Wielding an official stamp that says Good Grief for branding
days
like these ones when the ratchet seems to tighten
by the minute
back down into the limekiln spaced out by
refusals,
punctuating points in history as regular accelerator:
24 hours, 7 days, 200 years, points of origin & destination
you might think, but it depends where you are viewing from
or where the viewing platform has been placed for you
rather,
is this what looking it in the face could look like
well maybe or just
horizons that don’t deign to make themselves manifest
scooping up our desire rather diffusely or scooping
out our eyes,
from Settle to Shanghai in a blink
we got in through a side-shaft
spinning round & round through time
disgorged looking out over the off-scape
flattening new frontiers of future,
woodworming the state of the world.
*
Keeping on doing it for the way the reverse camber opens out
I guess,
(a little necropolitics never hurt anyone)
spiralling round down, or is it up, from the long
seventies
or back down, again, infrastructure gone all melty
we find ourselves neutrally netted
in the lapse between representation (pyramid) & nature
[(mountain)
in one of the big nets full of the larger zeroes
atle and other rounded cocoa counters,
the flash jays burying acorns in the local cemetery
have registered as a shell company
but the magpies
are onto them, i think
but at least some will sprout
burst their casings, fronts only for the full tree
as it extends into time, irreducible unit of life & loss
against inventory, and some will save food,
smart barred wings.
*
Brother workmen, Cease
your labours, Lay your files & hammers by
Listen while a brother neighbour Sings a
Sheffield shanty, a cutler’s destiny: How,
upon a good Saint Monday, Sitting
by the smithy fire, We tell what’s been
done o’t Sunday, And in cheerful
mirth conspire
steamy James Watt
also said that a horse had 50% of a ponies’ power
he must have met the ponies of Dartmoor,
no-mow stoics
they got that lithic look
caught in stillness
of thought no cud
i just feel these postwork ponies are looking down on us
from their summitism
they haven’t read The Living Mountain yet
pony-being at High Willhays
from the highest point of the Moor,
meet me at the philosophy cairn
& in time, caught in the mane of thought
––i get fomo from just looking at the map,
the rocks having a good time without me.
______________
Dan Eltringham is a writer, scholar and translator based in Bristol. Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure is out with Liverpool University Press
(2022) and was awarded ASLE-UKI’s 2023 Prize for Best Critical Monograph. Dan co-edits Girasol Press, a small publisher that explores experimental translation.
These poems were chosen by Anthropocene Guest Editor Tom Branfoot
Comments