By Geoffrey Hill
Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
latter acknowledgement: the self that counts
words to a line, accountable survivor
pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,
less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel
to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room
a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt
to describe them, as if for evidence
on which a life depends. Except for the eyes
they are threadbare, the threads hanging
as from a luminate tough weed in February.
But those eyes—like a Greek letter,
omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;
like a shaved cross section of living tissue,
the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,
the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,
the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.
The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
at the garden end, in blustery twilight
his lambent cloak stark as a warlock's cape,
the maharajah-bird that scavenges
close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.
--------
Wednesday started cool and overcast and ended raining buckets. In between, things were pretty uneventful -- I did do two socially distanced Pokemon raids, one from my car near the tennis courts and one from my house with a remote raid pass while a neighbor used one as well, and I fought with Google Photos which was so much easier to use when it could be set to sync automatically with Google Drive.
We never managed to take a walk because the thunderstorms moved in, so I watched some Merlin while folding laundry and in the evening we watched this week's The 100 (dark but good this season) and Agents of SHIELD (a thing of beauty -- I love Sousa's storyline, both his noble intentions and his shifted fate, and the film noir format made it witty and clever). Fancy birds from Parrot World:
No comments:
Post a Comment