This Mysterious
for Lawrie
Enter by night the moon moon moon
slipping down through the smart
hatch of your gaze – watching
as the cold truth of it ties a cats-
cradle between your fingers. Little
wutherer, I wish for you huge
luminous, scribbles and stridency,
boiled milk – to be as
wakingly baffled as any of us
who float this mysterious
glass canoe over
the numberless goings-on of life
all you can hold. All you can hold.
And yes life can be held.
And yes I do fear.
But unhooked chunks of
night flocking to your side
like great-aunts come through
the sonic cold, bearing fruit
and feeble explanations for
everything, not least the gravity
that hangs – speechless –
from your thumb. Go,
in your small wellies
across the endless rooftops
The ideal name would resemble water
Like the steady entrance of something sheer,
deliberate, a line on the sea appears;
or the line is the sea, in the distance where
gather several distances. Imperative light,
slopes. Dull rain miles off in a gap no
wider than a pool cue, far beneath the sun,
a skein of action fastened to silence.
Over the breakwaters humming with rot
lulls the tide that deepens its pitch, shifting
shingle and mud-scribble, soft as a ditch,
oyster-shell crockery moulded of sludge
opulent, kilned. The wind pulls itself on,
the utter room of its music hung in
some flute, some crystal film of dizziness,
adjusts the air like a composer fiddling,
then a sound the exact shape of a gull
then a sound the exact shape of a gull –
this moment and that moment endlessly
are meeting themselves just above the sea
________________
Dominic Leonard's writing has been published in The Poetry Review, PN Review, Pain, the TLS and elsewhere. In 2019 he received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and his pamphlet, Dirt (2021), was published recently by Broken Sleep.