Paul Farley

Shorter than the blink inside a blink

the National Grid will sometimes make, when you’ll

turn to a room and say: Was that just me?

People sitting down for dinner don’t feel

their chairs taken away/put back again

much faster than that trick with tablecloths.

A train entering the Olive Mount cutting

shudders, but not a single passenger

complains when it pulls in almost on time.

The birds feel it, though, and if you see

starlings in shoal, seagulls abandoning

cathedral ledges, or a mob of pigeons

lifting from a square as at gunfire,

be warned, it may be happening, but then

those sensitive to bat-squeak in the backs

of necks, who claim to hear the distant roar

of comets on the turn – these may well smile

at a world restored, in one piece; though each place

where mineral Liverpool goes wouldn’t believe

what hit it: all that sandstone out to sea

or meshed into the quarters of Cologne.

I’ve felt it a few times when I’ve gone home,

if anything, more often now I’m old,

and the gaps between get shorter all the time.

My clock has gone although the sun has yet to take the sky.

I thought I was the first to see the snow, but his old eyes

have marked it all before I catch him in his column of light:

a rolled up metal shutter-blind, a paper bale held tight

between his knees so he can bring his blade up through the twine,

and through his little sacrifice he frees the day’s headlines:

its strikes and wars, the weather’s big seize up, runs on the pound.

One final star still burns above my head without a sound

as I set off. The dark country I grew up in has gone.

Ten thousand unseen dawns will settle softly on this one.

But with the streets all hushed I take the papers on my round

into the gathering blue, wearing my luminous armband.

The scarecrow wears a wire in the top field.

At sundown, the audiophilic farmer

who bugged his pasture unpicks the concealed

mics from his lapels. He’s by the fire

later, listening back to the great day,

though to the untrained ear there’s nothing much

doing: a booming breeze, a wasp or bee

trying its empty button-hole, a stitch

of wrensong now and then. But he listens late

and nods off to the creak of the spinal pole

and the rumble of his tractor pulling beets

in the bottom field, which cuts out. In a while

somebody will approach over ploughed earth

in caked Frankenstein boots. There’ll be a noise

of tearing, and he’ll flap awake by the hearth

grown cold, waking the house with broken cries.