Alice Oswald

I who can blink

to break the spell of daylight

and what a sliding screen between worlds

is a blink

I who can hear the last three seconds in my head

but the present is beyond me

              listen

in this tiny moment of reflexion

I want to work out what it’s like to descend

out of the dawn’s mind

and find a leaf and fasten the known to the unknown

with a liquid cufflink

              and then unfasten

to be brief

to be almost actual

oh pristine example

of claiming a place on the earth

only to cancel

It is the story of the falling rain

to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower

to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary

that from the ground flows green and momentary

is one of water’s wishes and this tale

hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

if only I a passerby could pass

as clear as water through a plume of grass

to find the sunlight hidden at the tip

turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

then I might know like water how to balance

the weight of hope against the light of patience

water which is so raw so earthy-strong

and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

I notice a cold streak
I notice it in the sun
all that dazzling stubbornness
of keeping to its clock

I notice the fatigue of flowers
weighed down by light
I notice the lark has a needle
pulled through its throat

why don’t they put down their instruments?
I notice they never pause
I notice the dark sediment of their singing
covers the moors like soot blown under a doorway

almost everything here has cold hands
I notice the wind wears surgical gloves
I notice the keen pale colours of the rain
like a surgeon’s assistant

why don’t they lift their weight
and see what’s flattened underneath it?
I notice the thin meticulous grass,
thrives in this place

This is the day the flies fall awake mid-sentence

and lie stunned on the windowsill shaking with speeches

only it isn’t speech it is trembling sections of puzzlement which

break off suddenly as if the questioner had been shot

this is one of those wordy days

when they drop from their winter quarters in the curtains and sizzle as they fall

feeling like old cigarette butts called back to life

blown from the surface of some charred world

and somehow their wings which are little more than flakes of dead skin

have carried them to this blackened disembodied question

what dirt shall we visit today?

what dirt shall we re-visit?

they lift their faces to the past and walk about a bit

trying out their broken thought-machines

coming back with their used-up words

there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly

it’s going to be impossible to think clearly now until next winter

what should we

what dirt should we