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DE
RERUM NATURA
1
Two
frozen waterfalls (or two glass walls)
run
parallel and endless. One,
bog-black,
overlooks
harbour, factories and slums:
‘reality’:
what you kick here kicks back.
Along
the blind and smoky glass is smeared
reflections
of the docks in streaked disguise;
from
the Rorschach distortions on the wall
newspaper
hacks write annals, analyse.
A
few despise their tabloid compliments.
‘Whatever
from the glass the smears avow
is
bent by force fields on the other side,
which
must be ‘real’ as well. We
must find how!’
With
hieroglyphs, concertos, algebras,
with
measuring tools and quick excited scrawls,
they
rough out myths and theories that suggest
what
mysteries are at play between the walls.
As
to the second fortress wall of glass,
it’s
too far out, they say: debate is sheer
fatuity,
with words like far-ness, is-ness.
No
language, even music, brings us near.
2
So
mother, I have it still, the jacket you knitted
in
the blackout, at a table by a basket
skewered
with needles melting in candlelight.
The
coat grew as I grew: I wore it when
I
fished with a bent pin beyond the downs;
wore
when we hid from the Black Inquisitors
who
flicked bangs from the stars; wore when with chains
I
marked off lengths through the inaccurate streets
to
make new maps; wore in another city
as
academic undergown when I
studied
the bog-black print on dubious sheets
and
learnt, although reluctantly, to praise.
I
bought a house and a polished metal jug
from
which a twisted face stared back
in
anxious trauma, my coat a hair shirt, till
a
woman with cool hands anointed me.
The
resin rose up then. A warm
wine soaked
from
every pore. In that
love-liquid’s gleam
I
loved the here and now, the far and wide.
The
coat I wore then was like silky fire.
The
world behind the mirror worshipped me.
The
praise went there and here. I
learnt a little
of
that quiet happiness you must have had
when
knitting a tiny jacket for your child.
3
Change
metaphor. The All’s a Möbius
or
torus skein of gut wound differently
every
time round, and in the midmost layer
there
is a knot of gut, and in it: we,
quite
round the twist. The ball
is of no size
yet
infinite. It doesn’t
quite exist
but
is eternal. The end of it
loops back
to
its beginning: nowhere does it desist.
No
wonder that the knot is too absurd
in
which there is this world of leaf and light,
magical
animals whose every word
is
a tautology and right’s a might.
The
knot in the spun gut is made of glass,
bog-black,
and in it: harbour, sea and stars.
The
skein’s the second wall, a nameless class,
the
Word itself which no rule-book can parse.
Alan
Marshfield
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