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BEING HERE

  

And even could I adumbrate, in signs,

a model of the world, its spectrum, spectral,

I could not sense it, much less visualise

(space-time’s leaf mould, the end ground of things,

the beauty and horror of being—being here).

I’d have to make up yarns, figured less strangely,

cut from known creatures in the layered cliff,

a gouty literature of gods and heroes

to people faults in the cathedral dark.

And worse: my legends, trolls and minotaurs,

would just be sinewed of old family feuds

and natural news-disasters, heartburn, pity.

A lust for life?—Yet still an opera buffa

stitched up in rags of psyche, nothing more.

  

And were I given to analysing myths,

squeezing my eyes like a keen neophyte,

doing a kiddy-crawl between the legs

of Isis, Urizen, Hamlet and the rest,

toddling under the rant and shirts of fire

on broken knees dug deeper than belief,

I would learn not to care, burrowed down

and twisted like a joke or paradox,

a maggot dreaming in abstraction’s core.

Would this be comfort? Would I cease to care?

  

Better with open eyes shake off the crust

of netted dreams, hypotheses, and stand

like a new child in a garden; turn and see

the violent petal, veined, for the first time;

touch half-flayed silver birch for the first time;

smell consciously July’s own smooth, warm rain

for the first time; hear crouching in the wind

animal pain; feel the heart of me involve;

and chew wild herbs for the first bitter time.

So find my way around, after a life

of finding and forgetting. Better I see

a world I had not recognised before.

  

Until the ungentle hurricane

and cliffs of mud come boiling to my door.

Alan Marshfield

  

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