This poem is taken from PN Review 218, Volume 40 Number 6, July - August 2014.
From ‘The Atom Smashers’
From The Atom Smashers
1
You’re not,
he asked, coming up the road,
you’re not
painting it
that colour…?
Saturday night I walked down the stairs
with a bucket of hawks and floats,
the wet plaster red on the wall,
dust in the webs thick as goldleaf in any Paradiso.
I swept that room myself, banished ghosts
from the cistern, the wasp-husks suspended by threads.
*
Three times the blackbird built:
petals, wire. Now she must weave
the bones of her children.
Red as a match-head, Arcturus.
But its flame already struck.
*
I stand on the fulcrum built to raise the back gate
...
1
You’re not,
he asked, coming up the road,
you’re not
painting it
that colour…?
Saturday night I walked down the stairs
with a bucket of hawks and floats,
the wet plaster red on the wall,
dust in the webs thick as goldleaf in any Paradiso.
I swept that room myself, banished ghosts
from the cistern, the wasp-husks suspended by threads.
*
Three times the blackbird built:
petals, wire. Now she must weave
the bones of her children.
Red as a match-head, Arcturus.
But its flame already struck.
*
I stand on the fulcrum built to raise the back gate
...
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