The Year I Fell off the Boat


That was the year I started 'The Book from the Sky'.

I still have the notes.  I was clearly pre-occupied

with Aquinas' ideas about the soul;

the way it is tethered yet tugged like a skiff in the swell.

 

Afternoons I'd linger on the bridge,

rejecting draft after draft of 'How it is

We Dream about the Moon', or staring, spellbound,

at the silent film of my reflection.

 

'Religions that Failed' began as a sort of joke

that swathed itself in baroque and rococo until

it overbalanced into a ruined epic,

weed-clogged and gappy and wrapped in yesterday's rain.

 

After that I wanted everything I wrote

to be cubical, clean, transparent, like ice or Perspex

furniture from the 1960s.  I tried

and failed in the sequence 'When I Spoke in Light'.

 

'Lines Intended to Seduce the Beautiful Girl

Before the Ship Sails.  But then the Ship Sails' concealed

much more than they revealed; the only things

worth writing down, I concluded, are those you will

 

remember anyway.  I had the idea for 'A Box

Made from a Bough of Fallen Ash' the instant

I entered the water.  I saw the trees on the bank.

They were lovely but I knew I couldn't reach them.

  

Inventory


These are your yards of shelves, your books, CDs,

photographs of long-since vanished empires

in labelled albums.  This is your desk, its plain,

uncomplicated architecture, drawers

 

of folded shirts like sleeping children.  This

is your bed and this is the impression

you made last night, for better or for worse.

This is the chair that no-one ever sits in.

 

This is the clock that will outstare the moon.

Here, in the mirror, is where each day you meet,

calm and astonished, the deposed ghosts of your past.

 

This is the ceiling and this is another man's floor.

This is the window receiving its diet of daylight.

Here are the keys to the kingdom.  Here is the door.



Wooden Boulder