Poetry

Abstract

Hourglass: the Inquisitor’s House, Mdina

Or twenty minutes, strictly speaking. After that

we pause for the doctor, who will check solicitously

no damage has been done to make

next session complicated. We need them

capable of speaking, obviously, so all

the treasury of care is there for them, all

will work calmly for their good and ours, polishing

the glass through which we gaze, the glass

that focuses the elegant brushstrokes of light

into a single pin of fire to secure them and release

the truthful tongue.

If it were quieter,

you could imagine almost that you heard

the hissing of dry grains through the needle’s eye

between the upper and the lower worlds, a background static

from the primordial explosion, a gritty whisper,

jostling shrunken silicate, never silent,

a curtain of blank paper dropped from the ceiling,

waiting for them to sign their name. If you let it,

it spreads inside your ear, a temperature

that twists into a wire, a single pin, a fever,

till there is nothing else to hear: the grains

hiss, drowning things out. The last of the sand

slips through. The doctor clears his throat;

you put your pen down, head ringing

with the sibilant wire, the dryness. Pause till

you turn the glass again.

Iona: bog orchid

More slowly than you can imagine,

assessments are made: so much

exposed surface at such an angle,

so much extension for the waterworks.

The answers slip into place, converging

pilgrims pulled together to the shrine,

the tiny gothic finials, defining where

the story solved its problems and dissolved

into the grass. While down below

the sea resolves its issues with the rock

in fans of gothic spray, and the whole

grunting heap of bony hillside quietly

suckles the mulch, the bog, the seed,

solving its grey paralysis, huge arthritic

fingers painting the razor-cut miniatures,

more slowly than you can imagine.

Iona: view from Dun I

The sea’s long table, scattered

with torn crusts. The host

leaves food for sailors.