Teacher.
Lately, fallen to recalling times
when scorn wouldn’t resound after dark in an empty room,
and a stray glance meant something
at least in its own soft dumb pawing, asking.
Now, the last five years:
images of crooked fangs recede like horizons;
pad around Europe, haunt the margins of scenes
with imitation stuff further diluting memory,
for times almost drained.
This all drips (sometimes) into the vital Schrödinger ears,
poisonous, you might think, but their antidotic power is still such
even the cynic void is for them real, it
nullifies itself with meaning; and they
(redemption)
paint me anyway in those narratives I denounce.
Dolphin song
The time we saw the dolphin
From the harbour ferry
Arched back glistening with wet
And possessed of more steely symmetry
Than another two beastly backs
Humped against cold and bent amid
Drowsy winehaze, dimmed the then encroaching tide, black
That sharp suffering that gives way, skin tight, back, water
Clumsy, unerring but, plashless
Collapsing back into waves of sleep more pressing need
Undextrous as a fin as yet unimagined
A sunny day gave way to cold immersion
And a glimpse of dolphin back –
What sense of audience possesses us / them?
