Here’s
Here’s a shadow
the mercury vapour
falling
as shadows do, cool
lamp where spells
have and
even. Now it’s on the sea’s broken,
been colliding all
night. And here
broken, broken lip,
the sea’s split lip, now
are the moths
its battle-glow’s drawn:
the exposed bone of the
beach. Faster than you
rabbit-ear-shreds, bark-scars, leaf-sons,
can
read this wordy glut, faster than your eyes can pick
shed-submunitionlets, brick-flakes,
living
through these snagged ink-clots, the
shadow eats up then
ashlets, apple-skin-shavings, yam-peel, scute-
expels
the shacks on stilts, the cluttered
cars, spatters of
lets and wet tobacco, map
corners, snagged
park
and garden, pools, roofs, road junctions, slipways, docks,
hem-rags, bitten cuticles of stormclouds,
slipped
metro stations, stadiums, coliseums,
hospitals, river-mouths,
hooks, split pods, pink samaras. Now dawn comes
museums,
universities, plazas,
cemeteries, sex shops, cinemas,
spilling through car windows, and the man who moths
landfills,
ossuaries, schools, squats, crime scenes, flash mobs,
film
unpacks himself from the back seat. In his ear’s rumour shoots,
shrines and squares. If it could be cut, the shadow would make
mill, the ossicles chatter like cups and saucers, and dew
cowls for seven hundred children. If
it could be gathered, it would slosh
splinters under his feet as he comes
to the trap, bending
from a million-gallon water tank. It’s a piece of the night itself, come
un-
to survey his haul. They’ll go into the
fridge, a cool electric
fastened, gone
tearing. And what’s it doing here, then
here, then here, and
slumberland – beginner cryogenics! The
egg-rack makes room where
will it settle? Ask me again when I’m
old and have lived through the
for cylinder-prisons, and every inmate the fetch of its shelf-mate
aftermath, better yet a run of aftermaths, one chaining into the next -
because
(but imperfect, as if a smut or a fingerprint had edged its way into
right now, everyone is guessing. Even those bound to a jungle of instruments
the cloning machine). The murmuring blood – low
as a heat-pulse
}
can’t really say what
the numbers mean, and besides, mostly we’re hearing from
through filament, the
whir of a pebble chewed in the surf. When all }} {{ middle men,
enthusiasts. Seated waxily under studio lights or
looming bust-like
are suspended in their miniature seines of sleep, the man who moths }} {{ over their columns, they
muffle their fervour in a kind of drone,
a drone that
will remove them one by one, and place them, via the tip of his finger, } { sounds like bored
intelligence, and they put their case: how the shadow was all
onto pinnately veined props, dishes of lichen, between the lichen-frills Here’s a dream: but inevitable, how it
can be overcome by policy, how the shadow points toward
and
lichen-froth of a tree’s sleeve, upon a pebble-scrum or a new shoot, 00 the moth whose 00 a future of infinite shadows, how
it is, after all, only a shadow. But
whatever, or
then aim
with care his delicate box of glass and light and lightning, and
0000 compound
eyes 000 whoever, is throwing
the shadow likely has no opinion at all. He, or she, or it, is
in the pictures later published, not a one of these sleeping beauties
will 000 are satellite dishes or 000 only
feeling the sunblast on his, or her, or its back, perhaps
on the way to
look anything less than brightly alert, nectaring
on the scenery and satellites, whose
antennae are firs a showdown or
spectacle, perhaps benevolent, perhaps woken
pro-modelling their kicking-out coats of paint-speckled khaki, twitching in a sweet breeze while from the mother of all sleeps and shaking off
a
juice-stained raffle-buff, gnawed-edge gumshoe-dun, the windows of a
town fill with seismic hangover as the
world
dog-fox-rust, frost-bottle, mustard a marmaladey glow. The moth skips like a
and more./ Here \
blinked out by the moon. tune./
is our _
/ \ The moth which /\ Here’s
song, a song \ _ /\ crawls / __ | a howl for
for summoning. It \__\ into \ / / your wound, to
takes
days and years to sing it./ \ \
/ your \ ____/
/ take you off your feet, to
We sing it through slickings of rain,/ __ \___/
mouth, /\ dress you in dust. Oh, wild is the
through the sun beating us half way / \ dark \__ / \
whipped-up saxophone, pushed
to death, and we sing it with our throats \
\____/ as a \___/ to its highest pitch. Ah, but you might
torn, with our drums dulled,
with our dance raided /\______/ stinging
\ ___ as well
try to catch the comet that’s been blown
nightly by the agents of a hundred and one
regimes. We sing | nettle. The moth
crushed
___ \ off course by the bluster of space age
weaponry.
it in
spite of pamphlet drops, countersong, bad reviews,
plagiarism ___ in the window frame. The
\ \ Every candle in the house goes out at once, and summer
and constant nightmares. And no, the sea doesn’t sing with us, nor /
\moth in her danger shades,
| |is just another idiot, gone with the rush. Here’s a wail to rip
do the giant hills or the earth itself. We sing happily, and ragingly,
out | who touches down on an / up tree and root, to sweep your
mind of change, boy. Electricity
of love and misery, and desire and hope and hopelessness all at once,
and \ | island whose inhabitants lines undulating like sound waves,
houses turning as mill wheels do.
we sing it in our sleep and we sing it in the bath, and we sing it naked
and we worship the
moth. The Now open
your hand. Two miniature girls are hid there, clasping each
sing it to our children and our parents. Sometimes we stop singing. But very moth with her wings other like tangled keys.
And when you put your ear to them, you can hear
soon, we start up the
song again, the very same song, and we sing it as if we in flames.
The their bracelets chittering, their
breath gathering. How do you even begin
never
stopped singing, and sometimes we want to stop but find the song moth
who
to keep them, with the sky bearing down on you, and now a blizzard
goes on without us, goes on in our hearts and mouths, and we come
ravishes a
of golden scales wurlitzing through the city,
turning monsters
to welcome it again, and take it up again, and one day – not
universe
dim, as something dies and is born again, maybe
today but
inevitably, some day – one day the song
for love.
in your heart, maybe not. The city, she’s
will wake you, will summon you.
just
too beautiful.