A Lull in the Birds
To the left, let’s say
a country lane
The hour
begins to eat itself
No redemption
can happen to you
just like October can
happen to you
A pavement
in the end
can blossom
α
Language eclipses itself
an eye leaving its socket
Today was
like today was
in the surface of a helmet’s dome
We miss
another different window
What, if anything, is
with you?
α
This accidental dance
resolves
The time
fizzes with
autoplay
A picture of the Earth
morphs into
all times in the
future
The speaker
in the wake of things
Un-ordinary
longish
years
α
‘Tomorrow’ and ‘today’ collide
The missteps
trips us up
For a moment
sheer
ongoing changes
Meaning has
a kind of
form
α
Continue together
Elisions and
a three-way street
No flowers
can happen to you
just like eye contact can
happen to you
If we have to disappear
we can
An Atlas
It’s summer
around us, a
picture we’re
living in, as
though living
were a substance
that could ease
out like a taken
breath – the same
breath you are
taking now,
drifting your
slow way
through lakes
of experience,
crushing up
at last against
tomorrow
which is
like today.
Time happens
here in hills
and slopes,
increments of
everything de
-caying in soft
sequences –
replaced at
once invisibly
by sequences
ahead – though
everything that’s
seen from here
absorbs you
like a leaf
the sun.
Eventually it’s
just a case of
how long you
go on for,
two hands
writing side
by side down
two halves of
an empty
page, one
producing
what it sees,
the other what
it thinks about,
reacting in re
-sponse to sight
like blossom
flipping from
the trees.
And so, the scene
abandons you,
the new
afternoon
now describing
itself, its colours
and connectedness,
the sun proposing
no alternative
to the way
that things are
playing out,
faster and faster,
believe it
or not, summer,
winter, winter,
spring.
Under the Equalizing Night
A mountain stream descending to the sea.
The radiation of the snows.
Thousands of insects smashing the windscreen.
Thousands of insects not smashing the windscreen.
An uncontainable, retreating view.
A water-damaged athlete under many-angled, greenish lights.
The somewhat imaginary noises of the sea.
A woman with a horse’s skull or with a rock shaped like a horse’s skull.
A room of silent de Chiricos, eyeing themselves in the empty gallery.
A quarter moon cresting the Alps.
Infrared cameras monitoring temperature.
Apollinaire’s lines: I am everywhere or rather I am beginning to be everywhere.
Hart Crane’s last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas.
A single horse standing in a field doing nothing.
The ongoing approach of spring.
The ongoing approach of spring.
Us travelling at close to three-hundred kilometers per hour.
Us eyeing the dawn as it absorbs into itself the night.
_______________
Rowland Bagnall is a writer and poet from Oxford, UK. His debut collection A Few Interiors was published by Carcanet Press in 2019. Recent poems and reviews have appeared in the
Brooklyn Review, PN Review, PROTOTYPE, and the Los Angeles Review of Books:
https://www.rowlandbagnall.com/