Tag: writing

By Estill Pollock

From chaos, a season—within it
a house we pace corner to
corner, fingers pried from flags, the corner-patch damp
of this nostalgia

Where the house is, there is space for a house, perfect
house-shaped space, yet how can one stay
uninvited

Long lines shift silently

Moving or motionless, some carry scrolls, others
numbers scratched on bones

They say, If these were
gifts they would be yours, or they say
These are our gifts

Everyone everywhere arrives

They are waiting in the garden, and the hallway
is full of waiting

A catch-breath sound
of hinges, the door opening, the door closing

A circumspection precedes this—billion cubic tons of planet
rolling towards a jonquil dawn, feather-ruffs of cloud
so tranquil

Imagine the world
is turning, that it stands in a sky that does not
end, that curves forever, a pulse

These are our gifts

§

Bell-blooms of comfrey, the lawn
immaculate, a green
of a startled season’s green, anticipating
the sparrow’s leafy witter

This drowsy precognition, through
invisible territories each decibel of birdsong tags, a rummage
of memories revived—why
so vague, so uncertain

These things are practised as an etiquette
is practised—a bright cutlery
on fresh linen, in an old house inhabited now
by the apprenticed sane, soliloquies oblivious
to the protocol
of forks and the knife’s domain

A sense of elegance is all
that remains of the old address

We cannot tell plates from tumbling birds, the whites
of flowers folding like lawn chairs

What is to be done

Positions
of utter calm exchanged for a meticulous
subversion, each face clouds, sullen—the spit
of language, defiant
servant climate

§

Shifting rhythms, some passion, all
one expects, all the usual—still, a strangeness
in this determination to live
where ghosts are big-booted
and the floorboards ring

This house is brick and sky, wayward
leaning clutch-straw courses, and time
what we made it—an imagination

of leaves, a childhood of leaves, the sunbursts
so neatly raked, the wicker and the smoky damp
from wet leaves smouldering

Who has sent us, alone to this task, from a house
no longer standing

Slow drag of rake tines tidies sluttish maples

And then the years

As if this memory was ours, as if the spark

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