The face disappears with the need to touch
or search for truth, or get lost in the mist
where the chance of being witnessed
is swallowed. Are you there
floating about its edges? While others drift away,
a remembered voice guides our footsteps
though only fleetingly. Through the ambivalence
of architecture in the distance, sky
and sea are bound together. In a cut-out
picture, you blink with surprised
discovery. In the movement down this space
your wave when you turn has no meaning;
yet it is there with the beauty of geometry.
It is you who have changed during
your stroll through the emptiness
between glass buildings where the outlines
of men and women sit unmoving, as if
in a kind of waiting for inner speech.
Not a syllable is heard. We must invent
the hum of wires, the trapped song
of lovers, those faces you will colour later.
(From Shifting Registers)
Ghost story
While he’s at his desk, his daughter runs up to him with paper and pencil. She wants him to make a picture for her. He sketches something quickly, without thinking. Since he’s awful at drawing, he’s surprised at how good the picture is - a big, dark house with all the curtains closed. As he looks more closely, he finds himself inside it. He’s standing in the drawing room. A shaft of sunlight pierces the gap between the curtains. For some reason, he thinks of this house as ‘my father’s house’. But where is his father? Perhaps upstairs asleep or at work in the study. He tries to get his daughter to be quiet. She wants to run around and explore. He wonders why he’s never been here before. He didn’t know his father lived all alone in such a house.
(From Shifting Registers)
Diminishing returns
Light is always seeming to dawn
with its changing shapes in a language
we can never be sure of. The more pages
we turn, the more a different sort of face
emerges with a bright new meaning. The fog’s
chalk is rubbed away. Yet still no one can join
the beginning to the end, which is perhaps unknown
even to the narrator, though his professorial voice
ticks on like a clock in an empty lecture hall
in summer - as if it had no means to stop
to drain itself of its own words. His heroine
is endlessly photogenic, yet like a lover’s name
traced in steam on a mirror, or a moving figure
in a crowded street, is only visible for a time -
like us, leaving no stain on the air she breathes.
(From Shifting Registers)
Replicas
the stars shrink
at the far end
of a room
if ever you get there
I will open the door
to a deeper country
finding something
neither of us knows
we want
yet when you arrive
I walk away
as though a stranger
had entered me
but what good his eyes
their light
with no relation to mine
tell me
if I know him
the one moving
in the sleeping house
who brushes your body
as if by chance
while I lace my shoes
blind in the dark
By that token
So many undreamt dreams
emerge like ants
from a cracked paving stone.
Just now, someone unseen
has come to lay his hand
on my shoulder.
He kneels beside me. I can’t speak
of him to anyone - it seems more
than my life’s worth. His hand,
like a blind creature, moves
over my face, as if it didn’t know
what it might find there.
But how should I distinguish this
from my other wanderings? I walk up
through thin, bare trees
towards the brow of a hill. The sun
has almost set, and is all the brighter
in my eyes because of this.
Best Disguise
The ice is broken. Beyond the mirror,
the bits and pieces are our own to wrap
all over again in these panes of water.
At the edge of the river, I catch up with you
gathering clues, insisting we recalculate
our route before our lives end as a dream
about life. It’s such a funny shape to hold
yet you wrap your hand around it.
When we fall asleep, our bodies
are empty. No one knows who we are
sinking to the river bed. On the far shore
the lights of the village are artfully strewn,
torn into the fabric of the dark. Strange
to me and yet at the heart of me
I climb into a little vessel and travel.
Copyright © Ian Seed, 2011
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