Competing with the Piano Tuner

Ways of Seeing with Heatstroke
 

I'll start again. A horse that is led on a rein
down an alley that is narrow, by a girl.

A hand, a rein, a rein that is drawn
by a hand down an alley, plus a horse.

A horse that is walking down an alley
that is narrow has a girl, attached to it.

A rein that loops gently, down an alley,
with a horse and a girl at either end.

A ring at the centre that holds the rein,
holds the girl, holds the horse. It is silver.

The blossom that floats, that is sucked
down the alley, that is blown from its branch,

that is a draught of rain, of ochre snow.
The sun that bulges into the alley

or the alley that cramps the sun, mostly dark.
The ground that clops upon the hooves.

Mirror Angled at Sky

' ...In the morning the mirror is consulted again,'
said Doctor Johnson, but
not of this one dumped in the back of a Peugeot truck:

it is left, one corner broken off, among the riven architraves,
and won't be consulted again.
It is in with the ripped out sinks, the sofa springs' dying octaves,

it is with the builder's rubble that is valueless.
Now that its silver leaf is
peeling off, it is pond water with gleams beneath the surface.

There is a frogspawn of rust-spots. Black stipple on mercury.
There is a cloudiness
of depth and current, scratched by teeth beneath the glass

but bright enough for provincial eaves and firs to crane
over - for the first glimpse.
The mirror is put out. It will not be consulted again.

First, there is the misplacement - a veiled indoor convenience
must cope will all that light.
It reflects a worm's eye view of what will soon evaporate:

the passers-by with collars up for whom spring broke
too early, knock wet
turgid blossom onto it - equally misplaced where breeze-blocks sit,

as incongruous as the fractured seventy eight
of Beethoven's Fifth
dumped in the stingers - where nature and something else conflate.

Second, there's the passivity - the mirror tilted as it is
reflects every detail
of onrushing sky - the gulfs of blue and weightless cumulus

that drift like floes, that billow, fly, and break apart.
And so I think this bit
of junk's not just the still reflecting point of art

but may be likened to a certain juncture in
the history of clouds,
at which formations such as these might part to glimpse

maelstroms both human and equine, far below,
and which will yet
tear softly apart, to show the goings on of god knows what.

Lastly, there are the soft concealments - the mirror invokes
the droplets
of wet that steamed off with the last to smile in it:

the youthful nurse's theatre of unwitnessed face,
the couple who
moved in and out of it some twenty times a day.

Now all that consults it is sky. Soon, it will go
to the council dump,
but here finds cloud after cloud moving slow

though its skin of liver-spots is utterly still,
under the glass of which pours this
bright moving floor or conveyor belt, freckle-faced.

The Curtain of the Water Bed

After Liu Hsun

The possible simplicity. Ah yes.
The sunlit sill the sill, and the jug the jug.
A language bare of ornament or quibble -
the coition of dowel and glue a kitchen table.

Jug. The love of plump and secular things;
religion the saddled thought, in search of the thought -
the self a source of marvellous accidents
inclining because it must to the present tense.

But you had to get in my way, didn't you,
tasting of freshly sliced apple, furrow to upper lip?
The jug became china, the table wood, and we
indulged instead the longing for complexity.

Lumm's Tower

Retracing a hesitant path where the steps were worn
Uncle Henry for sixty years climbed the tower
of a stammer, one step up, ten down, one up.

For every inch he ascended some odd sort of gravity
drew him back, to begin again at the bottom.
If he tripped on the indefinite article he drew blood

on the next step's jagged ellipsis, attempting a curse.
A tailback of fat vowels crowded the stairwell,
impatient tourists shoving the uncertain guide.

Or perhaps he was building the tower as he climbed.
And what an odd shape it turned out: lopsided,
tier upon tier, teetering and top-heavy,

comprised of stones no human could hope to shift.
He could see for sure what he wanted to say
but it was many steps ahead, like a vision.

It leaned over his life, part climbed, or part built.
Because he was anxious he'd stumble, poor man,
he stumbled, and the tower was the vertigo

of the tongue's extreme reluctance
to contemplate the climb, though the brain was game.
One day, he swore, he would truly climb

the edifice of mishit notes which rose
towards the unified language, so tall.
Up through clouds, he dreamed, was the top of it

where all his dropped and broken words were stuck
together, his tongue at last obedient
in the glinting cupola of meaning.