Focus Is A Glinting Thing
another urgent poem
I have a thousand poems in me
about attention and places
to put it, like spiderweb dew,
and glint, in preference to sheen.
And a thousand more
about places I must retrieve it from — my taker’s gaze,
like emails, and futures,
which are majestic and self-assured,
like elder cows who won’t be rushed.
I could write all two thousand,
spread my arms and try
to wrap around all things,
and still I’d be sprawled
across impressions,
a fearful protector of the noticed
world, unable to let any of it go.
I’d run through housefire to
salvage my notes on being.
I could notice it all,
and still not disintegrate, as in,
self-forget (the good kind),
or succumb to its needlessness (also good),
all for the chance of an incomplete memory.
The child knows you
do not live to remember,
that time is not a culture
for the mind’s pillaging,
that the Earth is not a movie
to dunk my head in
repeated baptisms.
I am not a tool,
and God is not a builder,
or an artist,
and I knew this once: to worship
beyond thought and inscription,
to know my neighbours (not their Latin names),
to write an unurgent poem,
to take great care in the failing
to cross my membrane
into the deepest touch,
to be enormous while nothing, and for this
to not be brave.
I walked by comedian Joe Wilkinson while writing this. I almost ended the poem with ‘Anyway, I just walked past Joe Wilkinson’, but decided against it.