When you live on the twenty-first floor of a tower
and way past midnight you hear a fracture
of wings and in the morning there's
a collar-dove on your balcony
is that a dream ?
When you live on the twenty-first floor and you get
home just at dawn from a party - or you've
been working at the desk all night, the
desk of words I mean - and the
mist you've travelled
home through
lies
flannelled just beneath
your feet so you cannot see the
ground and yet the whole
sky is king-fissure
blue
from the palest horizon to the most golden baroque
is that also a dream
but is it not also
the most real ... ?
And out of such skies come birds and bombs ...
When you live on the twenty-first floor and you
notice that in a crack in the cladding
a few metres down a kestrel
has made her nest
and when you see that kestrel
pinioned on its wing-bone, sitting at ease in
the middle air, shifting sideways on sudden
gusts - its unperplexed ligaments
ready to dive it through
skies of reality
through torn webs of nerves
and when you catch
the feather of the collar dove
floating past your eye ...
is that not a dream and
is life only a dream ?
Or when you see Arctic geese flying beneath your feet
toward the landing stage on the Camargue just
as once you saw them flying
between the mountain and the sea - in
the gap between sight and nothing
right there above your head -
on those far islands of
mica schist
way out west and beyond
the times of
clearance
is that only a dream or does life
just dream us ?
And language has broken down, language has been
bandaged - like the sun, like the bandaged
sun - and we speak in chunks
of betrayal words
when language itself
has become .....
Or when at eye level from your balcony you see black
darting swifts mewing in the fine drizzle or
turning their sleek bodies in the
sun as they bite tiny insects
simply for sustenance
is this just a dream of
life ?
Or the gannet that plunges down cliffs of light
(as a broke lift might through shafts of
darkness) and breaks the surface
of the curdled water leaving
its tongue's graffiti on
the shoal beneath
having picked out just one fish
for its gizzard and gullet
O my toppled sanity : O my maytime
market : O my bridge of
dreams
Or as a cormorant might
fly straight into the sun
and either it will crinkle and fizz in the black
heats - or else it will heal the sun's
bandaged
wound :
(for this is what birds know that we
no longer know)
Or the stormy petrel sleeping on the heave of
the ocean, giving countenance to
the wreck and the wrack
waiting for the spigot or flag
of seaweed or the onrush of
maritime tide
One time in my house on the burnt island a wren
deep-dived by a buzzard fled in through
my blue open door but then was as
bone burst by human space
as by any beak or claw
though I spoke to it
in bird words from the piece of
my hearth
and I cupped it in my hands
until off it flew
but my mind is a burnt island : as is
everyone's in this bruised
world, or in this world
of bruised minds
and is everyone just a
dream ?
When you live on the twenty-first floor and the old
Ukrainian man twelve floors down keeps
racing pigeons on his balcony -
Popa he is called
and he sings
lullabies
in
the sunlit pub on Cable Street
the pub that is not yet
shut down -
and
his pigeons fly in wide arcs, in circles
from his balcony, but they cannot
return him to the village
near Lv'ov (shhh
shhh :
this is his mother hugging him close
shielding his eyes, clasping him
to her body lest he moan
or whimper when
the partisans
piss in
the bushes she's hiding him in as
they pass through the
burnt village :
shhh ... shhh)
Is this then just a dream ?
Or when you live on the twenty-first floor and
you see two cormorants sweeping the sky
making wide arcs of their own choice
bargaining with no-one and
compromising nothing :
what in their bone structure
do they know that we will never
know ?
what in the balance between
their gut and their eye ?
and suddenly from sweeping the city they
streak and scud from one
sector of the city to
another
from one skerry to the
burning sun
(corporations named cars after animals, governments
named bombs after birds)
even language has its final answer, even
words fail - or else soar -
where we most need them
even birds fly in East London
coming from Iceland or the Western Isles
going to Morocco or Algeria or
south of the Sahara ...
Is this just a dream ?
this
parliament of birds, these
migrations
this flight path of swifts and swallows
this discourse on the sanities
this journey to be made
across breath
or
the stupidity of ever drawing
boundaries
When you live on the twenty-first floor and down
there in the paved market you can see
your friends ...
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