roadbuilders dig the atoms up and | leave them in piles, clear evidence | of tyrannous construction
Holding two thoughts together in the one mind | In this word
or in this word | you | can’t find the exit door, and can’t recall | quite | how you entered
Even the new is old, hadn’t you | realised? | Sift through the wreckage for the prettiest piece of wreckage | the glittering thing | that doesn’t look like wreckage
On a path with so many ghosts for company | With their laughter and bawdy and their fragrant needs | although they are entirely lies | they put the living to shame, and you | half wonder whether, when the path divides and they | seek to take the one into the night | you shouldn’t join them, or at least
Oh, look, there you are! | Just as you were | setting your autograph | to every single snowflake | in the blizzard | smiling | waving to your fans, and your heart feels as if | its feet touches the ground only | once in every seven leagues – so quickly are the | crowds dispersing
The freckled pear topples on its rolling side | So much darkness for you now, you must be a light sleeper | I feel embarrassed to leave you, but | your way is there, and I | take this path
••
from the series hypergrammar (open-ended, 2012–present)
(this poem, November 2012)
hypergram 