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Who would suppose a dryad in a laburnum
Accusing over a privet hedge? Or the woman
Who asks me the way and stared deep in my eyes
As though reading an autocue in them?
But we have entered The country of short afternoons where every angle Is filled with intense implication. Brickwork is pertinent, Sycamore leaves The wind scrapes widdershins over the pavement Are freighted with dangerous meaning, a world At your two-timing feet and its secret truth on the tip Of your tongue. In the sky A vapour trail is a pipe-cleaner metamorphosing Into a papery silver birch limb, changing Into a spoilage into the lake of darkness, Sun knowing sudden Disgrace as it falls from the arms of the tree of heaven. And then the silver, Black and too purple Frieze is under vindictive construction, Wind in its element again Of Chaos and old night. So faces That dip after work into pubs on the Holloway Road Are electrical, tripped Into such sudden transparency, Into such lit significance there is reason To fear and cherish, to huddle and talk excitedly, Naming each others’ names, since faces Are offered once only, says the wind, And the singable circumstance is being alive. Collection of the Artist | |
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